Keeping the Beat on the Street (27 page)

The Tremé Brass Band didn't get going until about 1991—they were the first brass band we had in here. I knew about the brass band tradition, and I'd seen brass bands. But in the past the brass bands were rather limited to the jazz funerals, and that's one big difference between them and the younger bands
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My first husband had always planned to have a place like this. When we had the Bourbon Street place, we also had three very small children, so I couldn't put in the time. You know, when you run a small business, you have to put in more time than when you run a large business. We moved to Florida, and I was teaching there. But we always said that when we retired, we'd open a little jazz bar. So I stayed over there about two years, and then I decided to do what we had always said we would do together. I didn't have any real plans, but settled on this place. We started off kind of slow, as far as featuring the brass bands; I just played them largely on weekends
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Also, through me knowing Benny Jones, Kermit Ruffins started here on Monday nights. Then we added the Soul Rebels, because they had a new hip-hop brass band sound; there was a market for that. I told my husband Charlie, “If we stick to New Orleans music, we'll never be big, but we'll have our niche.” We also had the New Birth, and the Pinstripe played in here for about three years. Then the leader of Pinstripe got his own place for a while, so he stopped playing in here
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I figured the brass bands would last about three years in here, and that's what happened. Basically, we're a small place. As the brass bands started to fill the place up, other clubs started seeing a market for them. That was in direct competition with us, especially on weekends. So some of the brass bands would prefer to play at Tipitina's—I never figured out why, because they got their gigs out of playing here, and they weren't being paid more at those other places. I guess they must have thought that the other clubs were more prestigious
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I really regret what happened, but as I phased the brass bands out, no one else was booking them either. You don't see the brass bands much today in clubs. The only one that's playing a lot is the Rebirth, and they've always kept the Tuesday night at the Maple Leaf. Le Bon Temps Roulé on Magazine Street sort of picked up where we left off. The young brass bands didn't know me and that I knew the older musicians. So they didn't understand that I had an alternative to presenting the brass bands
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Looking back on it, I enjoyed having those bands here. We never did profit much from it. When we started to phase them out, we had acquired a reputation for New Orleans music. Financially, we do a lot better now—smaller bands, bigger crowds, for the most part
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Several things contributed to stopping the brass bands. Ruddley Thibodeaux, leader of the Algiers, had a lot of problems within the band—illness and so forth, and his wife was ill. So he was having a hard time keeping the band together. The Soul Rebels changed their music totally—they went into a more hard rap style, which didn't really fit in with the audience that I have here. New Birth just sort of faded out and started playing mostly at the House of Blues or Tipitina's. Our main bands were Tremé, Soul Rebels, New Birth, Algiers, and Pinstripe. And Mahogany played here on Sundays for quite a while. Brice Miller came in and asked us for a gig—he used to play here with the Algiers and the Tremé
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Most of the brass bands now just play mainly at festivals, that sort of thing. I'm glad that they have that opportunity. But the Tremé Brass Band still plays here, and we occasionally play another brass band
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Benny Jones probably influenced the younger bands more than anybody, because he's always found a place for the younger musicians to play in his band. He makes no bones about it—he calls his band the Tremé because he uses the musicians from that neighborhood. Quite a few of the kids got their start with him
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BORN
: Algiers, Louisiana, 1948 Founder and leader of the Algiers Brass Band
Interviewed by Kevin Herridge in July 2002

Photo by Marcel Joly

My name is Ruddley Thibodeaux, leader of the Algiers Brass Band and one of the original members. I'm from 449 LeBoeuf Street, corner of LeBoeuf and Eliza. I just made fifty-four years old, and I've been in Algiers all my life
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Now, when we started the Algiers Brass Band was about July of '87. We kinda all got together back in the days when I was coming up, when everything was segregated. Behrman School, right there, was a white-only high school, and L. B. Landry was the only black high school on this side of the river. So that meant that almost all the black people that come up over here went to L. B. Landry school, which also happened to be from junior high to senior high, so you got a chance to know everyone
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So that's how most of the members got acquainted. A lot of us were in the high school band but not necessarily at the same time. Mr. Othello Batiste—who was a gospel singer—was actually one of the founders of the band, and Frank Hooper, who was the trumpet player, got together and organized the band. They thought it would be nice to have a brass band based right here in Algiers, whereas Algiers was no stranger to second lines and brass bands. They had second lines here, but they hadn't had a brass band since Red Allen's father, who was last heard of with a brass band around 1947 or '46, somewhere round there
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As a matter of fact, Red Allen's house in the 400 block of Newton Street is still in the family name. The reason I know that is because of my day job. See, being a musician in New Orleans, a lot of time you need a day job. I work for the city, and I work in housing. So therefore I have occasion to look up different records. I spend a lot of time in the Notarial Archives, not necessarily researching history but just to see who owns what so we can get out and get them to get it fixed up. But nonetheless, that's Henry Allen's family house still over there. They were the last people to have a brass band before we started over here
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So I guess how it kinda started was when Mr. Batiste, who I was speaking of, and Frank Hooper got together, picking the people they wanted to get for the band. So since Frank had been in the high school band in Landry, he knew that some of the guys that had been in the band were still playing music professionally. But I wasn't too much into this kinda music. As a matter of fact, I didn't think too much of it—jou know, I'm gonna tell you all the truth
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But when he called up, I said I knew all the guys and we'll give it a shot, you know. So we get together in July of '87 and picked a name, and somebody said it's gotta be Algiers Brass Band, as we're all from Algiers. So they did that, and we started practicing, and I got to be one of the leaders of the band. I wasn't too much into being a leader. I was just into music, but I wanted to offer my assistance to help the band musically, and so I was like a coleader, and we moved on from there. So we started practicing, and as we started practicing as a group, we probably knew about two songs: “Bourbon Street Parade” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

That's all we knew when we started. I imagine that other people knew songs, but as a group that's all we knew. So we built on that and built up our repertoire, and things started to move rather fast. Like, we started in July—probably about in August. Let me go back, just briefly. I guess around the latter part of July, first part of August, we had like a debut. Blaine Kern, who had the Mardi Gras World over on the West Bank and who's interested in anything and everything from Algiers, became like one of our mentors, one of our sponsors, and he offered up the den for a press conference to announce the formation of the new band. So we came out and played and everything
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Anyway, we did that, and we were playing here and there. Sometime around the latter part of August (I think Blaine had something to do with that, too), on Royal Street they got a lot of antique shops, and they were having some kinda block party. So we got a chance to go up there and perform for some self-promotion, you know, so people would know all about us. We were playing on the steps of the Wildlife and Fisheries building, and so this man walked up to us and said, “Y'all sound good.” I said, “Thankyou.” He say, “Y'all interested in going to Japan?” So I said, “Yeah,” you know, “I'm interested.” But now I was a bit skeptical in my mind because, keep in mind, I had been playing a long time but just hadn't been playing in the brass band genre. People tell you all kinds of things, but I knew better than to say, “No, I'm not interested.” But I didn't think nothing was going to come of it, and lo and behold, about two weeks later I started getting some correspondence
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Now just to show you how being in the right place at the right time … you know, I guess it might have been fate. The man turned out to be Bob Leblanc, and he was in charge of tourism for the State of Louisiana. More than that, he was a former Al-gerene! So I said, “What made you pick us?” And he said, “Well, I just try to help the boys—y' all's from Algiers and I'm from Algiers.” It was just as simple as that, and from then on we did a tour of Japan in October
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We worked hard. We practiced two or three times a week, but, you know, I guess when you're trying to do something and people know you're sincere, they volunteer to help you, you know, and so things started moving. The gentleman that owns the restaurant and catering service right on the corner of Valette and Homer— George Rainey—he was the vice president of Zulu. So that next year, he put us in the parade—sight unseen. So that was our first year in the Zulu parade, and we moved on from then
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I know you've heard of Mr. Danny Barker. Matter of fact, in that same year, 1988, we were over at WWOZ playing on the radio, promoting our first anniversary. We were also selling raffle tickets. What we were doing, we were having a parade and a big party at the Elks Hall, right over there on Elmira Street, which is a historic place in Algiers—lot of famous musicians and stuff have played over there. So that was like a fund-raiser, and we were getting people to come out and help us celebrate our anniversary. But also, we going to make some money, too, by selling raffle tickets and having a party
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So anyway, we were playing, probably something like “Didn't He Ramble” and a couple of things on the radio. After a while, this old man come in the radio station and he said, “I was riding in my car and I heard the music. I just had to come over. I was going home but I decided to come to the radio station.” I didn't know him, so he introduced himself. This was Danny Barker and he congratulated us on the way we sounded, and from then on we had made a very important friend who helped us further our career. We didn't know it at the time
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So I guess after that we probably went on and had our anniversary and did different other little gigs. Just things you do, you know, on your way through. I got a call from Mr. Barker, could have been seven or eight months later. He said this guy was in town doing a documentary on brass bands and liked the way we sound—we sound more traditional than the Olympia, which was a great compliment 'cause the Olympia go way back. That was one of my goals for the band, to try get at least an equal footing with them or at least somewhere close
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So anyway, the guy, whose name was Sinclair Bourne, came out, and as things would have it, one of the younger, like, auxiliary members of the band, his grandmother had died, so we just playing the funeral 'cause he's a friend, you know. So this guy that Mr. Barker had sent come out, and he asked would he have permission from them to come out and film it. And the guy put it on a documentary that they put on the
National Geographic Explorer
series. So you know, all these things just happening, you know
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Ruddley Thibodeaux and Danny Barker
Photo by Marcel Joly