Keeping the Beat on the Street (29 page)

I was in school in Xavier. I guess it might have been about my second year. You know, you're young and you listen to all these promises of fame and fortune. So we got there with Huey Smith and them—just a big-time gig. Now, we got a band concert and I'm a music major. Band concert is part of your grade, but I'm so wrapped up I'm not going to the concert, I'm going out here. So we got out there to Meridian, Mississippi, and time'll show you how things change. Like, some of these guys I hung around with, they weren't too good as businessmen. Which is one of the reasons, probably, the Algiers Brass Band is successful, because having been through that, I wasn't going through it again
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We got on the gig out there in Meridian, maybe two or three hours late. You can't do that. First of all it's not the thing to do, and from a practical standpoint, like, a logical standpoint, you got these people out here in the country. This is probably the only thing going on, and so everybody's looking forward to that. So if you don't get there early or at a reasonable time, after a while they gonna think you're not coming. And then when you don't come, the man ain't gonna pay you, and this is basically what happened. We got there a couple hours late—nobody in the place. Whether the man was telling a story or not, he said, “The people were here. They didn't see your instruments… didn't see nobody… they left.”

Well, like I say, some of the guys taking care of business; I just wanted to play music right there. People get deposits and stuff. Now, when I get a deposit, that's not my money, that's the money for the band to put aside, probably to pay people, or if something go wrong wherever you at, get you back home or whatever. But not those guys! When they get the deposit they go party and spend up the money, and we go out there broke. Now the Sister's about to put me out of school 'cause I was going to Xavier University—it's a Catholic institution. I done missed the band concert and was about to flunk out of school. But where I been I ain't earned no money. Matter of fact, I'm gonna telly'all, I think I actually earned about thirty-five cents. Now, musicians sometimes say cents, they be talking about dollars, but no, this was thirty-five pennies! There was me and my partner, who played trombone—our parents actually came out there to come get us. We must have been about eighteen. I didn't know it then, but that was good training!

There was a little place that we was playing at up on Nunez Street. I got some pictures of me and some Japanese guys playing over there. And then the building got in a bad shape. I had to recommend it for demolition. It's kind of ironic. It's kind of funny sometimes, but that's the way things go. Mr. Manetta's studio has probably been gone about ten years or so; I think when we first started the band it was still around
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The Mandalay Room on Newton Street? It was a bar. There was music there. What I know about is that when I was about eleventh or twelfth grade, I used to go there because I looked old for my age. I had no business in there. I had some older friends, and I'd hang out there. There wasn't no, like, music too much in there. There'd just be music on the jukebox, but then sometime after they had music there. Since we had the band, we used to play there on Friday nights, every Friday. The building is owned by Toot the barber. He bought the building when the owner died
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There used to be all kinds of entertainment going on at the Grey stone League. I used to play there, and the Neville Brothers—any body in New Orleans music—Professor Longhair, everybody, just about everybody! We called it the Grey stone Voter's League, but it was just the Grey stone back then
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The Hershey Bar? To me it was just incidental in the history of Algiers. It was a pretty big bar. It was on the corner of Newton and Whitney, but in the beginning it was a bowling alley, when I was a little kid. My cousins used to work there setting up pins before they had automatic pinsetters. Then they closed down for a long time. Then some guys opened it up and painted the whole building brown—hence the name, the Hershey Bar. They'd have entertainment and stuff going on there, but it was just another bar to me
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Toot remembers when Ray Charles and people played at the Elks Hall. He went to see Ray Charles there. When I was coming up, they'd have dances and stuff in there. At first I guess I was a bit too young, and when I got older, there wasn't much going on there. Toot said Ray Charles cost about fifteen cents or something. I think one of the people Toot's dad played with was Kid Thomas Valentine
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I was the first musician in the family. My parents are actually from two little towns outside Lafayette—Grand Coteau and Sunset, Louisiana. I'm the first one the music bug bit. I was taught by William Houston and Earl Barron. Believe it or not, I used to sing, but I wanted to play the trumpet like Louis Armstrong. I really didn't know a whole lot about Louis Armstrong, but it was just the name was famous. So when I got into seventh grade, I really hadn't played music before. I guess it kind of mirrors the brass band. I wasn't into it that deep, but when I saw what it was about, I really got into it
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BORN
: New Orleans, January 12, 1969
Played with Danny Barker's Roots of Jazz Brass Band; founder of the All Star Brass Band; currently with the New Birth Brass Band
Interviewed on the banks of the Mississippi River, November 2002

James Andrews and Mick Burns, November 2002
Photo by Entile Martyn

I was born in the Tremé as well as my brother Troy, a.k.a. Trombone Shorty. A couple of my uncles played with Fats Domino—they were Walter “Papoose” Nelson and Prince La La. My grandfather was Jesse Hill; he wrote the famous song “Oo Poo Pah Do.” Then a couple of my cousins play with the Rebirth band, and a couple of them played with the Dirty Dozen. That's Revert Andrews and Glen Andrews. I have another brother named Terry Nelson; he plays snare drum with the Lil' Rascals Brass Band
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I came to playing music by being a kid in New Orleans. A long time ago, I used to be a tap dancer on Bourbon Street. I just had a wonderful love for music and watching all the old guys from the Preservation Hall and the Olympia Brass Band with Milton Batiste and Harold Dejan and the jazz funerals. I played a little bit in school, but I always wanted to play New Orleans brass band music because I love that sound. Milton Batiste was a childhood hero of mine—the Olympia was everywhere when I was a kid, the number one band
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Danny Barker came by my house one day. He was starting a band called Roots of Jazz with some kids my age. Some kind of way, I wound up playing the bass drum in that band. I was around thirteen years old. Then we flayed at the World's Fair here in New Orleans in 1984, and after that I formed a band called the All Star Brass Band
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I was playing trumpet in that band. At that time, we had my brother Terry Nelson on snare drum, Kerwin James on tuba, Revert Andrews and Mark Jolly on trombones, and a guy called Larry Barabino. We used to play in Jackson Square. And there was Sammy Rimington Jr. on clarinet and Nicholas Payton on trumpet—he was about ten years old. We made some nice money, and when you play in Jackson Square, you get this feeling you're playing with different musicians passing through. After a while, you can go out in the world and play in front of any kind of crowd. It was a great experience. So Jackson Square was like a foundation that prepared you to go and play in any festival or any kind of club
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The way I learned the tunes was to go to Preservation Hall every night and listen at what they were doing. Or I would buy albums, take them home, and learn the tunes. It was just the regular traditional songs everybody was playing around town—“St. James Infirmary,” “St. Louis Blues,” “When You're Smiling,” different things like that. That went on for a long time, around ten years. I started with brass bands because in the Tremé we always have second lines. I guess it was part of my nature, being from that neighborhood
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I became a musician because I love the music, and I love to perform in front of people—it's that thing you get from the crowd, that energy and adrenaline. People listen to your music, and they feel warm, and they kind of respect you. You can make them happy
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I got a lot of trumpet influences from New Orleans players: Milton Batiste, Teddy Riley, Jack Willis, Gregg Stafford, Leroy Jones, Kid Sheik, Percy Humphrey, Thomas Jefferson—he was one of the guys that influenced me most. I saw him at the Famous Door when I was a kid
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I used to see the respect that they got from being a bandleader, and how the guys looked up to them, how they worked together and knocked the songs off. Then, by being in festivals later on, I got introduced to people like Clark Terry and Dizzy Gillespie
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As a kid, I was in a social and pleasure club in the Tremé called the Money Wasters. They'd parade around the city and do jazz funerals when a member died. So the brass band thing was always somewhere close in my life, even up to today. A long time ago in Congo Square, they used to do a celebration on Louis Armstrong's birthday, the Fourth of July. They had something they called the Soundalike Contest. I didn't know what I was doing, but I've always had an ear—I could hear stuff and pick it up. I entered the contest a lot of times and didn't win for a lot of years. When we got it together with the All Star band, we came there and won the contest for a few years. We started to win in the early eighties. Then I got the chance to play with Clyde Kerr Sr. and the Young Tuxedo with Herman Sherman. I saw older guys like Clem Tervalon
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All Star Brass Band (Terry Nelson, Kerwin James, Mark Jolly, Sammy Rimington Jr., James Andrews)
Photo by Marcel Joly

The All Star band got booked overseas a lot. The first trip we did was to Milan, Italy, in the early eighties. After that, it all fell into place. We started getting offers to play on the SS
Norway
cruise line floating jazz festival and in Arizona at the festival there. We were doing our own representation. Kids playing New Orleans music always goes over well
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I toured with the Tremé Brass Band a lot and wrote a few songs for them; there was one called “Gimme My Money Back.” It wasn't based on any personal experience, but it was a catchy title. In between times, I played in Jackson Square with Tuba Fats
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How
Satchmo of the Ghetto
came about was some people used to call me that. Quincy Jones had heard me when he was down here, and he asked me if I would like to be the subject of a documentary. I said, “Why not? It couldn't do nothing but help.” It was a good move—I got a lot of gigs out of it. I got to tour the world again, for real money this time. I put the music together in my head, and they had somebody with me that was writing it down as I was putting it on. The documentary was on TV all over the country. Then I got a call from Allen Toussaint, saying, “Would you like to do a CD?” It was all falling into place. Me, Allen Toussaint, and Dr. John went in the studio. I had about eight songs ready in my head—Allen wrote them down, and he came up with some stuff. It was a wonderful thing, man
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It made a big difference to me. It gave me the chance to get out of the brass bands for a little while and into a more mainstream thing—concerts, stuff like that, where I was fronting a piano, drums, bass, and horn section—funk and rock 'n'roll. I started doing some nice gigs that paid thousands of dollars. I really wanted to do it
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I haven't got tired of brass bands, because you can never get enough of that stuff. Any time I hear a brass band, it just jumps, that adrenaline. Especially when the crowd is second lining—when you see them dancing, you know you got them, there's something happening. The band is just part of that energy. It's like a generator—the band kicks in the power, and then the people take it from there
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