Keeping the Beat on the Street (30 page)

James Andrews
Photo by Peter Nissen

It makes a difference whether you're playing in the Tremé or for a bunch of white college kids uptown. Because of the culture: when the band plays in the Tremé, it's a different feeling. You've got Congo Square there, and you got the people that are from that culture, and you got other people from around America and the rest of the world, and they're listening to the music. So I would say the groove is different. You get the college students, they're just drinking and talking and listening to the music. But in the Tremé, it's more of a culture thing. It's more satisfying, because that feeling and culture is worth more than anything to me. I'm very proud of all that, and I've had the chance to travel the world and share what I learned in the Tremé
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It's difficult to describe the Tremé. First of all, it's an American black neighborhood in New Orleans. Its present culture comes from a long time ago. The music is wonderful there; it's got its own flavor. Each neighborhood in New Orleans has its own flavor, the way it flows and the way the people flow. But you can go to the Tremé and catch a parade anytime—the character and the feeling that you get is different from anywhere else in town
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Who knows where the music will be in five years? I think the music will still be in the Tremé after we're gone. I think they'll be second lining in New Orleans for generations to come
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BORN
: New Orleans, April 12, 1946
Played with the Storyville Stompers and the Tremé Brass Band; founder and current leader of the Regal Brass Band
Interviewed at his home in Eden Isles, Louisiana, November 2002

My mother was a stage mother; my sisters used to dance. The family was very good friends with a number of the white Italian jazz musicians. Tony Almerico, Russ Pa-palia, Val Barbera, several of the older guys. On Sunday mornings, there was a radio show from the Old Parisian Room on Royal Street. Tony Almerico's band played, and the family would go over there. Sometimes I would sing with the band. I was about six years old at the time
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So I grew up in the music scene and started playing in grammar school, on clarinet. When I got to junior high school, I started my own rock and roll band, playing tenor. The band was called the Starlights. Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, played in that band with us. His family was from across the river, from West wego, and then they moved to the Third Ward. I don't know where he lived himself—you were lucky if he showed up
.

I started playing with a band called the Storyville Stompers. There was a whole bunch of people from my school; some of them could play and some of them couldn't. The band started doing well, so the more serious people broke off and formed the Storyville Stompers; that was in the late sixties. Some of those guys are still there
.

I wanted to play with some of the older people, so I quit the Stompers and started the Regal Brass Band. I put my dream band together. There was Alan Jaffe on bass horn, Kid Sheik on trumpet, Clem Tervalon on trombone, Benny Jones on bass drum, Gregg Stafford on trumpet, Boogie Breaux on snare, Chris Burke on clarinet, and Bill Shaeffer on tuba. I guess the Stompers just didn't have the feel; it wasn't the true music that I wanted to play. I went out and bought a copy of The
Family Album
and started looking people up and contacting them
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Then, from the brass band, I started doing a lot of sit-down jobs. I did a lot of work with Danny Barker, and when he couldn't make it, “Father” Al Lewis
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We rehearsed the Regal Band—we would sit round in a barroom in the Sixth Ward, drink a lot of beer, and play. The Regal didn't work much on the street; I first started getting jobs out of town. The older guys couldn't really travel much
.

Our first real job was in Milan, Italy. It was a festival the day after Mardi Gras. Benny Jones and I got together—we were running the same band with two names. It was the Regal when I booked the jobs and the Tremé when Benny booked them. His work was more local barrooms and social and pleasure clubs. I was trying to book festivals and concerts. For a long time, about two years, it was the same band. Then it got kind of ridiculous, so we decided to put all our eggs in one basket and go with the Tremé name
.

Joe Jones, the singer who recorded “You Talk Too Much,” lived in Los Angeles, and he was a distant cousin of Benny's. He had burned a lot of bridges behind him with New Orleans musicians. He bought a catalog of music, through a fluke, for a thousand dollars, went out to L.A.; it had people like the Dixie Cups, Tommy Ridgley, people like that. Joe Jones started promoting the music and not paying the artists
.

He wasn't welcome in New Orleans for quite a while, so when the brass band thing started picking up, he wanted in on it; that was his way of trying to get back in. He created some problems between Benny Jones and me. I think he told Benny that I stole eighty thousand dollars from the band. We didn't make anywhere near that—I wish we had. I was the white devil, and I shouldn't be taking black musicians out of New Orleans and creating all these problems. Joe Jones stayed in Los Angeles—he had leased the Dixie Cups' version of “Iko Iko” for use in the movie
Rain Man
for quite a lot of money, but the Dixie Cups got nothing. That was his way of working
.

Benny's a really nice man, and I think he just didn't know how to handle the problems. Joe Jones started calling everyone I did business with, telling them I was a crook, that he was representing the band, and that I couldn't take them anywhere. So I left and took Kenneth Terry, Kerwin James, and Keith Anderson with me. Revert Andrews had left the Tremé to go with the Dirty Dozen sometime in the eighties
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I played soprano sax, because I just don't like clarinet. I started learning more about Sidney Bechet—I played a lot of harmonies with the trumpet
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Almost the whole of the Tremé came with me into the Regal—it was Benny and Lionel Batiste who were left. Which was really sad. I loved the band, and I think it would have had a good future. I wish we could have stayed together
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The Tremé's still working, but I don't think they're realizing their full potential— on the other hand, I don't think Benny likes to travel a lot. And I don't think anyone's really handling the business for them
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The Regal's been around a long time. I guess our first job was in the early seventies. We're still working. I try to keep it traditional, even though we do a lot of the newer brass band stuff—Rebirth-type music. Keith Anderson and Kenneth Terry both played with the Rebirth, and Kerwin James is Philip Frazier's brother; they still like to do that, and so do I sometimes. We don't really rehearse. Most brass bands do the same songs, in the same keys, with basically the same arrangements, so everybody knows what's going to happen. I have a set drummer called Brian Lewis who works stage jobs with us—he's heavily into the funk thing; he has a studio here in New Orleans. I also have a female vocalist with me now—she's our grand marshal when we have to march
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Regal Brass Band (Kerwin James, John Gilbert, Kerry Hunter, Keith Anderson, Tanio Hingle; seated: Kenneth Terry, Butch Gomez)
Courtesy Butch Gomez

The reason we're trying to do more stage work is that if we go somewhere out of town, as a marching band, we're like the dog and pony show. It's like the main acts are on the stage, so we entertain the crowd by marching all around in the mud for two hours. Then run here and run there—they tend to try to overwork the brass bands. In New Orleans, you don't have that problem:you're a brass band, and you do what you're supposed to do. Even though a second line lasts four hours, it's different. You get motivated, because of the crowd; they put out so much energy, and you can key off that
.

If you go to Ascona and they ask you to walk through the streets, and then walk through some different streets, it's just not the same. When they offered us a marching tour of McDonald's in Germany, I turned it down. You contract to do certain things, and they're always coming up with extra work—we would have ended up working eight hours a day
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I love going to Europe in the summer. I prefer working on stage if we're playing funk things or if our female vocalist is singing gospel songs. But audiences are different outside New Orleans. If you walk through the streets here playing, you get motivated; the crowd really pushes you. If you do the same thing in Tallahassee, Florida, it's nice, and the people appreciate it, but you just miss that feeling of enthusiasm, so you have to work harder to make up
.

When the Dirty Dozen first started, a lot of people just weren't open for the change. The way I looked at it is, brass band music's still evolving. Brass band music was, and it is, and it's going to be. It was basically the music of the people, something they wanted to hear when they were celebrating
.

I think reading holds a band back. For a short time, I was working with a tuba player called Dimitri Smith, who had Smitty D's Brass Band. He tries to have everything very polished and smooth, but that's not what the music is. The music is a couple of shots of Jack Daniels and go and play. If it's too precise, it's not our music
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I remember being on stage with the Olympia Brass Band in Milan. I went up to Harold Dejan and said, “Hey, Harold, you wanna tune up?” He looked at me and said, “I tuned up in 1958.”

I took the Olympia snare drummer, Boogie Breaux, on a job with me. He wouldn't go anywhere without a bottle of gin, and he'd been drinking from it. We got stopped in a traffic jam on the Huey P. Long Bridge while a train crossed. You don't realize how much that bridge moves until you're sitting still. Boogie was getting really nauseous. So we went and did the job. He was playing OK, but he was completely drunk. Suddenly, in the middle of a song, the drums just stopped. I looked around, and there was Boogie walking off with some girl. Afterwards, we were eating in a restaurant, and Boogie said, “I don't feel good” and collapsed face down in his food. But that was Boogie
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Brass band musicians are a wild bunch—they're hard to control. The street funk that the Rebirth plays definitely isn't traditional—it might be in thirty years time
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BORN
: New Orleans, December 30, 1967
Host of the
Brass Band Jam
radio program on WWOZ, 1991-1999
Interviewed at 3621 Burgundy Street, November 2002

There were two periods in my life when I was influenced by brass bands. I grew up right by a Baptist cemetery, so I had the chance to see the joyous part of jazz funerals when I was a kid. When I was in the third grade, I switched schools to McDonough 15, where the music director was Walter Payton
.

So I pretty much took traditional jazz for granted, and in high school I got into funk music and punk rock. I was a DJ at WTUL before I left New Orleans to go to college. The Dirty Dozen played benefits for McDonough 15 around 1980. And I'd seen the Rebirth playing on the corner of Iberville and Bourbon for tips in 1988
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By then, the Dozen had become a national touring act, so they were gone most of the time. The Rebirth was becoming the number one street band. The guys in that band were my friends and contemporaries, but the Dozen were on a different professional level. There was a feeling at the time that they would lose their edge, but the Rebirth wanted to remain “street” and always be available for second lines and functions
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In 1991, I went to David Freeman at WWOZ radio, and he cleared the idea of my doing a radio program called
Brass Band Jam.
I started the show to celebrate the brass band movement, and I put the emphasis on the more modern bands. Some people complained about that
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