Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "Preservation Hall Comes to Carnegie" by Gene Santoro (©1994, by Gene Santoro).

The essay was originally published in 1988 to mark the appearance of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (PHJB) at the prestigious Carnegie Hall, best known as a classical music venue.

Don't be deceived because the Preservation Hall Jazz Band appears at Carnegie Hall. Down in New Orleans where they hail from, the loose-limbed music they make, with its crossfire rhythms and its overlapping melodies, is no dusty fossil; it's as natural as red beans and rice and Mardi Gras. You can hear it resounding still when marching bands strut the streets, or in clubs where the musical descendents of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century players swing with an easy-going, infectious lilt. And when the PHJB pour their catchy exuberance into every tune from Crescent City standards like "Lil Liza Jane" to Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo," you'll feel just how alive the music is: it's mighty hard to stay in your seat, however plush.

There is, of course, a historical dimension to what the PHJB does-even to their very existence. Watching the bands (there are several lineups traveling under the name) can be a bit like watching one of the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History come to life and begin enacting, before your startled eyes, the tumbling flow of a time and place long gone. For as the story goes, it was to New Orleans that the rough-hewn cry of the blues flowed down along the Mississippi; there it mingled in a catchy whirlpool with the snappy march beats of the city's countless brass street bands, so much the rage at the nineteenth century's close. Warmed by the kiss of the Caribbean sun and sea, that fertile primeval mix stirred into the first movements of what we now call jazz.

Basically, as it evolved in New Orleans, the music took two forms, both of them, then as now, functional. One style, New Orleans jazz, was for church dances, and emphasized ensemble playing; the other, for jitney (five-cent) dances, sported the hot solos characteristic of Dixieland. Neither style has ever been adequately represented on recordings; like Natural History's dioramas, recordings can only snatch frozen moments from a tumult of development and change.

One of the PHJB's virtues is that, over the course of one of their long, exhilarating shows, they do so much more than that. Playing deftly in both styles, moving seamlessly across the vast catalog of standards in each, they breed contagious enthusiasm because they live and breathe the sounds they play, have learned them from the masters rather than studying them in books. Usually Dixieland bands are hampered by their lack of gut feeling; trying to be historical re-creations, they lack the continuing influence of these sounds that remains so obvious in New Orleans. Minus that context, their music shrivels into superficiality, becomes stylized. Europeanized technique too often over-shadows or, worse, replaces, the ragged, stomping vitality, the deliberately altered timbres and skewed intonations at the music's roots: the bleary sweet-and sour trumpet with its climactic shrieks; the molten clarinet with its New Orleans fingerings and chirpy quality the grumbling trombone, the brightly splayed piano, the thwacky banjo, the slaphappy bass, the rioting drum (Contrary to popular misconception, tubas and marching drums were commonly used only in street bands, not early jazz ensembles.)

Since they were born at nearly the same time in the twentieth century, most members of the PHJB have heard and played these sounds from their earliest days—they don't have to re-create them. All of them have, in the traditional New Orleans fashion, learned their instruments by apprenticing themselves to master musicians and absorbing techniques and tunes by watching their mentors perform and by performing with them; this frees them from nostalgia. Simply put, makes the difference between joyful volatility and studied stiffness.

The PHJB are anything but stiff, belying the ages. Their utter unpredictability includes refusing to prearrange what numbers they'll perform at a given show; they prefer to trust their own moods and the shrewd sense of the audience's reaction when they cast tunes onstage. Given their seemingly limitless repertoire, their endless enthusiasm, and the spontaneous outbursts of snake dancing and clap-and-sing-along that seem to burst out wherever they play, it's not very surprising that their shows can often stretch on for two or three hours-or more.

Too bad Carnegie Hall has fixed seats.