Keeping the Beat on the Street (12 page)

I first met Al Carson when I was fourteen years old. I was playing at a friend's wedding, and they had a nun singing a pop version of the Lord's Prayer—I sang the middle part, because they couldn't quite get it. Afterwards, at the reception, at the Bricklayer's Hall on Galvez Street, I was the first one out of the car—all of us looking real cool in our suits. I said, “Hey, listen, they're doing ‘Mighty Mighty' by Earth, Wind and Fire.” I ran up to the door and said, “Hey! They got this big dude on the bandstand, sound just like the record.” I didn't know him, but I was mesmerized. In the front of the Bricklayer's Hall, there was a champagne fountain. We got some cups, I went to get the drinks—I'm the biggest of my group. Who should be standing up there but Big Al Carson. He says, “Hey, boy! Put that champagne down, you got no business drinking that! I'll tell your momma on you!” I remembered him for years
.

Four years later, I was applying for a scholarship at Xavier University. We hadn't had the results, and I went up there to see what was going on, just as they were having a concert band rehearsal. I looked to my left, and Big Al was playing tuba. I went over there, and said, “How you doing? Remember about four years ago, you played with a band called Better Half? You played at Irwin Johnson's wedding at the Bricklayer's Hall.” He said, “Yeah, I remember that.” I said, “Remember that kid you told to put the champagne down?” He said, “Was that your little brother?” I said, “No, that was me.” We became the best of friends. We didn't start playing together until around 1980
.

We got together to rehearse and record some songs I had written when I was in the hospital for a month. He sang lead, and three of us sang backing. Al named the band Sterlyn Silver. We recorded some stuff, but we didn't do anything with it, because we didn't have any money, and Al was on the road with
One Mo' Time.
He's got about three and a half octaves, and all in tune—he's disgusting!

The Fairview band basically broke up because everyone was getting older and getting into other musical things. So then Danny Barker started the Younger Fairview band and brought in Michael White and myself. I was still in college, and so was Michael. That's when we met Eddie Bo Parish, Efrem Towns, Gerry Anderson, William Smith on trumpet, Curtis Walker on trombone, Dwight Johnson on bass drum, Byron Washington on snare. We would play traditional tunes in the French Quarter for tips
.

Danny sent us to Kentucky to play at a horse auction—it was great. We would play at the plantations on River Road and wedding receptions and stuff. I was getting really weary of the tuba. Then they had Wolf—Keith Anderson—come in and play tuba. By now they had changed the name to the Charlie Barbarin Memorial Jazz Band. But by then I had quit—I was gigging. They used to come to get me to do brass band gigs in the morning, when I hadn't got to bed until 4:00
A.M
. They would come in my yard and play, shouting, “Come on, Big H! We got to go to work.” The years with those guys were great, but I wanted to concentrate on my guitar playing—by then I was starting to play classical music
.

I've now been working with Big Al Carson at the Funky Pirate on Bourbon Street for eight years, and it doesn't look like the job is likely to finish any time soon. Usually on Bourbon Street bands last a year, maybe two, then they change the policy or something. We figured we'd just do the gig, take the money, and run. Two years became three, three became five, five wound up being eight. It's never been about the money, but when you get older, you have responsibilities. And as Al says, he's never missed a meal in his life, and he doesn't want to start now! And at this time in my life, I'm not ready to get up in the morning to punch somebody's clock. I'd rather be at the Funky Pirate, 727 Bourbon Street, sitting on my butt, playing the blues behind Big Al Carson
.

BORN
: New Orleans, September 19, 1952
Interviewed at Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, November 2002

I've been going to farades since about 1969. I met Jules Cahn that way. I was doing research on the Mardi Gras Indians, and Jules veas very involved with that; he knew a great deal about the various tribes. He was a great cultural voyeur—always at the parades on Sundays, with his camera. He didn't leave any books or memoirs—I wish he had—but he did leave us his photographs, and they're at the Historic New Orleans Collection
.

He lived on Versailles, and I lived on Belfast Street, so we were only six blocks away from each other. Often we'd go to parades together. He had very broad tastes, and he liked a lot of different people
.

Jules was a friend of Danny Barker's, and I'm sure he knew the musicians from the Fairview band. He told me about the Hurricane Brass Band when it started, and we went to hear them a couple of times. They were young and inexperienced; it was young, raw, energetic. They weren't trying to do anything new and different—they had come up with Danny, so they were trying to stick to the old traditions. The musicians from that band were probably the last influence from Danny's era. The cutoff is really in the eighties, with the Rebirth and Dirty Dozen; by that stage, the tradition had really gone
.

At some point, Jules said, out of the goodness of his heart (he was personally wealthy, owned Dixie Lumber Mill and a lot of property in the French Quarter), “I'd like to make a record of the Hurricane band, but I don't want to spend a lot of money on a fancy studio.”

I told him I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder; it was stereo, a good solid machine. We went out to his brother's house, out on Lakeview. We had food and drinks, and we set the band up in a corner and balanced the sound. We started in the afternoon. I'd switch on the tape, point at them, and shout, “Take One!” That was the first time I'd done anything like that. After about three hours, we'd recorded the whole album. I think we issued everything from the session. It was to help promote the band at the time. I'm sure they didn't press more than a thousand copies. I remember thinking that the test pressing sounded pretty good, considering it had been done in someone's house, on a home tape recorder
.

LINER NOTES FROM
Leroy Jones and His Hurricane Marching Brass Band of New Orleans
RECORDED MARCH 1 AND 2, 1975

Personnel
Charles Barbarin Jr., bass drum. Joseph Charles [Torregano], clarinet. Leroy Jones Jr., trumpet and leader. Darryl Adams, alto saxophone. Lucien Barbarin, trombone. Michael Johnson, trombone. Anthony Lacen, sousaphone. Henry Freeman, tenor saxophone. Gregory Davis, trumpet. Gregory Vaughn [Gregg Stafford], trumpet. Raymond Johnson Jr., snare drum.

Titles
“Little Liza Jane,” “Bourbon Street Parade,” “Leroy's Special,” “Oh, Didn't He Ramble,” “Closer Walk with Thee,” “The Saints Go Marching In,” “Nearer My God to Thee,” “Joe Avery's Tune,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Olympia Special.”

Claude Tremé created the oldest faubourg (suburb) in New Orleans around 1812. Originally the home of many skilled artisan gens de couleur libre (free people of color), the area still has some of the most distinctive and elegant architecture in the city.

Its geographical boundaries seem to be a matter of opinion. In
Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story,
Tony Scherman cites a 1980 architectural study as indicating that “the Tremé extends from North Rampart to North Broad Streets, and from Canal Street to St. Bernard Avenue,” but he goes on to say, “Most people … consider it much smaller: the thirty block area extending on one side from Rampart to North Claiborne, on the other from Orleans to Esplanade.”
¹⁵
Austin Leslie, interviewed for the Tremé Oral History Project, said, “The Tremé is from Lafitte to Esplanade, down Claiborne, and North Rampart to St. Peter.” Norman Smith, another interviewee for that project, indicated the neighborhood runs “from Galvez to Burgundy, from Lafitte to St. Bernard. In later years, the boundaries have been extended to Elysian Fields.”
¹⁶

What most people would regard as the area's economic decline during the last century coincided with a cultural richness and identity, particularly in the amount of music that emanated from the Tremé and the appreciative enthusiasm that supported it. Recollecting the mid-1950s, Ernest “Doc” Watson recalled, “I would see the older guys playing on the street…. That music was very popular in the Tremé section—the people would do these little street dances, and so forth. Whenever we played in the Tremé section, Little Millett would wait until around midnight, and start calling those old Dixieland numbers. You had to play that stuff down there.”
¹⁷
Milton Batiste, recalling working in “the Sixth Ward,” remembered, “They had plenty of nightclubs there: the High Hat, the Caldonia and the other dance halls…. This was the very epitome of where blues and jazz actually was born.”
¹⁸

William Smith explains that the love of music helped create a strong sense of community in the neighborhood: “It's like—this is a high crime city, usually I lock my car when I go anywhere. But I can go in the Tremé and leave it unlocked, with the tuba on the seat, and my horn on the hood, and they're not going to touch it. Because that would stop the band from playing.”
¹⁹

Older residents look back to a time of order and cultural stability, when goats pulled little carts to the icehouse to keep the beer cold, where disagreements were resolved by fisticuffs on Nanny Goat Square rather than by shootings, and Sunday afternoons were spent making music for the sheer fun of the thing. As Norman Smith recalled,

I lived on North Robertson—we had a unique neighborhood, and many of the people were very talented. My earliest memories of music in Tremé took place right in my backyard. The music was very unique—there were lots of traditional hymns. There were not many singers around then, but a lot of people who played instruments.

Some of the Batiste family lived on St. Philip Street. The family was very musically inclined, and on a Sunday after church, when everybody had cooked their dinner and what have you, they would get in the backyard, and they'd make a big crock of Sangria, and they would put up a card table. Some people would play cards, and the Batiste family would get out their makeshift instruments and play music. There was the washboard, the comb and paper. My mother had a beautiful porcelain-topped table, and the guy that was supposed to be the drummer was playing on the table with two forks. One day we were having so much fun in the yard, and the adults were drinking the Sangria and the Eagle beer. My mother looked down, and all round the corner of the table the forks had chipped the porcelain off. She broke the party up that day.
²⁰

Chef Austin Leslie, a long-term Tremé resident, was for many years the proprietor of Chez Helene restaurant at 932 North Claiborne. Trade and the neighborhood went down together. In 1996, he was running the New Orleans restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark. After a couple of years, he returned to the States and went to work in Oakland, California. Fortunately for New Orleans, that didn't work out, and in November 2002, he was back, using his considerable culinary skills at Jacques Imo's on Oak Street. It seemed to be going well—they don't take reservations for parties of less than five. He recalled his younger days in the Tremé:

I was born in the Seventh Ward, but I came to the Lafitte projects when I was in third grade. I went to Craig School. There was a teacher there called Miss Morton. She was a music teacher, and she put out people like John Fernandez, who was a trumpet player—he was one of my classmates. I can remember when Fats Domino and them used to play back of the Caldonia, in the Tremé section, right at St. Claude and St. Philip.

They had a lot of second lines going through then. Years ago, they had the Center Club on Dumaine between Villere and Marais. A lot of stuff used to go on in there. You had people like Rip Roberts—he used to bring different entertainers down. I can remember Ray Charles coming in there years ago. Dooky Chase Sr., the old man, he would parade with the Square Deals. Like the parades that are going on now, like the youngsters have different parades throughout the year. They'd go by Rampart Street and get their clothes, all the different colors, with the sashes and all. It was good times in New Orleans then. I've been around it so long I feel like my feet hurt with that tar and asphalt, trying to catch up with those bands. Now I just look at them. History excites me—it's like being in this area here, you know? I was born and raised here.

I enjoy music—I like old jazz, and I remember the music from the sanctified churches. In the Tremé, you were right in the thick of it. I lived on 1854. North Miro. The drummer Earl Palmer, he lived right on the edge of the Treme, and the guitar player Walter “Papoose” Nelson. He was very young, but he played with Fats Domino. I was always connected around music.

I remember the vegetable man coming through the Tremé to the French market—back then, he would push a small wagon to carry the vegetables. On Fridays, he would sell seafood from the wagon, which was against the law. The cops would come and shake him down; if he couldn't pay them off, they'd take his seafood.

My music was more like, any time someone died, they would have a second line, so we'd follow that. They had a lot of clubs—the Jolly Bunch, the Square Deals, and so forth, social and pleasure clubs.
²¹

The social problems that afflict the Tremé today are pretty well spread throughout the neighborhoods of the city. Recent years have seen a school child shot to death for possession of his bike, a crack dealer burned alive in the street during a turf war, and too many drive-by shootings to count. In 1962, Dejan's Olympia Brass Band was the only one that dared venture into the Tremé for the funeral of guitarist Papoose Nelson. The other bands were too scared. It's the kind of crime that comes from lack of opportunity and loss of cultural identity. These problems don't start in the Tremé, but that's where some of them end up.