Keeping the Beat on the Street (25 page)

The Olympia Brass Band's bass drummer, [Nowell] “Pa Pa” Glass, was a good person to follow behind and to play music behind. A couple of summers ago, I went to Spain with the Olympia: me, Pa Pa, Boogie and Kerry, Jeffrey Hills, and Edgar Smith on tubas—so there were two bass drummers, two snare drummers and two tuba players—it was a big show. Milton let the people know; the old guys would get off the stage and let the young ones do the gig! That's what we did. We all played together for forty minutes, and then he left us alone for the last twenty
.

Milton was trying to let the people know that there was a lot of younger cats gonna be coming. It had showed them that we could play the traditional things, by us playing with the big band. But for the last twenty minutes, he would tell the audience, “We're going to let the younger guys do what they do, to let y'all know where the music is going right now in New Orleans.” Sometimes we would fool Milton—on some of the funky music, we would play the traditional beat
.

The way I do it with the Olympia, that's how I was taught to do it in the beginning, with the straight traditional beat, and keeping the New Orleans feeling. There's a lot of beats that you can play, but if you ain't got that New Orleans groove, to me there's no more brass band. Sometimes, I get away from it. I'm sorry we have to get away from it, but it's the change in times and the music and sometimes the crowd that we're performing for
.

I had to straighten a couple of people out a couple of weeks ago about funk. I said, “Y'all say we're playing funk. But if that's the case, we could take Just a Little While to Stay Here' and funk it up. I would come in with a different beat. If I take a Herbie Hancock song like ‘Chameleon' and play it with a funky beat, it's gonna sound funky. But I could just as easily play it with a traditional beat.”

The Tremé Brass Band, with Benny Jones and Lionel, they ain't leaving a pocket. You can tell them to play anything in the world. I love the way the old cats played, like Lionel Batiste and Stanley Stephens. A lot of people say to me that I must have been around a long time. I've been listening and watching and looking at these cats and saying, “Man, that's
real
New Orleans.” Ever since the day I picked up that drum and started playing that beat, I never looked back. This is my life
.

The New Birth works three or four times a week. For wedding receptions, conventions, press parties. We're going out to Brazil on November 6. We play a parade every year in Philadelphia. The club scene ain't happening too much right now
.

At one time, we were the house band at Donna's Bar and Grill. That would have been around 1996. We did it once or twice a week for about five years, on a Wednesday and Saturday. Then, before you know it, we started doing Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. It was working out. You couldn't retire on the money, but it was good exposure, and it gave us a chance to sell CDs. We got more gigs from it, because a lot of people would hire us to work in Europe and different parts of the U.S. by seeing us at Donna's
.

There ain't no “Today, I'm gonna do my garden. I ain't gonna talk about music, I ain't gonna play my horn, I ain't gonna play my drum.” I used to go by Milton's house every single day. That telephone, and that studio—something happening at all times! With this music business, you can't sit home and wait—it's not happening. Milton is the one that was the teacher about going to get it
.

I lived in the Seventh Ward, right between Esplanade and St. Bernard. When I was younger, I hung in the Tremé twenty-four hours a day—that's where all the culture's at. Congo Square, the Caldonia, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Chosen Few Brass Band, Kermit Ruffins, Lil' Rascals Brass Band, Tremé Brass Band, Pinstripes, Coolbone, Soul Rebels, everybody—they all hang out, before they go to the gig. Stop at Joe's Cozy Corner, get them a cold one, load up the cars, get to the gig. Meet at Joe's two hours before, get to the job forty-five minutes before the start, everything gonna be all right
.

We have a big following. We work about every other Sunday on parades in the season. They have different clubs coming out now and younger bands coming up. They don't worry me; I like to play with them too. A lot of them are playing the right kind of music. Not too many of them are playing traditional—that's what we're missing right now
.

The modern stuff that the young bands play now, it comes from their heart—it's their own feeling. Three or four guys sitting in a room, humming, patting their feet—the stuff they're coming out with is out of their own heads. They get on their horns and play what they been humming—could be just some phrase like “Your head too big”—“Ba bom bom Bom.” A lot of stuff starts like that
.

BORN
: New Orleans, 1969
Played with the Bucket Men Brass Band, the Junior Olympia Brass Band, the New Birth Brass Band, the Rebirth Brass Band, the Chosen Few Brass Band, the Tremé Brass Band, and the Regal Brass Band
Interviewed at his home on Urquhart Street, October 2002

Actually, years ago, it was kind of funny how I came to music. Growing up in New Orleans, you always see like a funeral or parade. I'd see a guy playing a horn, people dancing, and I was inspired by that. I started playing cornet at school, in the fifth grade. I wanted to give playing the second lines a shot, so me and some of the guys, we were all playing sports together, got together and started to teach ourselves to pick out the notes-no formal teaching for that. This was in the neighborhood around Urquhart Street, just outside the Tremé. We just started walking round the street, trying to play
.

I was playing sports over at Tambourine and Fan, and the coach had seen us playing music. So they brought us into the Tambourine and Fan, and we just sat in a room and started practicing. We were the first band they had, and we were called the Bucket Men Brass Band. That came about because Tambourine and Fan had a second line club called the Bucket Men
.

Through time, around six or seven months later, we were introduced to Milton Batiste. He used to sit us down in the locker room by the field, and we'd just try to learn to play the songs. He always used to holler at me, “Boy, you're playing the wrong note.” At first, it was intimidating, because here's a guy that you see all over the city, playing music, and I'm there trying to learn from him. So he tells me I was playing the wrong note, I got kind of nervous, fussing that the next note might be wrong too. But he just kept at it. I used to think, “Shit, I don't know if I should be doing this.” He always said, “Kenneth, you gotta make the note.” The first song he taught me was “Down by the Riverside.” I still remember that
.

After that we carried on practicing by Tambourine and Fan, twice a week, I think it was Tuesdays and Thursday. We would start around six or seven o'clock, and we were always the last to leave the organization—we were in the back, practicing our horns. Then we did a couple of gigs under the name of the Bucket Men Brass Band. We had Stafford Agee, Taju Smith (Revert Andrews came later), Abraham Cosse when we finally got a tuba player, Kerry Hunter on snare, Tanio Hingle on bass drum. There was a guy we called “Specs”; his right name was David Gallaud. We had about ten or twelve young guys
.

Then we started practicing at someone's house, so the band got smaller. There was me, Revert Andrews on trombone, Glen Andrews on trumpet, Tanio and Kerry, Abraham Cosse, and Erskine Campbell (Kid Merv's brother) on saxophone. That was when it became the Junior Olympia
.

How it happened, Milton Batiste had a gig somewhere, and we used to always go with him to listen. So he said, “Man, what y'all think about changing the name of the band?” And he talked to us about keeping the tradition going, for the sake of the music. He was always telling us not to ever leave the tradition. Then he suggested using the name Junior Olympia. The guys were real excited: here's the number one band in the city of New Orleans asking us to be the junior band! So we said, “Yeah, why not?”

That was around 1982. We used to go by his house and rehearse. We had like a real closed rehearsal—we didn't allow too many people to come in. We had to concentrate on what we were doing—we were there for one reason, to learn. We'd sit in the practice room and listen to old recordings by Louis Armstrong, the Olympia, the Young Tuxedo. Then we'd try to play the tunes. Every rehearsal, before we left, we'd learn at least three traditionals. We knew the songs as a group, and we could play them the way we wanted to
.

And we were listening to the Rebirth, the Dirty Dozen, and the Chosen Few. One day in the practice room we started playing “Tuba Fats.” Milton went into a rage. He told us, “Don't you ever come back here playing that shit! Whatever you do, I want you to stick to the tradition. See all that other stuff? It's no good.” Believe it or not, to this day, the traditional music is still what's happening
.

I've been in the Bucket Men, the Junior Olympia, the Jackson Square Brass Band, the Original New Birth (I was there before James Andrews—he was still with the All Stars), the Rebirth, the Chosen Few, the Tremé, the Regal, and I get gigs with bands all over the city—the Algiers, the Pinstripe—I worked with just about everybody, and now I'm getting gigs at Preservation Hall. And that's all because of one thing—sticking with the tradition
.

A couple of years later, the Junior Olympia branched off. We were going playing in the Quarter; Milton didn't like that. We'd say to him, “We're not practicing today; we're going to play in the French Quarter.” He'd say, “What? You come and practice!” He and his wife used to come to pick us up to practice, and we used to have to run from them. It was like, go make a few dollars, or go practice. He got fed up with us. He got to the point of thinking, “Oh shit, they're going out there—just let them go.” We went out there, and we wound up missing a gig. It was a benefit. We were young; we thought, “Why go play for free, when we can make some money?”

Milton was highly upset, and we fell out for a couple of years. We had a couple of guys leaving, and the All Stars was breaking up. So we welded together and formed the New Birth. The All Stars and the Junior Olympia both knew a lot of traditional stuff, and we started to combine that with the sort of thing the Rebirth was doing, so we had it all. We used to go playing in Jackson Square with Stackman [Elliott Callier]—he used to teach us stuff. One day, Benny Jones came out. He said to me, “Hey, Little Milton, you want to make a gig?” I told him I had to ask my momma
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I was about fourteen. Benny and Tuba brought me home in the back of a truck to my home at 1220 Franklin Avenue to ask if I could go. After that, I started working with the Chosen Few
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Then, when Benny started his Tremé band, he had me and Kermit Ruffins on trumpet. They called me “Little Milton” or “Little Half Head” because I had been Milton's prot
é
g
é
. I know I was very influenced by his style, and now when I play at the Hall on Sunday nights, I'm actually taking his spot. That's a huge step, going right behind someone like that who was in that spot for years. Jacques Gauthé, the soprano player, always shouts, “Play it, Milton,” when I take a solo
.

At first, they said I looked like Milton because I was a bandleader; I played trumpet and tambourine. Later on, when I started getting a stomach, I
really
looked like him
.

In 1989, I went to Ascona [festival in Switzerland] for the first time with Benny Jones and the Tremé. Ascona was a good experience at one time, and then it kind of went down
.

I joined the Rebirth much later on, in the nineties. I had been with the New Birth, and Kermit had left the Rebirth. They took Glen Andrews and me. I was there for a while—it was a good experience. When I was in the band, they had Roddy Paulin on saxophone—he used to write a lot of stuff we would read off the paper, but a lot of the stuff they do is by ear
.

It was a different thing from a normal brass band. Sometimes we would pick up on things kids would be saying on the street—we'd put a melody to it, and before you knew it, it's a song. We'd just do it on the spot. Sometimes, we'd play one riff for the whole of a four-hour parade. Towards the end, it would be a song
.

I had trained by playing chord changes, and I found switching to a one-chord-based funk thing more difficult than I thought. In the New Birth, now, we play some things that have no chord changes at all, just a straight line. Then I go to Preservation Hall, and I have to play all the chord changes. You have to be versatile. Actually, what happened to me on Wednesday, I was sitting up there playing traditional things, and I had been used to playing straight lines. I mean, I knew the songs, but by the time I had moved to the chord, they had all changed to another one. I find playing on chords easier, it makes you think. With the other thing, they put down a bass line, and you can run with that all day. At the Hall, it's fine. You get to play with some of them old guys and play the old things. I don't have no complaints. It's a learning experience, and the more you learn, the better it is
.

If you look at it, they got a lot of kids trying to play this music, and they don't know anything about traditional songs or anything. Tuba's still calling me to go to Jackson Square and pick up those old songs. Kermit used to sit over by Tuba and say, “Tuba, everything you play, I'm, going to steal it.”

But it's real hard to play in what we call a “street” brass band and then go and play in one of those jazz clubs. I like to do both, like with the New Birth
.

At one time, there were only a few social and pleasure clubs, but now there are many of them. They like the street brass—something about playing from the soul, the heart. Also, there are some clubs that don't want anything but traditional music, even some of the younger clubs
.