1959: Jazz Begins: Sounds of New Orleans Streets – Funeral & Parade Music
Jazz Begins: Sounds of New Orleans Streets – Funeral & Parade Music (1959)
New Orleans Brass Band, 6/10, Of Historical Interest
Funereal drags and festive vaudeville romps
This is 1958-recording of a brass band founded in 1938 and existing across generations (not unlike their more successful peers, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Not the earliest, but certainly an early document of recording these traditional combos, it is decidedly presented as an exercise of historicizing and contextualizing the style: Jazz Begins. This is interesting, as we’re at the height of hard bop in 1958, long past the quarrels between hot and cool, dixie and bebop. To present this as a museal piece probably worked for it – because people interested in jazz probably weren’t listening to the latest dixieland-installment in all seriousness – but the specifically historical, archaeological interest of jazz listening certainly rose in the late 1950s.
This is rambunctious, exuberant music – no surprise –, and the two sides keep the “second-line”-nature of a street parade intact since the songs all segue into each other. A loose and joyous “live”-feel thus is kept. At its base, this is dixieland. New orleans brass band as a genre isn’t bound by a style – throughout the decades, brass band took what it needed from the given popular formats of the period (thus the longevity of these cross-generational outfits). This record therefore shines where it actually deviates from dixieland into its pre-jazz-roots: where the horns go into funereal drags or festive vaudeville romps, where they disappear around the corner with the hearse only to come back with joy the next minute. As such, a very good document of New Orleans Brass Band.
A cool factoid about the Young Tuxedo Brass Band is that a later incarnation played for Paul McCartney at a New Orleans press conference in 1975 – and they appear on the traditional piece “Baby Face” McCartney performs in his documentary One Hand Clapping and which you can find nowadays on any of the extended Venus and Mars-issues.
Text Lambrecht 