Keeping the Beat on the Street by Mick Burns Page A

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 .

Tad Jones, Jazz Writer and Historian
    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