Keeping the Beat on the Street by Mick Burns Page B

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.”

BAND CALL
Dirty Dozen Brass Band

Gregory “Blodie” Davis, Trumpet
    BORN : New Orleans, January 30, 1957
Played with the Hurricane Brass Band and briefly with the Majestic Brass Band; leader of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Interviewed at the offices of Festival Productions on Camp Street, October 2002
    I’ve lived most of my life here in New Orleans. For a brief period in the sixties, the family moved out to Los Angeles, but that was only for about a year and a half. Fortunately, we came back to New Orleans .
    My family’s not particularly large: I have three brothers and one sister. I have one brother who plays keyboards in the church, but I’m the only one who has made music my primary source of income. I had an older brother who went to summer music camp. He was more into the sports side of it, and when he would leave to go to camp, he wouldn’t bring his instrument—he’d leave it at home. I’d sneak it out and play. It was a baritone horn .
    I was in the seventh grade, at the age of twelve, just fooling round with the horn, teaching myself. After that summer, when school opened, I enrolled in the music class. At that time, I went to Andrew J. Bell school. After three years there, I went on to St. Augustine. That’s when I met Leroy Jones. My original intent was to play drums. There were maybe twenty other kids in the class that wanted to play drums, and maybe two drums. So I just didn’t see a future in that. The instructor offered me a French horn, but I thought the case was kind of ugly; I didn’t want to carry it on the bus. The next pretty-looking case that he had was the one for a cornet. So at thirteen, I ended up playing cornet in the junior high school band .
    My track went like this: in the beginning, I was in the school marching band. From that point, I started playing with some of the rhythm and blues and funk bands here in New Orleans. Friends would form a band, and we’d play. I didn’t really have any influences; I was just playing the trumpet in the band. Just learning how to play some music, without any particular direction. I spent some time with Jean Knight, who had a hit record with “Mr. Big Stuff” in the seventies .
    Then I went on to high school, where I became friends with Leroj Jones. He had been under Danny Barker’s tutelage with the Fairview Baptist Church band. Then he went on to form the Hurricane Brass Band, and he asked me to join it .
    As he progressed on his instrument, playing jazz and all, he got too busy to maintain the Hurricane band. He was playing on Bourbon Street and doing other things. Myself and some of the others started another brass band, which we called the Tornado. That lasted a couple of months. Money problems—stuff was just happening that shouldn’t. So we moved on and started another