Tuesday, June 29, 2010

PHJB wins Best Local Musician Website in 2010 Best of New Orleans Web Awards!

With heaps of gratitude to our handsome and talented webmaster, Mike Cammarata of Cammami Design, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band is pleased as punch to accept the title for this year's Best Local Musician Website!


When you have a moment, make sure to check out all the other websites that were up for the various awards this year. They're all remarkably well-executed and informative, whether you live in New Orleans or want to know more about we who do!

Monday, June 28, 2010

PRESERVATION is #1 in PASTE Magazine!

Best Music of 2010 (so far):
Josh Jackson, Editor-in-Chief
Paste Magazine


To celebrate the half-way point of 2010, this week
Paste staffers are counting down their favorite albums of the year (so far). Check out all of our lists here, and share your own favorites in the comments.

As editor of an entertainment magazine that spends as much time on music as Paste, I often get asked what I’m listening to. Lately, I’ve been pointing a lot of people to Frightened Rabbit and Mumford & Sons. But that just scratches the surface of stuff that has me excited this year. Here are 10 that don’t even include great releases from LCD Soundsystem, Phosphorescent, Josh Ritter and plenty of others I’m sure I’m forgetting. Listen to a track from each in the playlist below.

10. Beach House – Teen Dream
I didn’t know I needed a new dreamy pop album on my iPod until I heard this.

9. Free Energy – Stuck on Nothing
The aptly named boys from Philly are the best bar band since The Hold Steady.

8. Janelle Monáe – The Archandroid
She’s amazing live, and now she’s got a full album to tide me over between shows.

7. Sleigh Bells – Treats
This album absolutely sounds like the future of music.

6. The National – High Violet
Apparently I’m release-date challenged. I originally thought The XX was 2010 and The National wasn’t out yet. Mea culpa. I’m fixing my list.

5. Band of Horses – Infinite Arms
This album has the office divided, but I fall squarely in the camp that loves its ’70s So-Cal vibe.

4. Frightened Rabbit – The Winter of Mixed Drinks
I can’t get enough of either of this Scottish band’s first two albums—or the live album that came out in between.

3. Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More
We may have matched them on the soccer pitch in South Africa this year, but England has out-Americana’d America this year.

2. Jonsi – Go
The Sigur Rós frontman sounds like he’s having more fun than ever.

1. Preservation Hall Jazz Band – An Album to Benefit Preservation Hall
Guests Tom Waits, Yim Yames, Steve Earle, Buddy Miller and Ani Difranco sound even better with some legendary New Orleans brass.

-Thanks, Josh!

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

'It Ain't My Fault' - Now Available on iTunes!




..and now YOU can own your own copy of this amazing track, just by donating 99 cents to help the effort in the Gulf! CLICK HERE to travel to iTunes where this all-star relief track is now available for download!
Like the video? You can own your own copy for $1.99!
iTunes!


"Mama ya don’t say, uh

Oil and water don’t mix

Petrolio don’t go good with no fish

Aw, it ain’t my fault

BP, big pimpin, big problem, bad presence

Billionaire pirate, boiling point, burst pressure

Aw, it ain’t my fault

Say man, who pushed the marshes back ?

Where’s the hurricane shelter and the garden at?

Aw, it ain’t my fault

Said, from the gulf of Mexico to the broke levee wall

Something gone wrong and it’s somebody’s fault

Aw, it ain’t my fault

Scripture says, it say they go to rock to hide they face

And the rock cried out no hiding place

Say, they go to rock to hide they face

And the rock cried out no hiding place

Say, they go to rock to hide they face

And the rock cried out no hiding place

Oh lord, oh lord, it ain’t my fault

OW!

Lord have mercy!

Aw, it ain’t my fault

This is part of my gospel song,

Say they go to rock to hide they face

And the rock cried out no hiding place

Say they go to rock to hide they face

And the rock cried out no hiding place

Say they go to rock to hide they face

And the rock cried out no hiding place

Oh lord, oh lord, it ain’t my fault

OW!

Aw, it ain’t my fault

This is part of my gospel song,

Aw, it ain’t my fault

It ain’t my fault

It ain’t my fault"

Monday, June 14, 2010

It Ain't My Fault in the Times-Picayune!

Great article here by wonderful New Orleans music writer, Keith Spera.
With any luck, the track will be up on iTunes tomorrow!
(Fingers crossed - and we'll definitely shout it from the rooftops when it happens!)

Lenny Kravitz, Mos Def and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band remake 'It Ain't My Fault' as Gulf Aid fundraiser

Published: Monday, June 14, 2010, 6:05 AM
Keith Spera, The Times-Picayune

Early on May 12, Preservation Hall Jazz Band creative director Ben Jaffe was still fuming about the previous day’s U.S. Senate hearings on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster.

The spectacle of BP, Transocean and Halliburton executives shucking and ducking responsibility warranted a response, Jaffe decided.

A certain New Orleans rhythm & blues classic sprang to mind: “It Ain’t My Fault.”

Written by legendary New Orleans arranger Wardell Quezergue and drummer Smokey Johnson in 1964, “It Ain’t My Fault” is now a Mardi Gras and brass band standard.

Less than 24 hours after the idea first struck Jaffe, a new version of “It Ain’t My Fault” featuring Lenny Kravitz, Mos Def, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, actor Tim Robbins and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band had been recorded and mixed.

Jaffe hoped to release the song immediately on iTunes to benefit the nonprofit Gulf Relief Foundation, created to promote coastal restoration and assist families affected by the spill.

But creative processes often move more quickly than legal processes. Weeks later, the various parties involved still were securing necessary clearances and lobbying iTunes to waive its percentage of sales. Meanwhile, a video of the late-night recording session at Preservation Hall circulated online.

Barring another delay, “It Ain’t My Fault” should be available via iTunes on Tuesday.
Its existence is a testament to the ability of technology to facilitate creativity — and the musical possibilities available at any given moment in New Orleans...

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Thursday, June 10, 2010

PHJB Concert Review: June 1 / Orlando, FL (via OrlandoWeekly.com)

Some nice words about last week's show in Orlando:
This Little Underground
By Bao Le-Huu
...The Preservation Hall Jazz Band show (June 1, Plaza Theatre) was an outstandingly immersive occasion. Being in a classic setting pregnant with history while listening to music with even deeper roots makes for a uniquely transporting experience. The live personification of the French Quarter record label and venue (a tradition dating back to the ‘60s), the PHJB are torchbearers of New Orleans jazz. But rather than relics or campy knockoffs, the band plays in a way that captures the fire of youth from which that music was originally forged. All of it culminated in a finale where the band left the stage and led a dance line up and down the theater aisles. And lemme tell you, those blue hairs got up outta their seats and got down faster than you kids normally do.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Midnight Preserves 2010 in Pictures

Just received some great pictures of this year's Midnight Preserves series from our good friend Adam McCullough. Please enjoy, and make sure to check him out online at www.rhythmicphotography.com!

04.30.10 / TREME BRASS BAND
05.01.10 / TOMMY SANCTON'S NEW ORLEANS JAZZ BAND
05.01.10 / JOHN BOUTTE AND PAUL SANCHEZ

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Ben Jaffe and Preservation Hall on the Bob Edwards Blog

If you listen to NPR at all, you're probably familiar with the work of Bob Edwards.

About a month ago, during the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Mr. Edwards stopped by the Hall to speak with our Creative Director Ben Jaffe for a recent series of interviews with New Orleans musicians.

The interview airs today on Bob Edwards Sirus / XM radio show!

If you're not fortunate enough to have access to satellite radio, you can check out the reflections of senior producer Chad Campbell at the Bob Edwards Radio Blog as he talks about their visit to Preservation Hall.

Ben Jaffe and Preservation Hall
by Chad Campbell, senior producer

As you’ve probably heard by now, Bob, fellow producer Geoffrey Redick and I went down to New Orleans for the first weekend of the city’s annual Jazz and Heritage Festival in late April. We recorded 12 interviews with 12 musicians all over the city in all kinds of settings. My favorite was Ben Jaffe AT Preservation Hall in the French Quarter. He was kind enough to meet us at 9am on a Sunday morning, just five hours after wrapping up a show with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Jaffe plays tuba and double bass and is the band’s director. As we waited outside, Jaffe rode up on an old bicycle painted Saints gold and covered in stickers - his trademark reddish afro bobbing with each push of a pedal. The building is about 260 years old, as Bob pointed out OLDER than this country and was first a private residence, then a Spanish tavern, then who knows what. It’s only been Preservation Hall for the last 49 years. (Click here for a virtual tour of the property). After showing us around the main room where the band performs and the crowd sits on benches along the walls, and on cushions on the floor, Jaffe surprised us by opening up his family’s old living quarters for the rest of the interview. It’s mostly one big room, with a bedroom/office up in the old hay loft. That was once his parents “room” and below that was a kitchen that the Jaffe’s turned into Ben’s brother’s bedroom. The main room is now chock full of knick-knacks, a collection of tuba player figurines here, dozens of mouthpieces for old tubas and horns there, a hand-crank player piano in an alcove along with a whole bunch of stuff collected by Ben’s father Allan Jaffe, who along with his wife Sandra, started the Hall in 1961...