Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Preservation Hall Announces 6th Annual Creole Christmas Performances



Preservation Hall is proud to announce the sixth annual presentation of the local holiday favorite, A Creole Christmas.  Please join Lars Edegran's St. Peter Street All-Stars with special guest vocalist Big Al Carson for a seasonal selection of New Orleans' best-loved holiday classics performed in the joyful tradition of Preservation Hall.  Due to popular demand, this year’s presentation has been expanded to include a total of six performances.  Showtimes are 2:00pm and 4:00pm on Sunday, December 18; Saturday, December 24; and Saturday, December 31.  Advance tickets for these very special performances are available online at www.preservationhall.com/tickets.  

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

LA Times interview with Ben Jaffe

 Influences: Ben Jaffe of Preservation Hall Jazz Band
Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times
November 16th, 2011
Ben Jaffe leads the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which makes its home in a storied New Orleans venue when it isn’t touring the world. Jaffe, son of the group’s founders, marched in carnival parades while still in grammar school. Now a tuba player and bassist, he extends the group’s original mission: to keep the music of 1920s New Orleans alive and accessible to audiences, and to maintain the rawness sometimes rubbed off by the “Dixieland” movement and its genteel followers. The band appears at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday for a collaboration with dance group the Trey McIntyre Project.  Besides his expected roots in musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Jaffe, 40, says he’s also inspired by Muhammad Ali’s resistance to the Vietnam War draft, Pete Seeger’s involvement with the Civil Rights movement and Andy Warhol’s redrawing of art’s map. “Where do you go,” Jaffe asks, “when there are no limits or boundaries?”


Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Preshall on Boing Boing!

Preservation Hall Jazz Band: old time jazz from New Orleans - Cory Doctorow

Last year, I found myself in New Orleans for a rather epic birthday party. One place I knew I wanted to visit was Preservation Hall, (which I'd written about here), a legendary unamplified jazz club. It was everything I'd heard and more.
I bought the whole run of Preservation Hall CDs, and they've been in heavy rotation here. Of the bunch, my favorite is "Songs of New Orleans," and I always know it's going to be a good day when the random number generator smiles on me and shuffles a track from the double CD into my music player, especially if that track is Go to the Mardi Gras, which played about ten minutes ago and put a smile on my face that's certain to last the day through.
I've just noticed that there's a new(ish) Preservation Hall Jazz Band CD, American Legacies, which, alas, I can't say anything about, because the Amazon MP3 store won't sell it to me (I'm in Germany and my credit card is registered in the UK, so they shut me out).