"PRESERVATION" in Relix Magazine!

A nice review from Relix magazine. It's on newsstands now, if you'd like a copy for keepsies!

PRESERVATION
reviewed by Mike Greenhaus
for Relix Magazine
published on 07/09/10

New Orleans’ legendary Preservation Hall Jazz Band is the latest group to receive a reboot with the help of some famous friends on the all-star benefit album Preservation.
Notably better than the average collaborative effort, Preservation succeeds because the lauded ensemble remains commitment to traditional, Dixieland New Orleans jazz. Though the album’s celebrity guests are associated with such diverse styles as indie-folk ( Andrew Bird, Cory Chisel ), alt-country ( Jason Isbell, Steve Earle ), singer/songwriter ( Richie Havens, Ani DiFranco ), American roots music ( Pete Seeger, Del McCoury, Blind Boys of Alabama ) and places in between ( Tom Waits, Angelique Kidjo ), each performer essentially curbs his individual voice to fit with Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s distinctive sound. Album highlights include Jim James’ delivery of “Louisiana Fairytale” through a retro-New Orleans bullhorn, and a lost recording by jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong.

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"PRESERVATION" Reviewed by Jambands.com and Creative Loafing!

PRESERVATION
reviewed by Brian Ferdman
for Jambands.com

The “with special guests” album is typically a loaded proposition. While the guest often adds new elements to the band’s sound (and hopefully increases exposure and sales), the guest also can also disrupt the fragile chemistry of the band, significantly diluting their sound. Thankfully Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s new guest-laden effort does not fall victim to these traps and wonderfully weaves each guest’s sound into that of the ensemble. Band leader Ben Jaffe initially laid out a dream list of potential guests who understand the traditional sound of Preservation Hall, and much to his surprise, everyone on this dream lineup agreed to take part in recording the twenty standards that comprise the excellent Preservation: An Album To Benefit Preservation Hall & The Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program.

Multi-instrumentalist and singer Andrew Bird sets the tone for the album with a rollicking turn on the bouncy “Shake It and Break It.” After opening with such a lively pace, the group downshifts a bit but maintains their unmistakable swing feel as Paolo Nutini deftly warbles through “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” Up next is madman Tom Waits, who leads the band through one of their most thrilling numbers, a twisted, butt-shaking turn on the ancient Mardi Gras anthem, “Tootie Ma is a Big Fine Thing.” With plenty of percussion powering an oddball secondline beat that compels strange movements reminiscent of a hip replacement, Waits applies his unique, guttural growl and guides the ensemble through dynamic shifts while maintaining an incredibly loose atmosphere that has a warts-and-all/devil-may-care vibe. The entire piece crackles with a very live energy, and a similar feeling is successfully applied later on in the album with Dr. John directing everyone through “Winin’ Boy.” The song shuffles, slinks, and grinds before he shouts, “Oh, suffer now, honey!” and everyone erupts into a raunchy burst of sound...

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CD Review: Preservation Hall Jazz Band
by Grant Britt for Creative Loafing

The Deal: Mind-bending, fonky take on Dixieland by a galaxy of unlikely presenters including Merle Haggard, Tom Waits, Angelique Kidjo, Ani DiFranco, Steve Earle and Dr. John.

The Good: A benefit album to raise money for New Orleans' revered-but-financially-shabby Dixieland homestead, Preservation Hall, Preservation pairs a gathering of unlikely Dixielanders with the strutting rhythms that are the heartbeat of New Orleans. Brandi Carlile roughs up "The Old Rugged Cross" in a manner Levon Helm would approve of: throaty and throbbing, but still churchy. Tom Waits' "Tootie Ma Is A Big Fine Thing," the earliest recorded Mardi Gras song, is a rump shaker that sounds like it was written for and by a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians, with Waits growling over a bubbling cauldron of horns. But it's hard to beat the hometown boys at their own game. Dr. John owns the fonk with his take on "Winin Boy." And even though Angelique Kidjo puts Edith Piaf to shame on "La Vie En Rose," it's N'awleans' own Terence Blanchard's trumpet lead that puts this one high in the Hall's rafters. The guests are impressive – even Steve Earle and Merle Haggard duke it out with Dixieland, but it's the music behind them that carries this show.

The Bad: Needs a warning label: Not your average old coots playing Dixieland. This music is vibrant, powerful stuff that deserves to be heard by a big audience of all generations.

The Verdict: A genre-bending triumph celebrating the diversity of roots music.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE!

"PRESERVATION" in Offbeat Magazine!

PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND - THE A LIST
March 01, 2010 - by Alex Rawls

For its new album, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band made some high-profile friends, but who learned from who?

Since Preservation Hall opened in 1961, it has been the great name in traditional
jazz. The venue continues to let the music speak without amplification, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band has been iconic, representing the city and music despite the inevitable lineup changes over the years. It’s the band that everybody knows in concept, but not in detail.

“I’d been to Preservation Hall to see their performances there,” Jason Isbell says. Isbell is just one of the guests on Preservation, the new album by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and his experience with the Hall and the band is more typical than not. He’d come to New Orleans and stopped in the hall as part of a trip. His awareness of it increased as he toured New Orleans with the Drive-By Truckers and his own 400 Unit. But, he admits, “I never knew much about the Preservation Hall. Once I got caught up on the history, I got more interested in it.”

Isbell, like guests including Paulo Nutini, Andrew Bird, Ani DiFranco, Tom Waits, Dr. John, Pete Seeger, Buddy Miller, Steve Earle and Amy LaVere came to Preservation Hall and cut a track live with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. It wasn’t Isbell’s first time cutting a track live, but it wasn’t common for him either. “You’ve got to have good musicians or it can take a really long time,” he says.

For Del McCoury, this was a significant change. “He goes back and plugs in all of his vocal tracks,” Hall director and tuba player Ben Jaffe says. “So for him to come into a room with seven musicians you’ve never met before and sing live over a jazz band, it’s intimidating. I was blown away with how he came in there and just did it.”

Since Jaffe took over as artistic director for Preservation Hall in 1993, the hall and the band have been modernized. Preservation continues in that vein, matching the band with guest artists and broadening the repertoire to introduce more people to the band. Not surprisingly, not everybody shares Jaffe’s vision equally. Preservation includes folk, blues and Western Swing, and their distance from Preservation Hall’s bread and butter concerned 78-year-old clarinetist Charlie Gabriel a little.

“We’re not doing the music the way the old musicians did it,” he says. “I think we might stray a little bit too far away from the source. But this is a good project; it’s geared to the education of the kids. It’s incorporating other folks’ music into traditional jazz music, which is a good intake. You’re incorporating bluegrass into jazz music, which is a good thing.”

Musically, the interaction between the guests and the hall band seems surprisingly easy on the album. In person, it added a dimension to the project. “I don’t think they had any idea (who I was),” Isbell says. “I thought Walter (Payton) was asleep until we counted off and started playing. He’d come to life at the last second.”

“Richie Havens was a very soulful individual,” Gabriel says. “He just sit right down, and started doing what he would do. Pete Seeger is a wonderful man. You feel good just being in his company. He was a soft-spoken man.”

My Morning Jacket’s Jim James embraced the project. “He came into the hall the night before,” Jaffe says. “I took him through the hall and it was his first time there. We went upstairs above the hall and we were walking through one of the old rooms upstairs and he saw an old amp in the corner with a microphone and he asked me about it. I told him that was Sweet Emma (Barrett)’s amplifier. She used to drag that around New Orleans and that’s what she sang out of.” The next day, James showed up in a suit and sang through her megaphone and amp.

“It was very surreal,” James says via email, “because I had a dream the night before we did the session where a spirit was breathed into my mouth through a hole in the floor. I carried the spirit for awhile, then when I put my lips to the bullhorn, I felt I was breathing that spirit back out into this world from the dream
world and into Preservation Hall. I felt Sweet Emma’s ghost howling through my heart.”

Preservation has already produced a number of small victories. The band got to work with member Clint Maedgen’s musical hero, Tom Waits, and My Morning Jacket is taking the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on tour with it this spring. “I think it will give the audience a deeper insight into where a lot of the music we enjoy comes from.”

Jason Isbell learned to play his song correctly—”there was one chord I was playing as a major 7th and it’s a minor 7th”—but he also learned something from the band. “It’s such a part of their life to create music that it wasn’t anything extraordinary for them, and I like that a lot. I think music should be like that sometimes without bells and whistles.”

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"PRESERVATION" reviewed in All About Jazz!

Preservation Hall Jazz Band:
PRESERVATION
by Wade Liguet

What do you get when you cross America's best traditional jazz band with 20 emerging or legendary musical artists? You get a terrific collection of highly listenable traditional jazz performances by a highly improbable combination of musicians and vocalists. Who would have thought to have Del McCoury sing "After You've Gone" with his heavy country twang? Or Tom Waits' raspy voice on "Tootie Ma Was a Big Fine Thing"? If you are Ben Jaffe—tuba player, creative director and son of Preservation Hall founders Allan and Sandra Jaffe, and grew up in the hall—this might seem, as Jaffe states in the liner notes, a natural fit. For the rest of us, it is a surprise, and a real treat.

Jaffe made a wish-list of performers whom he hoped would come to New Orleans to play with the band. Surprisingly, they all agreed to do so. He showed them around the city and then brought them to the warm confines of Preservation Hall to record with the band. The result is an album that will have widespread appeal, as performers known by the young—Andrew Bird, Yim Yames, Jason Isbell, Ani DeFranco, Cory Chisel, Paolo Nutini, Angelique Kidjo, Brandi Carlisle and Amy LaVere—share the CD with performers known by folk and rock music fans—Waits, Pete Seeger, Dr. John, the Blind Boys of Alabama and Richie Havens. Country music fans are catered for too, by Merle Haggard, McCoury, Steve Earle and Buddy Miller. Louis Armstrong even makes an appearance with extracted voicings on "Rocking Chair." All the performers are accompanied by the incomparable Preservation Hall Jazz Band—a group of musicians who are, no doubt about it, the best New Orleans has to offer in the traditional music genre.

The album elicits feelings of both joy and bemusement. Joy because that is what traditional jazz creates when played by some of its greatest musicians, and bemusement because of the pairing of some great singers and musicians with the band. Andrew Bird brings his skillful violin playing, as well as a voice with great range, to "Shake It And Break It." Tom Waits' craggy voicings on the Mardi Gras-tinged "Tootie Ma Was A Big Fine Thing" is just plain fun. Merle Haggard's version of "Basin Street Blues" skillfully joins a country voice and jazz in a surprisingly pleasant rendition of this old standard. Richie Havens sings a hauntingly beautiful blues ballad on "Trouble in Mind" with banjo and the horn section playing beautifully in the background. Preservation Hall vocalist Clint Maedgen performs with the Blind Boys of Alabama on the fired-up gospel tune "There Is a Light" behind the powerful organ playing of the hall's pianist Rickie Monie. Each of the tunes on this album deserves a comment, but more than that, each deserves a listen.

Preservation is released as a benefit album to support Preservation Hall and its Music Outreach Program. The album will also benefit traditional jazz in general. As younger generations shun jazz for hip hop, country and independent music, how will jazz lure listeners? How will a century old (and counting) music form stay fresh? Ben Jaffe and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band have created something brilliant with this album. They have kept the jazz traditional, and have brought in popular artists to collaborate with them. This album will no doubt have cross-over appeal. It is something that both young and old listeners should enjoy, be they country, rock or jazz fans. In that sense, the disc, as the title implies, is a preservation of all that is good about traditional jazz, while at the same time being an ambassador to a new generation of fans.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE!

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"PRESERVATION": Reviewed by PASTE Magazine!

Hall of Champions: All-Star Musicians Team With Preservation Hall Jazz Band
by Alison Fensterstock
for Paste Magazine

The new album of surprising collaborations with Preservation Hall—New Orleans’ bastion of traditional jazz—started with Tom Waits and a sign from God. In that order.

In the early fall of 2005, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band shared a bill with Waits, among others, at a Hurricane Katrina benefit at Radio City Music Hall. During a lull backstage, Preservation Hall creative director Ben Jaffe and vocalist/reed man Clint Maedgen—both huge fans—noticed Waits alone, leaning against a wall.

“I had my tuba,” Jaffe says. “I said, OK, Clint, let’s go. This is never gonna happen again.” They chatted with Waits. They played him a song. They got a phone number. “Since then, for years, at least once a week Clint and I would have our conversation about what we were gonna do with Tom,” he says. Jaffe dug out an old song called “Tootie Ma Is A Big Fine Thing,” which appeared as an extra track on a Baby Dodds Trio CD—the original 1940s vinyl was possibly the first commercial waxing of a Mardi Gras Indian street chant. That, they decided, would be the song they’d do someday with Waits. Jaffe sat on it until, one day, sifting through stacks of records at the Hall archive, the first album he pulled out was one of those rare original 78-RPM copies of “Tootie Ma.” He mailed it to Waits along with a 78 player and a note asking him if he’d like to record it at the Hall. Months passed before he finally got an email back: When were they available to record?

“I took it as a sign from God that Tom Waits was going to record ‘Tootie Ma Is A Big Fine Thing’ with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band,” Jaffe says. “I thought, ‘This is the only thing that could possibly convince him—to give him the only copy I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

“Tootie Ma” is a standout on Preservation, the band’s new album, which also includes collaborations between the Hall band and a diverse assortment of artists including Andrew Bird, Brandi Carlile, Richie Havens, Pete Seeger, Del McCoury and Jim James of My Morning Jacket. Every track was recorded live at the Hall, and almost all the songs are traditional and public domain, done in the classic Hall style—acoustic hot jazz with banjo, clarinet and brass—that has remained New Orleans’ hallmark sound since the late 19th century.

Preservation Hall itself is a major tourist attraction, but it’s not touristy in the least. In a ramshackle wooden building in the French Quarter, elderly men in black suits and ties play the traditional New Orleans jazz they’ve played for half a century or more, music passed down to them from men who often had learned it the century before last. It’s the real deal. Jaffe, 39, took over stewardship of the Hall from his parents the week after graduating from Oberlin in 1993. As he updates it for the 21st century, he walks a line: keeping tradition sacred, but also relevant and exciting for a new generation.

“At 22, when I took over,” Jaffe says, “I was petrified that when the original Preservation Hall band passed away that we’d cease to exist. But by the late ’90s [as some original members were replaced] I began to see that people would still come see us for this very real New Orleans experience.”

The collaborators on Preservation seem to feel the same way. Carlile recorded the traditional hymn “The Old Rugged Cross” on a Sunday, with Hall guitarist/banjo player Carl LeBlanc, a veteran of the last incarnation of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. “The Preservation Hall band’s performance of these standards and their obvious passion and roots in New Orleans music sets the bar tremendously high for recording artists in any genre,” Carlile says. “I think the pairing of the performers with the Preservation Hall band bridges gaps in a really cool way.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE!

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"PRESERVATION": A review by Sonic Boomers!

ALBUM OF THE WEEK:

Preservation Hall Jazz Band

Preservation

Preservation Hall Recordings

By Phil Gallo for SonicBoomers.com

"The eight musicians who make up the current lineup of the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band have a tough road to plow. Perform with the spirit and integrity of their ancestors or fit the role of re-creationists to keep their battered French Quarter home filled with tourists. It's a balance they strike on Preservation, an album that partners the PHJB with 19 prominent rock, country and folk vocalists in a program of songs from the first half of the 20th century.



Not surprisingly, the more the vocalist works a tone that resonates with historical wear and tear, the better the recording. Richie Havens, Dr. John and Tom Waits are tops in this set, getting the band to sound their gritty best by plunging deep into ancient Louisiana blues. Waits digs his heels into the swamp on the earliest known Mardi Gras tune, the percussion-driven "Tootie Ma is Big Fine Thing"; Havens takes a funereal tone on "Trouble in Mind," a tune recorded by thousands but first by Louis Armstrong with Bertha "Chippie" Hill; and Dr. John brings out the gris-gris and incantations for Jelly Roll Morton's "Winin' Boy."



Better than the average benefit/tribute album, performances over most of the disc are the result of serious consideration and effort, a worthy addition to the Preservation Hall's recorded legacy. Proceeds from the album benefit educational efforts to mentor musicians under
the age of 18..."



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CD Review: The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, “Preservation: An Album to Benefit Preservation Hall” (popdose.com)

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

by Jeff Giles
for popdose.com

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band has always been rooted in tradition, and at this point, the group is a tradition itself — to the point that quite a few of its albums are compilations with the kind of sepia-toned artwork usually reserved for artists who have been dead for decades.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the band has enjoyed an artistic renaissance over the last decade, and the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — whose destruction forced the temporary closure of the historic Preservation Hall, their home base for nearly 50 years — has only fueled their fire. They don’t venture into the recording studio often — their last album of new material, the wonderful Shake That Thing, was released in 2004, and Preservation Hall Recordings mostly functions as an archival label — but when they do, they make it count. For proof, look no further than Preservation: An Album to Benefit Preservation Hall, an album whose matter-of-fact title doesn’t even hint at the many treasures it holds in store...

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