Jazz Reviews : Great Pacific Band Does Honor to Dixieland

Traditional jazz, mainly taking the form known as Dixieland, is almost a stranger to the Southland’s best-known clubs, and the ranks of its true exponents are thinning. Still, every Sunday the old-time sounds ring forth at the Beef and Barrel in Northridge.

The Great Pacific Jazz Band has been at this location for more than two years. In charge is Bob Ringwald, now best-known as the father of the band’s original vocalist Molly, who sang with him as a pre-teen-ager until she went on to greater fame as a film actress.

The basic joy in this musical form can still be conveyed when it is performed with the authenticity brought to it by such veterans as Zeke Zarchy, whose trumpet buoys up the entire band. Teamed with the soprano sax of Don Nelson (who once played with his brother Ozzie) and with the admirable valve trombonist Betty O’Hara , he helped establish both the clean, swinging ensemble sound and the solo strength.

The rhythm section has the odd values associated with this genre. Ringwald is mainly tied to the wafer-thin sound of a four-stringed banjo, though at one point he switched to piano for a keyboard stride duet with Jim Turner. There is no string bass; instead, Jack Wadsworth pumps away at a bass saxophone, now and then even soloing.

The band alternates between tributes to black and white pioneers of the 1920s (Armstrong and Morton, Beiderbecke and Carmichael), along with some of the tunes Zarchy played in the 1930s with the Benny Goodman and Bob Crosby bands.

Drummer Ray Templin plays in the rather static style of those days, yet somehow the band continues to swing. You are left with the conviction that elderly need not mean moldy.