Jazz : Preservation Band Mixes Styles

In its continuing crusade to perpetuate New Orleans jazz, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band--with its mix of young and old players--provided a convincing case at UCLA’s Wadsworth Hall for the past and present value of this collectively improvised music.

This particular ensemble, perhaps the best of the various Preservation Hall groups, featured on Friday night a number of top musicians, particularly in the front line of horns, with leader Wendell Brunious a standout on trumpet.

Like most antiquarian performers, however, the Preservation Hall players must approach the music from a traditional or a contemporary point of view. In the case of banjoist Narvin Henry Kimball and bassist James C. Prevost, an early, reasonably accurate perspective, was inherent/

But trumpeter Brunious, for all his excellence, is inextricably rooted in a be-bop-tinged, thoroughly up-to-date style. Unlike Michael White, who has made an effort to simulate the broad sound, slap-tonguing and choppy rhythms of New Orleans era clarinetists, and Frank Demond, whose slippery trombone lines resonated with echoes of Jim Robinson, Brunious simply laid his crisply modern method over the New Orleans foundation.

New Orleans jazz can stand on its own--even as the centenary of its origins approaches. And, if their name is to be taken on face value, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band should be working to maintain an authentic interpretation.