Devoted to an Old Sound : An eclectic circle of aging performers keeps Dixieland jazz alive.

Saxophonist Don Nelson, eyes half shut in the reverie of jazz improvisation, weaves a passionate lament over the chords of the New Orleans jazz classic “Wolverine Blues.”

Joined briefly by trumpet and trombone for a soft, three-horn passage of melody, Nelson then takes the lead again, working his fluid, lyrical way from haunting lows to soaring high notes.

His fellow band members--graying, balding or white-haired like Nelson--pay close attention to his solo, which he finishes to warm applause from the 20 or so listeners at the Cinnamon Cinder, a Burbank bar that features Dixieland by the band Jazz Holiday at lunchtime Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Dixieland, created 90 years ago in New Orleans, is played today at a handful of places in the Valley for a loyal corps of fans who follow the music from spot to spot.

At the Cinnamon Cinder, three couples are dancing--all six dancers are well over 60--as trumpeter Bill Vogel takes the melody and Nelson joins trombonist Steve Hope in playing harmony behind him. After one chorus, Vogel kicks the band into high gear, and sax and trombone break into full-tilt, all-out ensemble improvisation.

This is the joyous magic of Dixieland that brings people to their feet. It’s the excitement of pre-World War I New Orleans jazz, where the legends--King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory--created a new American art form that spawned all the styles and schools of jazz that followed.

“We play just for the sheer fun of playing,” says Hope, a trombonist and the leader of Jazz Holiday, after the set is finished. “It’s a kind of music that just can’t help making you feel good.”

Although the six band members (playing trumpet, trombone, soprano sax, drums, guitar and bass sax) seem relaxed on stage, their approach to the music is serious. The players know the repertoire and know each other’s styles.

“We’re basically a quiet band,” said Hope, 61, of Hollywood. “You can hear the changes happen. Everybody respects what the other guy is doing.”

Hope is a musician by avocation, a film music editor by profession. So is bass saxophonist Jack Wadsworth. Soprano saxophonist Nelson, brother of the late TV star and bandleader Ozzie Nelson, is a TV writer and story editor. Although all three have played jazz for a living, they now do it for love in a band that evolved out of a long-running tradition of lunchtime Dixieland jam sessions at Disney Studios.

In the 1950s, those jam sessions led to a band called the Firehouse Five Plus Two, one of America’s most commercially successful Dixieland bands. Led by trombonist and Disney head animator Ward Kimball, the band made album after album, and it is said that some Disney personnel were scouted for their Dixieland playing ability and taught basic animation skills to justify their employment.

The lunch-hour jams continued long after the Firehouse Five was gone, and Jazz Holiday is one of several bands playing today that was born at Disney.

“Disney kicked the band off the lot quite a few years ago, and they looked for a place to play,” said Hope, who recently worked as a music editor with Henry Mancini on the latest “Pink Panther” movie.

Years later, the band, changed in personnel but not in spirit, has a lunch-hour home at the Cinnamon Cinder, one of several Valley spots where Dixieland can be heard by those who know where to find it.

“Dixieland is addictive,” Hope said. “Even though you start out just playing lunch hours to keep in practice, after a while you start juggling your schedule, and keeping it clear of meetings so you can be here at noon. It’s like a narcotic.”

Hope and other longtime Los Angeles residents remember when Dixieland was featured every night in nightspots in Hollywood and the Valley. Local fans and musicians could hear, and in some cases, play with, the greats: Kid Ory, Barny Bigard, Bunk Johnson, Johnny St. Cyr.

That was in the 1950s, when jazz had evolved several generations from its New Orleans roots. Swing in the 1930s, be-bop in the late 1940s, and cool jazz and hard bop in the ‘50s had pushed Dixieland far out of fashion by the Dwight D. Eisenhower-Joe DiMaggio years.

But while Dixieland in the ‘50s was no longer hip, it had wide popular appeal with the crew-cut and white-bucks set. It was good-time music.

“Dixieland is the only kind of music I’ve ever liked,” said John Reasoner of Sherman Oaks, a regular at the Cinnamon Cinder’s Dixieland lunch hours.

“It’s a happy sound,” said Jean Griffin, another Cinnamon Cinder regular. “If they’re playing the blues, it has a lot of feeling, and much of it is upbeat. And it’s very danceable.”

Dixieland fans, like Dixieland musicians, are dedicated people who go from spot to spot. Sunday is Dixieland night at the Mission Hills bar LGT (Let’s Go To) Vegas, where three Jazz Holiday players--Nelson, Wadsworth and guitarist Dick Braxhoofden--play in the Great Pacific Jazz Band led by pianist Bob Ringwald.

Sunday is also Dixieland night at Casey’s Tavern in Canoga Park, where Bill Myers’ Jellyroll Jazz Band fills the bar with devoted fans. Bernie Talman and his wife Evelyn are Sunday night regulars.

“He’s the greatest,” said Bernie Talman, 72, of Van Nuys, speaking of Myers, bandleader, trumpet player, singer and ham with a taste for the bawdy.

Myers’ band members wear loud colors--maroon pants, red shirts with white pants or red pants with white shirts--and several of them, including Myers, do gags with the music, the lyrics or jokes between songs.

“I started this band 15 years ago,” said Myers, who runs his own accounting business in Van Nuys, and who moved his music from bar to bar before settling at Casey’s Tavern.

“We mainly have a lot of fun,” Myers said. “Some bands are so dull people just get tired and leave.”

Casey’s is crowded and lively on Jellyroll Jazz Band nights, with no space on the dance floor during an up-tempo “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”

“You lose your inhibitions, listening to him,” Talman said.

“You forget your age,” Evelyn Talman, 70, said. “It’s so much fun. He plays such a variety.”

“You can’t just listen,” Bernie added. “You gotta get up and move.”

Jellyroll Jazz Band pianist Georgia Davis, 76, of Van Nuys, is a full-time musician.

“I also play in a group of older women called The Dixie Belles,” said Davis, who has a driving Dixieland piano style. “We’ve been on 20 or 30 TV shows.”

On this Sunday night, Davis’ rocking, upbeat solo inspires the dancers on the floor to kick and swing--and makes proprietress Jean Casey smile.

“This is what Dixieland is all about: People having a good time,” said Casey, a life member, like her husband Lee, of the Valley Dixieland Jazz Society.

At LGT Vegas, the Great Pacific Jazz Band, led by Ringwald, plays Dixieland in a pure and traditional format, without jokes, gags or funny hats.

“I guess I’m a purist,” said Ringwald, 52, of Van Nuys, another full-time musician.

“My real musical models were the early Louis Armstrong combos,” said Ringwald, bearded and blind, speaking of the classic 1920s Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven records that influenced all the jazz players who followed--including the later high priests of hip, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

“A lot of people think of Dixieland as cowbells and banjos and stuff,” said Ringwald, father of the actress Molly Ringwald.

“But that’s not what the early Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke groups were about.”

Those groups had a definition of line, a clarity and purity of concept that still makes exciting listening today.

“It’s pure,” Ringwald said. “It’s the real stuff, just playing from the heart.”

Ringwald plays a gutsy, rippling, hard-driving barrel-house piano style that calls up echoes of Fats Waller, Willie-the-Lion Smith and the granddaddy of jazz piano, Jellyroll Morton. His band, 11 years old, has a similar approach, and a fuller sound than the Jazz Holiday Band, thanks to two extra players (piano and string bass).

“I love this music,” Ringwald said, “but I don’t know exactly why. It’s sort of self-defeating. You can’t make money playing this.”

At lunch hour, Ringwald plays in the basement luncheonette in the Van Nuys Municipal Court building. On Saturday afternoons, he hosts a Saturday afternoon Dixieland program on KCSN (88.5-FM).

“You’re listening to a musical form that is in danger of extinction,” Ringwald said over the radio in a recent KCSN fund-raising appeal. “This is music that is only being kept alive by the people who play it, and the handful of radio shows, like this one, where you can hear it.”

Besides the bars mentioned, the Red Vest Pizza Parlor in Sylmar offers Dixieland on Wednesday nights. Casey’s Tavern has jazz (not just Dixieland) four nights a week. Then, there are the local Dixieland Jazz Societies: the Santa Clarita Dixieland Jazz Club and the Valley Dixieland Jazz Club, which present monthly concerts.

There are also weekend Dixieland festivals--in Sacramento, San Diego, Fresno and the annual Classic Jazz Festival in Los Angeles--that provide major stages for Dixieland almost every weekend of the year.

But it’s an irony of the music and culture that Dixieland, originally created and played by black musicians, is kept alive today almost entirely by white musicians--aging ones, at that.

There’s no mystery to it. Like teen-agers rebelling against their parents, each school of jazz has rejected the one that gave it birth. In the sociopolitical ferment of rising black consciousness in the 1960s, Dixieland was as welcome as the smiling face of Aunt Jemima or Little Black Sambo.

“A lot of black musicians see Dixieland as ‘Uncle Tom’-type stuff,” said Gus Willmorth of Woodland Hills, a founding member of the Valley Dixieland Jazz Society, established in 1969.

“There are still some older black musicians around who can play Dixieland, but if they’re professional musicians, they just don’t do it. There’s no money in Dixieland.”

Joel Leach, music professor at Cal State Northridge, takes it beyond a matter of race and culture, to the simple reality of changing tastes and eras.

“Dixieland is seen by college music students as kind of a museum piece. Most of today’s jazz students have very little interest in playing it. And that’s part of our cultural heritage: out with the old, in with the new.”

True. And also true that the easy-listening quality that gave Dixieland a wide, mainstream audience in the 1950s keeps it popular with devoted, if elderly, listeners today.

And, in Dixieland, age is no drawback.

“There’s age discrimination in a lot of entertainment fields,” said Don Nelson, who admits to being “over 60” but no more than that.

“The advantage of Dixieland,” said Nelson, “is that the older you get, as a player, the more venerated you are.”

Clubs of Note Casey’s Tavern, 22029 Sherman Way, Canoga Park. The Notables, 8-11:30 p.m. Wednesday; Tin Pan Valley Jazz Band, 8:30 to 11:30 p.m. Thursday; Sunset Swing Society, 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Saturday; Jellyroll Jazz Band, 6 to 9 p.m. Sunday. No cover, no minimum. (818) 992-9362. The Cinnamon Cinder, 4311 W. Magnolia Ave., Burbank. Steve Hope and Jazz Holiday, noon to 1 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays. No cover, no minimum. (818) 845-1121. Courthouse Cafe, (basement of Municipal Court Building) 14400 Erwin St., Van Nuys. Bob Ringwald, Dixieland and traditional jazz piano, noon to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday. No cover, no admission. LGT (Let’s Go To) Vegas, 11000 Sepulveda Blvd., Mission Hills. Bob Ringwald and The Great Pacific Jazz Band, 6 to 9 p.m. Sundays. $2 cover. (818) 365-9502. Red Vest Pizza, 12639 Glenoaks, Sylmar. The Jazzin’ Babies, 7:30 to 10 p.m. Wednesdays. No cover, no admission. (818) 362-1536. High Desert Dixieland Jazz Club, Louisiana Hots, 2728 E. Palmdale Blvd., Palmdale. This newly formed group plans two sets from 1:30 and 5:30 p.m. on the third Sunday of each month. Free. (805) 949-1449. Santa Clarita Dixieland Jazz, American Legion Hall, 7338 Canby St., Reseda. Dixieland concerts at 1 p.m. on the fourth Sunday of every month. (818) 892-1996. Valley Dixieland Jazz Club, Knights of Columbus Hall, 21433 Strathern St., Canoga Park. Dixieland concerts at 1 p.m. the first Sunday of every month. April 4, Janet Carroll and Friends. May 2, Johnny Varro and the Heavyweights. (818) 345-2096.