Jazz Review : Smile: Hall’s Well That Ends Well

If you’ve ever been to a performance by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, you know how the New Orleans-based ensemble’s show Thursday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre ended: with felicitous revelry.

As the septet launched into its signature piece--”When the Saints Go Marchin’ In”--members of the audience, three with colorful parasols--started to parade around the hall, clapping and sashaying to the effervescent sounds.

Soon this handful of people became 30, and they were joined by the band’s front line: trumpeter Wendell Brunious, clarinetist Michael White and trombonist Frank Demond. Eventually, everyone landed on stage, the paraders forming a semicircle around the band as the number concluded to uproarious applause.

The current touring edition of Preservation Hall worked this kind of magic from the opening moments of “Hindustan,” the first number--it’s just that the members of the packed house stayed in their seats until the final song.

A spectrum of listeners, from senior citizens in snazzy suits to 20-ish long-hairs wearing faded jeans and Nikes, couldn’t help but respond to the ingratiating musicians. The fans tapped their feet, clapped their hands in time to the music and, most of all, smiled.

The Preservation Hall touring band--there are several versions that perform only at the Crescent City venue for which the “group’ is named--keeps getting younger.

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Bassist Ben Jaffe, son of the Hall’s late founder, Allan Jaffe, is 23, and joined the ensemble six months ago; Brunious, the band’s leader, is 39 and has been on board for 16 years. Others, from Lars Edegran (piano) to Joe Lastie (drums), range in age from 34 to 61.

Whatever their ages, these musicians played this jubilant music with panache and style. Tunes were generally medium to medium fast, though Kimball’s roseate tenor vocal on “Georgia on My Mind” was done at a crawl, as was the first half of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” That latter number exploded into a fast two-beat as it headed toward its tumultuous finish.

The ensemble’s version of “Shake It and Break It” typified its gregarious approach. Brunious, seated like White and Demond on a straight-backed chair, stomped his right foot twice on the stage to kick off the number.

Then he and his front-line partners played the song’s melodies, though they never played the same parts. Generally Brunious played the lead melody, while Demond offered slowly slithering asides and White musically danced around the trumpeter with brisk, jaunty lines. The rhythm section provided a resilient base throughout.

Solos followed. White, his tone varying between reedy-sounding and pure and liquid, played notes that leaped and some that spun around in a circle. He offered long, elastic notes that whined and, at one point, a seamless smear that began low on his instrument and finally landed in the upper register.

Demond used short statements, tying together three or four notes, then pausing, then going again. These notes were highly rhythmical and were issued with a saucy tone that made them seem like huge pancakes sizzling on a griddle.

Then came Brunious, a remarkably tuneful musician who is comfortable in any style from New Orleans trad-jazz to be-bop. Lightly tonguing his notes, he played a series that sounded like intermittent raindrops, then others that had a Dizzy Gillespie flavor. Then he sprayed notes as if his horn were a garden sprinkler.

Brunious, in his solo pieces, such as “If I Could Be With You,” was uncharacteristically restrained--at times he played so softly his notes were hardly louder than someone breathing. White offered perhaps the evening’s most impassioned solo on “Summertime,” climaxing with swoops, trills and thrilling, long-held notes.

Edegran, Kimball, Jaffe and Lastie got in their fair share of hot licks, giving the ensemble, and the performance, a pleasing roundness.