Proudly Declaring New Orleans His Home Bass : Jazz: Bassist Benjamin Jaffe, who plays with the Preservation Hall band Friday in Irvine, is a passionate promoter of his hometown’s distinctive sound.

Preservation Hall Jazz Band bassist Benjamin Jaffe is such a natural spokesman for his hometown of New Orleans that the Crescent City’s Chamber of Commerce ought to hire him.

When Jaffe, 24, talks about New Orleans’ fabled cuisine, like the lunch of hot sausages, rice and vegetables he has just eaten, he makes you want to sit down and enjoy the meal along with him.

And when Jaffe starts talking about the inherent spirit and irrepressible rhythms of the music of New Orleans, he makes you wish you were there hearing it.

“The music here has a distinctive sound that you don’t find anywhere else,” he said by phone from his home just outside the French Quarter. “It’s based on rhythm, and it’s played so that people can dance and relate to it.”

Jaffe and the Preservation Hall band will bring a taste of the Crescent City to Orange County when they perform Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. Jaffe said the ensemble offers a one-of-a-kind musical experience: New Orleans-style jazz played with a special kind of authenticity--all the players were either born in the Big Easy, as the city is sometimes called, or now live there.

“This music is a Southern phenomenon, so it’s really hard for someone who is not from here to perform it,” said Jaffe, who grew up in New Orleans the son of Allan Jaffe, the tuba player who founded Preservation Hall in the Crescent City in 1961. “This music is not about how many notes you play or how great you are. It’s more about a feeling.”

The Preservation Hall band that appears Friday--one of three groups the hall sends out for tours--also includes trumpeter-leader Wendell Brunious, trombonist Frank Demond (a former Newport Beach resident), banjo player Narvin Kimball, clarinetist Dave Grillier, pianist Rickie Monie and drummer Joe Lastie Jr. The group will draw from its vast storehouse of both well-known and arcane New Orleans jazz tunes, including “Hindustan,” “Shake It and Break It” and, of course, “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Jaffe pointed out that while these songs were written many years ago, they have a special freshness when played by musicians from New Orleans.

“There, this music is being played at parties, parades, funerals and at Preservation Hall,” said Jaffe. “So it’s not like we’re trying to re-create something that died. This is something that’s very much alive.”

A graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, where he majored in bass performance and jazz studies, Jaffe said his education gave him some insight into the apparent simplicity of traditional jazz.

“In high school, I used to play tuba with brass bands,” he said. “And at that time, I had succumbed to the notion that traditional-jazz musicians were good musicians but that they weren’t as fine as modern-jazz or classical musicians.

“But when I came back to New Orleans after school--where I developed a really strong Western classical technique--and started playing traditional jazz, I found it to be incredibly challenging music--because it’s not about how well you can play or about one person being a soloist and standing out more than anybody else. It’s about knowing how to communicate with the six other musicians in the band at one time, about how well we play together.”

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And, blowing his own horn for a moment, Jaffe noted that the Preservation Hall band plays very well indeed.

“I’ve found our band to be amazingly consistent,” he said. “We’ve never had what I consider to be a bad night.”

Jaffe said that although he didn’t play a lot of traditional jazz before joining Preservation Hall, it’s in his blood.

“I grew up about a block from the hall, and I have more childhood memories of it than I do of my home,” he said. “It was sort of like my preschool at night, in that the musicians were like my aunts and uncles. And if you grow up in New Orleans, you hear music someplace at least once a week, because there’s always a parade.”

Jaffe said that playing with Preservation Hall is one of life’s finer activities.

“It’s like putting on a good pair of shoes. You say, ‘Aaaahhh,’ ” he said. “It just feels right when the music swings and you’re making people happy with it. It’s not just for yourself, and that’s the greatest thing of all.”