Sounds Like New Orleans

Musical fashion has known radical changes in the past few decades, but the song remains the same--stubbornly, proudly the same--for the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

Since the group formed in 1961, it has championed the jubilant sound of seminal New Orleans jazz, which is approaching its centennial as a genre.

Its predictability is a source of comfort and a reminder of the timelessness of certain musical idioms. In these late ‘90s, the music, as heard on the group’s latest album, “Because of You” (on Sony), sounds deep, true and fresh, all at once.

The band has made annual appearances around these parts for nearly three decades. This year, it stops at the Janss/Nichols Gallery in Thousand Oaks, a fine new photography gallery and budding performance space.

Family ties can figure into the lineage of musicians in the band, as is often the case in New Orleans generally: Witness the remarkable New Orleans-raised Marsalis family, whose musical sons include Wynton, Branford, Delfaeyo and the youngest, drummer Jason.

The youngest member of the current Preservation Hall band is 24-year-old Benjamin Jaffe, on bass and the tuba known as the helicon. Jaffe is the son of the founders of Preservation Hall, where the band has been one of the “house bands” since before the Beatles were mop tops.

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Benjamin’s parents, Allan and Sandra Jaffe, were on their honeymoon in New Orleans and became friendly with some musicians holding informal jam sessions at an art gallery.

The owner offered them the lease, and a grand tradition was born. However, the driving passion was not the cultural preservation of an endangered musical species but simply filling a void, Benjamin Jaffe said.

“The name is a little deceiving,” Jaffe said in a phone interview from San Francisco last week.

“The name makes people think it’s referring to the music, in terms of preserving New Orleans jazz. But really, that’s never been the function or the role that Preservation Hall has aspired to serve. It was a place that gave musicians who were not working in the early ‘60s a place to play. There were hundreds of musicians around who had either retired or were forced to get other kinds of work, because there were no venues for them to perform in. Also, rock ‘n’ roll had become popular and people like Fats Domino were more popular.

“Preservation Hall was really about preserving the musicians, more than the music, per se. Even today, our goal is not to preserve New Orleans and try to reproduce something that existed a hundred years ago. We’re simply performing something that we grew up with, that we heard and that our relatives played. It just happens that we’re carrying on this tradition. Of course, it has evolved over the years. But it still has the soul and feeling that it had a hundred years ago.”

You can’t escape from the sense of history in the making, and in the margins, with this group. That sense of historical continuum is woven into the New Orleans music scene, as well.

“In the ‘60s, when my parents were in New Orleans, you still had musicians who had played with Buddy Bolden,” Jaffe said, referring to the enigmatic trumpet-playing icon of early jazz.

“Even though there are no recordings of him, he’s considered the godfather of traditional New Orleans jazz playing. There were musicians at the Hall in their 90s who had performed with him at the turn of the century. They passed away, and actually, people like Willie and Percy Humphrey were considered the second generation of New Orleans jazz musicians, who started playing in the ‘20s. And now we have the third generation.”

The band’s members tend to stay put in the organization, touring four or five months a year when not playing at the home base, and as musicians pass away, the torch is handed down.

Early on, pianist Sweet Emma Barrett led the group, and she begat the era when siblings Willie and Percy Humphrey took over. With the passing of leader Percy, current trumpeter Wendell Bronious took the reins of the sextet.

“In New Orleans, jazz is one of these traditions that is really passed down from one generation to the next,” said Jaffe, who studied music at Oberlin College and joined the band immediately upon graduating in 1993. “Wendell’s father was a great trumpet player and my dad was a tuba player. Our banjo player, Narvin Kimball, is 90 years old, and his father was one of the first bass players in New Orleans. His dad, Henry Kimball, was playing bass on steamships in New Orleans as early as the late 1800s. Narvin’s first job was in 1922, just to give you some perspective.

“This guy has been getting Social Security since before I was born.”

New Orleans jazz has gone through a transformation in terms of its appreciation in the jazz world at large.

When Wynton Marsalis began making waves as a teenager in the early ‘80s and was outspoken about his view of what kind of jazz was worthwhile, traditional New Orleans sounds were outside his aesthetic vision.

But he has changed his tune and gained tremendous respect for, and been inspired by, his hometown’s roots music, especially Louis Armstrong’s.

Jaffe commented that “one of the problems that affects New Orleans jazz is the image of the old black musician, this sort of Uncle Tom stigma, that has traveled through time. And that’s one reason that a lot of young musicians do not credit New Orleans jazz with the due respect it deserves.

“Of course, there has always been that element in any kind of art in which the artist is also an entertainer. Then you had bebop come around, and people like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were saying, ‘What we’re playing is legitimate and you need to sit and listen to what we’re doing.’ Wynton was carrying on that history that went around. It took him a few years before he could recognize the genius of Louis Armstrong and these other incredible musicians. Sometimes, you have to look beyond the facade to hear what’s really being performed.”

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Jaffe doesn’t make the claim that the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s music is entrenched in the kind of “serious” issues of classical music or more cerebral forms of jazz.

It’s party music, after all, but party music with integrity and a deep cultural significance.

“Louis Armstrong aside, New Orleans jazz is truly a folk tradition,” Jaffe said. “It suffers a stigma because of that.

A lot of these musicians didn’t read music and they weren’t trained in the Western sense. People might say, ‘How can this be legitimate if they don’t know what they’re playing?’ Some of these ancient African tribes didn’t know what they were doing.

“I’m a huge proponent of folk art. This is something people did because they had to do it. They didn’t know why they had to do it, but they were drawn to it and it was their way of expressing themselves.”

DETAILS

Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Monday, 7:30 p.m., Janss/Nichols Gallery’s Back Lot Theatre in the Gold Coast Plaza, 1408 Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks. $75. 497-4066.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.