by Mick Burns
I got off the plane at Indianapolis, made some phone calls, and confirmed that they definitely weren’t coming. So I had to make arrangements to audition some bass players in Canada. It was rough—I was already dead tired from a tour we had just finished on the West Coast. I had figured to get a day off in Canada and catch up on some sleep, but instead, I had to call ahead and arrange to audition electric bass players. And when we chose one, we had to rehearse fifteen songs to make it through the show. Then we had to play a couple of dates in Detroit. But when we got to the U.S. border, the border police wouldn’t let us bring the Canadian bass player with us. So when we got to Detroit, I had to audition bass players again.
After that, we had three days back in New Orleans to find replacements on trombone and sousaphone, because we were leaving for a tour of Southeast Asia. That tour lasted until maybe a week before Christmas, and by then we had decided that we would take January off to be with our families. Then I was back on the road again.
One of the things I got from Danny Barker, and I learned playing around New Orleans, was that when people go out, they really want to be entertained. A lot of musicians thought that when you went out on a gig, you had to play like John Coltrane or Charlie Parker. It had to be real difficult for the audience to understand—and that’s not true. People do come to a show that are really interested in the music, but most people just want to be entertained.
That’s how I knew how to make the night work, both for the audience and for the band. If it’s going well for the band, then the audience will be happy. Because we used the same group of people all the time, we knew when there were humorous musical things happening that maybe had started somewhere else but just carried on on the stage, and that made it fun and bearable to do those six- or seven-week trips.
The Jelly Roll project came about from a suggestion of our record producer, Scott Billington. The first record we did with Scott was Mardi Gras in Montreux. We had such a good rapport with him, when we changed record labels, he made the move with us. The new company suggested that we try something a little bit different, so we came up with the Morton idea. At that time I really didn’t know too much about Jelly Roll Morton’s music.
At the time we agreed to do it, we were getting ready to do another long European trip. So I said, “If we do this, y’all gonna help us with the music. I have none, no CDs, no written music, nothing.” While we were on tour, I got deliveries of music at airports, train stations, hotels, all different places. I landed in Paris and heard them calling my name on the intercom. It was some music and CDs for the project. So we chose the songs while we were on the road, rehearsed as we traveled. I did some of the charts, Wardell Quezergue did some, Freddy Kemp did some, and Tom McDermott did one. I wrote mine mainly on airplanes.
When we got back, Wardell had had six weeks to work on the stuff like everybody else, but I think he forgot when we were coming home. The night I got back, we had a rehearsal scheduled for the next day. I called him and said, “Have you got the charts ready?” He said, “Oh, yeah, I got ’em.” But I knew he really didn’t.
We went ahead and rehearsed the music that Ed Frank had done and that Fred Kemp had done. We didn’t hear from Wardell that day, but then the next day he called and said, “OK, I got your charts now.” I later found out that he’d written them all in a day and a half. And Wardell doesn’t play piano—he did the charts with a tuning fork! That’s truly amazing.
The Jelly Roll project in itself was very, very interesting and gratifying and educational because it brought a dimension to the band that we didn’t have. Even today, we still get requests to play tunes from that album. It was a good change of pace. When you’re out on the road, you can fall into a rut of playing the same songs all the time, but we’ve been fortunate in that we’ve had other things to draw upon.
We were traveling a lot—we weren’t doing a lot of street things, we were just doing festivals and college performances. So the need to keep it as a brass band wasn’t there. It was all just music anyway, and I didn’t care whether they called it a brass band or not.
The next big change was in 1 994, when my drummers felt the need to make some changes. That was Lionel Batiste and Jenell Marshall. Jenell’s wife had been getting ill on and off over the years, and Lionel had a son who was having marital difficulties. We thought we’d just find two more drummers, but it’s not that easy. Those two had worked so closely together for all those years: you can replace the people, but you can’t replace that closeness. I talked it over with the guys and said, “Look, we’re not going to find two guys who are going to walk in here and do the same thing that Jenell and Lionel were doing. Why don’t we just try one guy playing the whole kit?”
We were just going out on a rock and roll tour with a group called the Black Crowes. We knew every night there would be around six thousand people, and we wanted to make the best impression. So we hired a drummer and a keyboard player, and it worked. We did seventy-two shows in about ninety days. Then we thought, “OK, let’s add a guitar player and see what happens.” That’s how the band goes out now.
When I first went up to New York in 1984, there was a woman called Marie St. Louis who worked with George Wein. She had said to me then, “One day You’re going to get tired of this.” They knew what I was in for, and I didn’t.
Any time I was in New York, I’d have lunch or dinner with George and Marie. One day I woke up in New York, looked in the mirror, and thought, “I’m tired of this shit.” I had thought the same thing many times before, but this time I was serious. I called George, and he told me, “When you get back to New Orleans, give Quint Davis a call.” When I made the call, Quint took me out to lunch and we worked something out. This was in August 1998.
I talked it over with my wife and then went round to the guys’ homes and spoke to them individually, starting with Roger. They didn’t say much at the time, but I could tell that it rattled them a little bit. I didn’t hear from them, so I called a meeting. They said, “If you feel you need to do this, go ahead and do it.” At the same time, we had a theater tour booked and some stuff in China. I still had to participate in those things, but my ultimate goal was to get off the road and go back to school.
So in September 1998, I came to work at Festival Productions to book the acts for Storyville. Then after that I agreed to start doing the booking for Jazz Fest. That led to other stuff, and now I do private bookings, and I do work for other festivals. That’s how I saw my way out of having to travel all the time. I still want to play, and I still want to make some trips.
I remember the first night I wasn’t with the band; I don’t think I had ever missed a gig. The night they were leaving town without me, I was unsettled. My wife noticed it. I was laying in bed that night—there was a clock by the bed, one on the TV, another one on a shelf. I was thinking “OK, it’s eight o’clock, they’re leaving. Twelve o’clock, they’re on stage.” I had to jump in the car and take a ride. But I knew I would be working with them in November and again in January.
So it was like a gradual weaning for me. It took the better part of a year to realize that I didn’t have to travel anymore. It felt good. I had the chance to spend that year with the family. Working for Festival Productions, I was just as busy, I was working round the clock. But the big difference is I was home.
Roger Lewis, Saxophones
BORN: New Orleans, October 5, 1941
Long-term member of Fats Domino’s band before joining the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which he has been with for twenty-five years
Interviewed at his home on Myrtle Street, October 2002
Roger Lewis, Jackson Square, 1986
Photo by Marcel joly
When I came to music was round the age of eight, or even younger than that, because that’s when I started to take piano lessons. I was raised on Pleasant and Harmony Streets: Pleasant on one side, and Harmony on the other! As I remember, when I was a kid, I had a fascination with the saxophone—I would roll up a newspaper and
make like I was playing. I can remember this stuff just like it was yesterday—I can see it, you don’t forget stuff like that.
I heard the sound of the saxophone— the first sax that my dad bought was a tenor—that’s when I was about ten years old. There was a record out called “Feel So Good” by Shirley and Lee. Everybody was trying to learn Lee Allen’s saxophone solo off that. I was in junior high school.
In those days you could come out of junior high school with a trade—woodwork, sheet metal, auto mechanics, homemaking—everything that you need to survive, all from the public school system. ’Cause everybody’s not going to college, you know? It’s not like that now—they pulled all those programs. It’s a whole nother thing now. And they had music programs, and the schools had bands—all the schools used to compete; they had contests and all that. The thing was, I wanted to play music in the joints, where it was happening, you know?
The first thing I did when I got my saxophone was I took it loose. Took everything off it, stripped it down.
My first live performance was with a guy named Sylvester. He was a drummer, he used to come over by the house. What this cat did, he used to have a couple of twigs and play a garbage can on the rim. We thought we was playing—we were just kids having fun.
So anyway, we moved downtown, and we hooked up a little band with some guys around the neighborhood. The Lastie brothers lived in the next block. They had a guy called Ornette Coleman—he was staying with the Lastie brothers. I used to hear those guys—he lived in the upstairs house, and I would be in the kitchen. I never had the courage to go over there—I probably would have learned a whole lot of stuff if I had knocked on that door at that time.
Anyway, we hooked up a little band round the neighborhood; we were playing at the Café Theater. We were young kids—we had plenty of energy. We had no car; we used to have to physically carry the drums and all that stuff. We’re talking about a whole mile, man.
Then I got hooked up with another guy—he was a tenor player—and the first paid gig we did was at a little placed called Mabel’s Tavern, on Magazine. They’d sit down and listen to us. I had to “walk the bar”: the guy told us, “I want you to walk the bar, knock all the drinks over, so the drunks can buy some more alcohol.”
You’d run out the front door, come in through the back door, slide on the floor honk-ingyour horn. Four-piece band—guitar, drums, bass, and me. I learned showmanship. I made so much money playing that horn. We went home with forty-seven dollars in change apiece. And when you did a back flip! People had never seen nothing like that. In those days, people was earning a hundred dollars a week—if you had a dollar, you was rich. So that was my first paying gig.
Then I hooked up with the Impressions—Curtis May field was the guitar player in that band. We could listen to a song and play it just like the record. And John Moore, he would sound like the cat who was singing the song on the record. Our instrumentation was alto, tenor, and baritone saxes—I played tenor. On tenor, you can do all kinds of stuff—you can sound like a trumpet player, alto, whatever. When we played big gigs, we would have Eddie King on trombone, and we would maybe hire an extra drummer. Al Miller was our regular drummer. Earl Derbigny was the bass player, Henry Joseph was the baritone player, Sam Bijou was on piano. And we would have Alvin Alcorn and his son on trumpets to fill out the horn section.
This band never had no charts—we never had a written piece of music. Everybody had good ears. Bobby Blue Bland had a song called “Cry, Cry, Cry.” We did a show with him. We would learn a song as soon as it came out. With us being kids, we was the opening band—we would play all his songs before he came on. When you’re kids, you do stuff like that. And he wanted to know, where did we get the arrangements. Like, we had just listened to the records—it wasn’t no big thing. As a matter of fact, when we played at the Dew Drop, he came over and sat in with us. There was no pain—you do that sort of thing now, people would get pissed off, but back then, it was a whole different thing. So after that band, I was playing rhythm ’n’ blues, rock ’n’ roll, you know? All the artists that came through had to have a backup band, if they didn’t have a band.
In 1971, I joined Fats Domino’s band. Herbert Hardesty was in the band. Clarence Brown was playing drums, and Fred Kemp. Then later on Lee Allen came back in the band, and Dave Bartholomew. When I first went in the band… see, I got in after a guy called Nat Perilliat died. They had Henry Joseph, the baritone player from the Impressions, and I made the transition. See, I was a tenor player. My baritone playing really had started when I was playing with Eddie Bo [Edwin Bocage]—check “Mr. Popeye” and all them songs. The band broke up, but I stayed on tenor. Then I got Fred Kemp in that band, also on tenor.
I brought a baritone to rehearsal one day, and he said, “Hey man, you sound good on that baritone.” I wound up playing baritone. That’s what happened—it started with Eddie Bo.
Anyhow, back to Fats Domino: Dave Bartholomew came back to the band—I think him and Fats was feudin’ or something. We had Herbert Hardesty, Walter Kimball, Freddie Kemp, and me on saxes. People say that was the best band Fats ever had—we were all around the same age, and we used to practice all the time together. And after that band, we had Dave Bartholomew, Lee Allen, Walter Kimball, Smokey Johnson, Jimmy Moyet, Walter Lastie. At one time, we would have three drummers set up on the stage at the same time. It was crazy—at one time, we had two baritone players. The other baritone player didn’t really play—he was kind of an alcoholic—I’d be up there blowing my ass off, man. He was a good saxophone player—he could really cut it—but he was drunk half the time.
Then I joined Irma Thomas, who was playing down the road; I went to hear her, and she said, “Where’s your horn?” I said, “At home, in the cupboard.” She said, “Go get it.” She paid me for the gig. It was around that time that Fats decided to take a long vacation.
I knew a guy called Daryl Adams, an alto player. Daryl said, “How you going to eat? Start playing second line parades!” I was like, “Why not?” I made this gig with those cats—I met Charles Joseph and started doing a lot of those parade gigs. That was the first street work I had done. My early experience was with big bands.
I used to go to William Houston for music lessons—he had this music school. Charles Joseph and Daryl Adams and those cats, they was already doing that Dirty Dozen thing. It wasn’t called the Dirty Dozen—that really started when I got in it. All of the Dirty Dozen, they all have a different story to tell, different from my story. We hooked up—it wasn’t really organized to the level of where it is today. We started rehearsing.
Before the band started taking that shape, we started with Benny Jones. Benny’s a real sociable guy; he had all the parade gigs. Benny used to play with Lionel Batiste, kind of entertainment for the neighborhood. What happened, he used to hire musicians, like Charles Joseph, Cyrille Salvant, Big Daddy [Andrew Green]. Big Daddy and Benny were the perfect drum combination.
Cyrille, the trumpet player, would not improvise. In New Orleans music, when you’re going down the street, somebody got to be playing that melody. This cat Cyrille, he was great for that—he’d play the melody all day. You play a four-hour parade, he’s going to be playing the melody—put all the colors you want around it, but he’d play the melody. You going to hear the song all the time.
That particular band in the beginning was Benny, Big Daddy, sometimes Kirk Joseph, sometimes Tuba Fats, but he was with the Olympia at that time. Gregory Davis came in, then Efrem Towns. Benny was working for the electric company, so he couldn’t take a lot of gigs out of town. Lionel Batiste’s son came in on drum.
We played our own music—what happened, we used to play a lot of traditional songs like “South Rampart Street Parade,” “Didn’t He Ramble,” all the other songs that most bands wasn’t even playing really. Then we started bringing in other stuff—I introduced “Night Train” to the band. People would play “Night Train” in bar rooms—it was like a stripper routine. We brought it to the str
eets. The first time we played it out there, the older musicians said, “Oh no, y’all can’t play that! That kind of music don’t go—you can’t do that on the street!” The people loved it!
We played music slightly faster, and hyped up. We started playing original things, too. We had a parade uptown, around Magazine Street; it was about six o’clock in the morning. We started playing “Reveille”—we put all other things with it, and it just became a song. It came together on the street—“The Flintstones Meet the President” and “Blue Monk”—no brass band in the city played that before, we started that.
We would be going down the street swinging; there was a lot of creativity within the group. What made the difference was the beat was slightly faster. So, like, if you got heavy tennis shoes on, or jiving shoes on, we used to roll. Like, before, it was kind of in between; when we came along, we moved it faster. You had to be in good physical condition—we had guys dancing to us that was doing incredible things with their bodies. So the combination of picking up the beat, incorporating all things like Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and Charlie Parker’s “Bongo Beep” and “Dexterity”—that’s what made everything different.
We weren’t thinking consciously about changing the music, but being in a band where you could do whatever you want to do, whatever musical ideas you had that you couldn’t do with nobody else—bring it to the table, let’s try it. I may not like it, but we’ll do it—you have an ideayou want to blow, go on and blow! The music has its structure, and we do have written music now, like the Jelly Roll Morton album. We hired people to write that; it was orchestrated.