by Mick Burns
Sometimes it just happens; I don’t know how the horn players do it. We’re playing, someone is talking a solo, no one knows what’s coming next, and the horn players are just talking, and they just come in on a riff together. And Philip gives a lot of signals from the bass horn.
It’s never written down; we never know what songs we’re going to play—it just happens. The music’s just different things we hear—there’s different age groups in the band, people listen at different stuff. People might come in and want to do, for instance, a Curtis May field song. They come in and give Philip the bass part, and the horn players figure it out. Although everyone in the band can read charts, we don’t like to do it; people feel it more without.
The music was different, it was angrier, back in the late eighties. When you’re dealing with synthetic drugs, you’re dealing with a different kind of musician, and everything’s just different.
Rebirth Brass Band, 1987 (Kermit Ruffins, Keith Frazier, Keith Anderson, John “Prince” Gilbert)
Photo by Marcel Joly
It’s more mellow now. You get a different type of feeling in the city, and the music’s different. I tell people that what the brass bands are playing now isn’t even close to what we were doing ten jears ago. Our band is still good. But when we had Kermit Ruffins, Derek Wilej—the band we have now couldn’t touch that band. Most of us were the same age; we came up playing the French Quarter together.
We would come up with songs—nobody ever called a background, it was so much easier. Nowadays, Younger guys don’t really understand the format of our music—they can’t feel it. Like seventies grooves and stuff, they don’t understand it, because they’re so Young. They’re more into a hip-hop thing. Hip-hop music only has two sections, A and B. In the early eighties, we would do like A, B, C, D: it’s different. I think this newer thing takes more than it adds. There’s less music—it’s more vocal-led than actual playing.
Sometimes we do certain songs—it’s like, “I don’t want to do that song. It’s just not real music.” But we have younger people in the audience at the Maple Leaf, and they seem to enjoy it, because that’s the music they hear on TV. I must be getting old. When I started, I was fourteen; I’m thirty-four now. I’ve seen so many changes in the music. When we do second lines, people are just dancing to the drums. I would say the horns are just not happening—they could just take a holiday, go and sit down somewhere.
Most of the bands coming up now, they’re really not doing anything that we haven’t already done. The quality’s going down, it’s not going up. I mean, at one time, we used to play traditional songs at the Maple Leaf. We don’t do that anymore. When we started, the Olympia Brass Band was still doing second line parades—they don’t do that now. The tempo of songs at second lines now is superfast.
The Dirty Dozen was the band that inspired us—we always used to go to the Glasshouse on Monday night. We wanted to emulate what they were doing. Their music is different from ours—we call it “New York.” It’s fast, it’s clean; the New Orleans feel is more laid back. After the Dirty Dozen stopped doing second lines, it was just the Rebirth for nearly ten years. There were some other bands doing it, but they weren’t really organized bands like we were.
I tell the younger bands now, “Everything you’re doing, we already did it—you sound like you’re copying the Rebirth.” We’re in a band called Forgotten Souls; it’s a mixture of guys from other bands, and we try to do something different. We use the bass and snare drums along with a set drum player. It’s pretty much a stage brass band. I don’t really know what you could do that’s different—I know we haven’t covered everything. There’s something else out there, but it’s up to someone else to find it.
Someone like Shamar Allen (he’s our newest trumpet player), he’s more of a straight-ahead jazz player, whereas Glen Andrews is more street, and “Kabuki” [Derrick Shezbie] is like a mixture of jazz and street. We have three different styles of trumpet playing. “Street” is more improvisation than jazz—you’re doing a lot of stuff that you can’t do in jazz. If you’re playing jazz in the key of B-flat, you can’t start playing in the key of A, because it’s not going to fit, whereas in street, you can be playing a B-flat when the note’s supposed to be B. You know it’s wrong, but you can squeeze it in there. Or, on a scale, you can play a D when you’re supposed to be playing an F—it’s not actually right. In jazz, you have to play the chords correctly for the song to be right. But in street you can play outside the chords—it can sound good if everyone’s doing it. You get one horn playing jazz and another playing street, it can be like a train wreck. But people say, “Sounds pretty good!” if it comes off. As a musician, you know it’s wrong, but you do it anyway. One of the younger guys from the Lil’ Stooges is saying to us, “Man, y’all playing some kind of chords’.” We’re like, “Look, man, you’re on the street. Ain’t nobody worried about what kind of chords y’all playing—just play.” If people are dancing, it’s not wrong.
Keith “Wolf” Anderson, Trombone and Bass Horn
BORN: Chicago, July 18, 1964
Played with the Young Men Brass Band (originating from the Tambourine and Fan Club), the Rebirth Brass Band, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Regal Brass Band, and the Olympia Brass Band; currently freelancing
Interviewed at the Crescent City Brewhouse, Decatur Street, September 2001
Keith Anderson, Copenhagen
Photo by Peter Nissen.
I was born in Chicago. My parents were from here, but my daddy had moved to Chicago before I was born. The family didn’t move back to New Orleans until I was nine years old.
That’s when I first heard kids my age playing on the street. Man, that tripped me out. Right there, I knew what I was going to do. I knew I had to be a musician. Like, even today, my daddy runs a trucking business, and my brothers and sisters all work for him—I guess it makes me kind of the black sheep, but I couldn’t do all that sitting behind a desk, you know?
When we got back to New Orleans, I attended Bell Junior High. The musical director was Mr. Richardson; he started me out on trumpet with the school band. After I’d been playing for a couple of years, I went over by the Tambourine and Fan Club. That’s a social club for young people, over on Claiborne, run by Mr. Jerome Smith. As well as sports activities, they had a little brass band, and I started playing trumpet with them. Later on, the Tambourine and Fan band went out on their own—they were working under the name of the Young Men Brass Band. We were all still at high school.
Remember I said that the young kids playing on the street was my first inspiration? It was around this time that I came across my second—Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen. I never learned anything about formal harmony—as far as I’m concerned, if Tuba does it, it’s right, and if he doesn’t, it’s probably wrong.
He is the MAN! I heard him in Jackson Square, and I couldn’t believe it—he is just so good. Tuba says his inspiration on bass was Wilbert Tillman. Of course, he plays a little more modern than Tillman, and I play a little more modern than Tuba. That was the cause of me taking up bass horn. He plays with such passion and feeling, and that’s the way I play too. How you going to play what’s in you if you don’t give it 100 percent of yourself? Ninety percent isn’t enough. I say to other musicians, “If yon don’t give the music everything you’ve got, why should an audience give you anything at all? I mean, why should they hire you?”
To me, playing music isn’t about money. Obviously, you have to take care of business, but when I go on a gig, I like to do that first. It only takes five minutes, and then my mind is free to concentrate on the reason I’m there in the first place—playing music.
Anyway, to get back to the story—I had a little part-time job when I was in high school, and I was coming home from work one night when I heard the sound of a band coming from a house. I went in there, and it was Philip Frazier, Keith Frazier, Kermit Rujfins—what later became the Rebirth. They were playing sort of high school music, from charts they h
ad got at school. I said to them, “Man, y’all sound good. You should play jazz, make yourself some money.” They all laughed at me! What they didn’t know was that I was a musician. What they also didn’t know was that I always used to like to mess with other guy’s horns, at high school and in the Tambourine and Fan band.
So I had some experience of playing trombone, bass drum, snare drum—I couldn’t play them well, but I knew what to do. And of course I already played trumpet and bass horn. That’s how I was able to help the other guys and show them what to do. Of course, Philip Frazier was the tuba player, so I had to switch horns again—this time to trombone. I love it—you have to be so precise, and I love a challenge. But when you got that right, the trombone is the most expressive of instruments. My favorite trombone player is Wendell Eugene.
So we started to get it together and work in the French Quarter every day—the full eight-piece band, which is what it had become. Sure, we made a few dollars, but more important, we improved a lot by playing together so much, and it gave us exposure. At that time, it wasn’t called the Rebirth. Those guys called it the Group.
There was a guy, a rehabilitated convict, who was trying to help the community. He wasn’t a rich man, but he had a job, and he used his earnings to fund a meetingplace for ex-convicts, to counsel them from his own experience and help them get their lives back together. He heard us in the Quarter, and he used to hire us to play at this meetinghouse, to raise funds and gain publicity. Now, the name of this place was Re Birth, and that’s where the band got its name.
Speaking of names, those guys gave me my nickname, which as you know is “Wolf.” Man, I really did not like that at first. It was because of how I had my hair at that time. Often guys had like naturals, but my hair hung straight down the back, like an Indian or something. And I had a lot of facial hair, sideburns, moustache, everything. So they called me “Wolf.” I hated the name, but it stuck, and I’m used to it now.
A guy called “Ice Cube” [Dan Untermyer] first brought us over to Europe—I don’t know his right name. He just heard us on the street in the Quarter and thought we might be popular overseas. We went to England, Germany, and Austria. That trip changed everything for me, for all of us. As a black man, as a musician, every way: we were so well treated, and the people were so enthusiastic. They really appreciated us.
Meanwhile, the band got hooked up with Allison Miner for representation. I think she was a little bit unused to the ways of business. Kermit Ruffins, Philip Frazier, and I had come up with a song called “Do Watcha Wanna.” Allison Miner got Philip Frazier on his own and got him to put her name on the song. The thing is, the song did really well. We got our money eventually—we didn’t really have to fight for it, but we didn’t get it until just before Allison Miner died, so it was a long wait. By this time we were working all the time, with foreign trips every year, record dates, local jobs, etc.
Then Kirk Joseph left the Dirty Dozen, and they asked me to join on tuba. I’ve always loved playing bass horn, and I was probably the only one in New Orleans who could have done that job.
I stayed with them about a year and a half. I only recorded with them once—that was the Jelly Roll Morton album. It was the record company’s idea to do those tunes. Roger Lewis and Greg Davis more or less ran things between them in that band. They commissioned Wardell Quezergue to write the charts. I remember the bass score was just a simple “oom-pah” part. They said, “Don’t play it like that. Spice it up a little.” So that’s what I did.
After a while, there was a big reshuffle and I went back with the Rebirth. We were doing some recording at Milton Batiste’s house, and he hired me for the Olympia when Edgar Smith couldn’t make it. Harold Dejan was still singing with the band at this point, but he wasn’t playing anymore. That makes me the only musician in New Orleans to play with the city’s three top bands, the Rebirth, the Dirty Dozen, and Dejan’s Olympia.
Milton fired me from the Olympia for missing a job. I had lent my horn to a friend to do an afternoon parade, and he didn’t bring it back until midnight. So that’s how I missed the Sunday night job at Preservation Hall.
After a while, the Rebirth and I parted company for the second time. I was working with a lot of different bands, and they said, “You’re supposed to be with us. If people see you with all these bands, it makes us look cheap. It makes it look as though you need the money.” I said, “I do need the money.” So that was the end of that.
Kermit at Vaughan’s, October 31, 2002
Vaughan’s Bar and Grill
Photo by Barry Martyn
It’s Halloween, and a distinctive pickup truck, easily recognizable by the barbecue hardware in the back, is parked on the corner of Dauphine and Lesseps, deep in the Ninth Ward, just by Vaughan’s Bar and Grill. Kermit’s habit of spontaneously cooking up for anyone who feels hungry has brought hot sausage to many people, and consternation to a few. A friend of mine from out of town once looked through the windows of Cafe Brazil, saw what he thought was a car on fire, and took off down Frenchmen before the gas tank blew.
Vaughan’s is featuring Kermit Ruffins and his Barbecue Swingers, as it has done most Thursday nights for a number of years. The band is Emile Vinet, piano; Kevin Morris, bass; Corey Henry, trombone; and Shannon Powell, drums. The musical menu is described by the leader as “traditional swing”—basically, nice old songs from decades ago, played with equal amounts of sincerity and musicianship. It’s an unlikely formula for commercial success in the current musical climate of the city, but it certainly has worked for Kermit Ruffins. He’s not the most technically complex player—there are plenty of those in New Orleans—but he has great stage presence and charisma. And a sense of fun. Tonight being Halloween, Kermit has come as a convict, in a white shirt and trousers with broad black horizontal stripes. The penitentiary effect is alleviated by his boisterous geniality and fedora hat.
The atmosphere inside the bar is the usual New Orleans combination of soul and sleaze, and the fifty or so habitues in the place obviously like it that way. Behind the bar, the usual lady is dressed as a fairy, with netting wings and a black tutu. Each beer is delivered with a few dance steps and a kind of fairy flutter, although the plies might have been more elegant without the black Doc Marten boots.
The music is advertised for 10:00 P.M., so promptly at 11:20 the band kicks off with “Please Don’t Talk about Me.” It’s the kind of music that welcomes people in, straightforward and warmhearted and unquestionably in the New Orleans tradition. Kermit has identified a niche for himself, that of Louis Armstrong-type trumpet-playing singer/entertainer—like a latter-day black Louis Prima. A party of bearded gentlemen revelers wearing wigs, false bosoms, and fishnet tights comes in as the band launches into “Tiger Rag.” First in the solo order is trombonist Corey Henry, who tears off four immaculate choruses before wandering off for a beer. He’s wearing white gloves, a full-length red robe with white trim, and a large golden crown studded with imitation jewelry.
Trumpet players Gregg Stafford and James Andrews arrive within minutes of each other, just as the band winds up “World on a String” to close the set. Kermit picks up the mike: “And now, y’all, we gonna take a reefer break—OH NO! Why did I say that? I made a mistake.” The band files through the fire exit in the corner behind the drum kit to chill out on the Dauphine Street sidewalk. It’s really not the time or place for any kind of interview, but we do manage a few minutes’ chat.
Kermit’s playing career began with a ten-year stint fronting the Rebirth Brass Band, which ended in 1993. He combined his interest in older styles of jazz (sparked by sitting in at the Palm Court Café) with his extrovert presentational style to form the Barbecue Swingers. He has the ability to deliver old-time hip nonsense with complete sincerity: “We gonna bring you back to one of those good old tunes, so flip your fedoras, and swing out like the rest of us!”
The band started with a Monday night residency at the Little People’s Place, a bar in the Tremé owned by Kermit�
�s in-laws. At the time, Kermit had no thought of wider success; he was just happy to have somewhere to play his favorite music. But a one-time appearance at Jazz Fest led to a recording contract with Justice Records. The band’s first CD, World on a String, recorded at Ultrasonic Studios, got good reviews and did well.
He’s confronted by the problem that faces all bands that win approval in the wider music scene: either spend long periods on the road to bring home lots of money, or stay home and maximize on the opportunities New Orleans can offer. Musicians from the city get homesick when they’re out for a long time and are apt to spend a fortune on foreign pay phones, just to catch up on neighborhood gossip. (When Fats Domino was due to tour at the height of his career, he used kermit at vaughan’s, october 31, 2002 121 to disappear to try to avoid leaving the city. Dave Bartholomew would have to threaten legal action to get him onto the tour bus.)
“Don’t plead pity, feed that kitty”: Kermit Ruffins, Jackson Square, 1992
Photo by Peter Nissen
Kermit muses,
Life’s so short, it’s not a rehearsal, you know? Ten years with the Rebirth, eight years at Vaughan’s—time’s going by, all the time. Sure, I have to leave New Orleans sometimes—selling records and making money is real important, but to me it’s just as important to be home, where my roots are. Even before I had the family, when I didn’t really know what I was missing, I always liked to be able to just go home. It would be a lot easier if I could take the family with me when I go on the road, like the real big-timers do. But you know how long it takes to get into that league.
There’s just something about being in your own place. If some manager told me I had to move away from home to find a wider market, I’d probably end my career right there—I could never leave New Orleans. I’d be up there in New York or somewhere, crying my eyes out in some hotel room, when I could be hanging out in the Tremé, laughing my ass off. Don’t get me wrong, I like money, but I just need enough to cover the bare necessities that makes me happy, and it doesn’t take much. More than that, and I’m overexcited.