This evening the nine members of the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble will bring you a program of treasures, many of them long lost or forgotten, of New Orleans jazz. Well-known works by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings will be mixed with little known "finds" from the repertoires of the Armand J. Piron Orchestra, the Original Tuxedo Orchestra, the New Orleans Owls, and the Halfway House Orchestra.

The Ensemble prides itself on offering these New Orleans masterpieces in original formats and played on period instruments. It's worth pausing to understand just what this means.

Like Old Testament sages, jazz writers generally introduce bands by reciting the musical genealogies of their members. It's hard to beat the musical biographies of members of the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble. Apollo Brass Band, Louis Armstrong's All Stars, The Count Basie Orchestra, The Tuxedo Brass Band, The George Lewis Band, Pete Fountain's band, Onward Brass Band, The New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra, The Salty Dog Jazz Band, Kid Sheik's Jazz Band, and the Preservation Hall bands are but a few of the many groups with which they have been associated. Several LRJE members are third and even fourth generation bandsmen.

Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble

But this is not a band of survivors, barely grinding out half-remembered versions of the great music they once played. After all, the early generation of New Orleans players (among them such LRJE stalwarts as Sherwood Mangiapane) have long since passed from the scene. Nor is it a "revivalist" or "preservationist" band serving up a simplified caricature of New Orleans jazz for tourists. Instead, the LRJE is a modern band that aims to bring to audiences of today the lost timbres and textures of a music that had already changed beyond recognition half a century ago.

That's why you'll see extinct "Albert system" clarinets (one of them once played by the great Johnny Dodds), a "pea shooter" trombone of 1916, gold plated saxophones from the 1920s, silver cornets from the late nineteenth century, a "plectrum" banjo tuned the old fashioned way, a big bass drum from 1928.

What you don't see is even more important: years of performing with early players like Edmund Burke, Willie Humphrey, Larry Shields, and Johnny St. Cyr, all now deceased; interviews with others like Johnny de Droit (pronounced "Detroit"), who was leading a "hot" band in New Orleans by 1915; patient hours spend "debriefing" surviving relatives of still others, including the sister of Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, Johnny Dodds' sons, and the widow of Armand Piron. There was also endless research in such repositories as the great Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, with which the Ensemble has been affiliated since 1980. And above all, the band has spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing the classic repertoire not for gullible tourists but for New Orleanians' own private parties and dances. Who better to critique your performance than the old timers at such gatherings who spent their youth dancing to the great bands of the decades before 1930?

Dancing? Yes. Jazz in New Orleans was above all for dancing. Today we hear New Orleans jazz (if we hear it at all) mainly in concert venues, like the one tonight. Or in the Crescent City's several "authentic jazz spots," where busloads of tourists sit docilely on the floor, as if New Orleanians in 1920 didn't yet know of chairs. Or in chic "jazz clubs," where an upscale public somberly imbibes "Art" while nibbling on nouvelle cuisine . But the true habitat of this music was the dance hall, whether a bare room in the Ninth Ward, Behrman's Gymnasium in the Garden District, or the New Orleans Country Club.

Playing for dancers is nothing like playing for passive listeners. In New Orleans, at least, this means getting the "beat" just right. If the beat isn't there, you can forget all the pyrotechnics. No wonder older musicians often say "the dancers make the music."

Highbrow critics and "jazz scholars" with foundation grants love to speak of jazz as "America's classical music." The LRJE is proud to present a music that, for all its radiant vitality, had a far more humble calling. Played by ethnically diverse local players for equally diverse local dancers, early jazz (which wasn't even called jazz) existed solely to inspire dancers of the One-Step, Two-Step, Shimmy, and Foxtrot to "move their bones." Who cares whether or not the results were "classical"? But one thing is for sure: those old sounds are timeless, and have lost none of their power to stir and delight us!

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