Keeping the Beat on the Street (15 page)

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 streets. 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
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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
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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
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Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Courtesy Dave Cirilli, Big Hassle

We did a rap thing, a CD called
Ears to the Wall—
I was trying to get copies of it to sell on gigs. The record company can't find it—we did it, but it don't exist. You can buy everything else, but you can't buy that one. I think that's what made the difference with the group, because everybody had freedom to do what they wanted musically—you didn't have one guy saying, “I don't want to hear that. This is the way it has to go—you play my music, later for what you do.”

Over the years, we've recorded with a lot of different people, too. We've recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Elvis Costello, Danny Barker, Dr. John. Dizzy was crazy about the band. We used to play at a club called the Glasshouse, uptown. Anything might happen there. Little small place, a bit bigger than these two rooms [around 12 by 25feet]. Put fifty people in there, you had a crowd. Sometimes, we'd have a hundred and fifty. So anyway, every Monday they'd have free red beans and rice, and they'd charge a dollar to come in. So there's Dizzy Gillespie sitting there at the table. When we came out the back room, we'd be ready, you know what I'm saying? Everybody would come through that place
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Being a saxophone player and hanging out with Freddie Kemp—this cat was a genius on that saxophone, man. If you wanted to keep up with cats like that, you'd study Charlie Parker. When we was on the road together, Kemp would say, “Play your major scales.” Now, I had learned at high school… they teach you to read music, and that's it. Kemp would say, “Play all twelve of them.” I'm like, “They got twelve of them?” He said, “Look, man. Before you even start talking about music, you gotta know scales. I'm going to give you a week to learn your major scales.” Then he moved on to the triads—that man was like a conservatory, man. He would call You at three o'clock in the morning and play stuff on the saxophone—You had to shed it. He would write two bars, and you couldn't play it—that's how bad he was. Incredible technique. One of his favorites was Johnny Griffin, and he was the fastest saxophone player in the world. Anyway, the band developed, and we ended up playing Carnegie Hall
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Then we began touring in Europe. The audiences were great—I mean the reception was fabulous. We played a concert with the Buddy Rich Band. I remember playing opposite Count Basie. We played four weeks at the Village Gate—no band had done that before. It wasn't no sudden thing—before all that, we were playing baseball games, house parties, street gigs—the band really got popular from all those second line parades
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It's really stressful being on the road all the time. I call what we got now the new band; see, what's happening right now, we're jamming. The scene keeps changing—right now, we're the world's greatest jam band. We still function as a brass band—we did a concert recently where we marched through the crowd, thousands of people. A lot of kids haven't been exposed to this kind of stuff. Now, personally speaking, I loved the band with me, Gregory, Efrem, Charles and Kirk, Kevin Harris, and Lionel. If that band was together now, seriously, there ain't no telling musically speaking, what heights we would have reached
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Not taking anything away from our guitar player—I mean, I came up playing with guitar players. I always wanted to play with just horns and drums—for some reason, you got more freedom, and horns can do just about anything. I mean, we've had Richard Knox, and Carl Leblanc (he's a personal friend of mine) on organ, so we've had a full rhythm section with us. But you take all that stuff out, just leave the horns—0 Lord! You can make a chord be whatever you want it to be
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We get guitar players and piano players with us, and they can't see where they can fit. Richard Knox, he figured it out, then he quit! I said to him, “0 Lord, not now!”

I liked the band the way it was. The band we got now is a great band, and we have some of the finest musicians on the planet Earth—Sammy Williams ain't no joke! He's the loudest trombone player in the world, and he has unbelievable energy and showmanship—he's about 260 pounds, about six foot three, size eighteen shoes—he ain't no more than about twenty years old. He'll dance all night—I don't know how he does it. I'm soloing, and I'm thinking people are clapping for me—they're clapping for him and his dancing; they don't pay me any attention
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One thing I find very flattering is we go to a lot of colleges and universities—and the bands there have transcribed a lot of our things—so there's three other baritones sounding like me playing my part note for note. They've written all the stuff out—some of it wasn't written in the first place!

Founding member of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band; founder and leader of the Tremé Brass Band
Interviewed on South Park Place, September 2001