By Ben Ratliff

When Preservation Hall opened in New Orleans in 1961, it was a simple and radical idea: create a place where the original practitioners of jazz could play and pass on their music. The first batch of Preservation Hall regulars are gone now, but the idea has stayed so unshakably appealing that the hall has become a tourist destination.

Still, in the 1990s, after the death of Allan Jaffe, who founded and ran it with his wife Sandy, the air went out of the place. Preservation Hall sent out touring bands and issued recordings, but some energy and purpose seemed missing.

The time had come to freshen up the brand. Benjamin Jaffe, the son of the hall’s founders and a bass player in the current Preservation Hall Jazz Band, helps run the hall now, and has started an independent record label, Preservation Hall Recordings, to document old and new versions of the band. One grouping of the band’s 21 members, on tour to promote the recording, stopped in at Joe’s Pub on Tuesday night.

Though the group is associated with old New Orleans jazz, its performance showed that it can stretch to include jazz of any era (well, up to about 1950, anyway) and some of the rhythm-and-blues and other music floating around the city. It also showed that decrepitude need not stand in for authenticity.

The group is a small, elite corps, including Don Vappie on banjo and guitar, John Brunious on trumpet, Rickie Monie on piano and Joe Lastie on drums – musicians with deep connections to New Orleans and the hall itself.

In a handful of songs played without drums, Mr. Jaffe’s old-fashioned bass plucking nearly fought the modernity of other elements. In trumpet solos, Mr. Brunious peppered his Louis Armstrong rhythmic approach with bebop lines; on banjo the virtuosic Mr. Vappie leaped from Charlie Christian to Django Reinhardt to B.B. King styles. Mr. Monie played with swing-era fluidity instead of the spindly abruptness of, say, the hall’s first pianist back in the 60s, Sweet Emma Barrett.

When Mr. Lastie settled behind the drums, the excitement rose, as well as the humor, swing and fullness of sound. The group played shuffles, march rhythms, two-beats and swing grooves that got the crowd moving. When the band played the last few songs for Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, a member who died last week in New Orleans, it was the usual New Orleans ritual of sorrow and joy – the slow, stately “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” followed by an up-tempo jam before finishing with, of course, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and a musicians’ march around the club.

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