DOWNBEAT
MAGAZINE
- DECEMBER
2007 -
Made In New Orleans: The Hurricane
Sessions
By: JEFF TAMARKIN
Preservation Hall Jazz Band
Made In New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions
(Preservation Hall)
When Katrina dumped six feet of water
inside of Allen Toussaint's famed Sea Saint Studios,
in New Orleans, Benjamin Jaffe didn't have high hopes
for the recordings his father, Allen, had produced with
the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in the 1970's and '80's.
But the tapes were among few that survived, and the younger
Jaffe subsequently took it upon himself to attempt to
preserve Preservation.
Made In New Orleans is a lovingly curated
document that honors the venerable institution. The boxed
set, available in a few different collector's additions,
contains a CD featuring both archival and new recordings
of the group, and a DVD, as well as several reproduced
artifacts: photographs, employment contracts, etc. -
no two of the 504 numbered sets contain the same doo-dads.
The DVD features low-grade (though no less fascinating)
historical footage of PHJB in action dating back to the
early '60's, and a music video, created in 2005 shortly
before the hurricane struck, set to an old-timey cover
of the Kinks' "Complicated Life." Not surprisingly,
though, it's the music on the CD that best sums up what
the traditional NOLA outfit is about.
Several of the tracks chosen, although
recorded in part or in whole before Katrina, allude to
the devastation: "Blow Wind Blow" grafts a
vocal cut by Sister Gertrude Morgan in 1959 to a sparse
but complementary backing track from 2005, while "Over
In the Gloryland" reverses the process, adding new
vocals to the raucous gospel number, one of the salvaged
Sea-Saint-recorded tracks from 1976. Most tracks, like
the latter, take full advantage of the band's ever-exhilarating
battery of brass, but others, utilizing far less, are
equally effective: "Sugar Blues" strips the
sound down to a quarter of trumpet, piano, bass and drums,
but its simplicity is as much the essence of New Orleans
trad as any of the wailing party tunes.
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