Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and Obama Interior Department Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett announced plans to transform the third floor of the Old U.S. Mint on Esplanade Avenue into a multimillion-dollar jazz performance space and museum slated to open  spring 2010.

Grammy Award-winning  jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard and his wife/manager, Robin Burgess, are expected to help book concerts oversee educational programs and launch the resource.

Plans call for a modular 4,000-square-foot performance space with seven different stage configurations. An on-site studio will make live concert recordings and radio broadcasts possible.

The project is a state/federal partnership involving the Louisiana State Museum, which owns the Old U.S. Mint, the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism and the U.S. Department of the Interior and National Park Service. The state and the National Park Service have each dedicated $2 million to the project.

Burgess hopes to develop a jazz subscription series similar to those of local opera and ballet companies, where patrons buy a season's worth of tickets. She believes a high-end jazz venue can attract the sort of high-profile jazz tours that routinely bypass New Orleans.

Louisiana Mint State Museum Official Site Minting operations ceased in 1909 and, for the next 57 years, the Mint served a variety of official purposes. In 1966 the landmark was transferred to the state and in 1981 opened to the public as a State Museum site.
During Hurricane Katrina in 2005 the building lost its copper roof which flew down the street, landing on the French Market.

The museum contains a collection of pictures, musical instruments, and other artifacts connected with jazz greats -- Louis Armstrong's first trumpet is here. It tells of the development of the jazz tradition and New Orleans's place in that history.

Three types of Bands: Ragtime, Sweet & the blues

---Pops Foster, "Pops Foster: The Autobiography of a New Orleans Jazzman"

---Louis Armstrong Funky Butt Hall, in Storyville,

One of the most famous Bolden numbers is a song called "Funky Butt" one of the earliest references to the concept of "funk" in popular music, now a musical subgenre unto itself.

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,
Funky-butt, funky-butt, take it away.

Jazzy and jubilant, soulful and spiritual, rocking and rolling – New Orleans music tells the story of the city and its people to anyone who will hear it, and in the most eloquent ways imaginable.
 Come and listen.

The legendary jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden played the cornet, and Louis Armstrong, probably the best-known jazz cornetist, started off on the cornet as well, but later switched to the trumpet. Cornetists such as Bubber Miley and Rex Stewart contributed substantially to the Duke Ellington Orchestra's early sound. Other influential jazz cornetists include King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Ruby Braff and Nat Adderley.

"(That) song caused a lot of trouble in and out of show business, but it was also good for show business because at the time money was short in all walks of life. With the publication of that song, a new musical rhythm was given to the people. Its popularity grew and it sold like wildfire... That one song opened the way for a lot of colored and white songwriters. Finding the rhythm so great, they stuck to it."

---Ernest Hogan

Ragtime first appeared as sheet music with the African American entertainer Ernest Hogan's hit songs in 1895, however the controversy generated by the biggest hit song and its many imitations has shrouded Hogan's historic musical achievements. In 1897  Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo "Rag Time Medley" and white composer William H. Krell published his "Mississippi Rag" as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece.  

The abolition of slavery led to new but limited opportunities for freed African-Americans. Black pianists played in bars, clubs and brothels, and ragtime developed. Ragtime has been called the first American music and was its start associated with the piano.

Ragtime was distinguished from other music of the time mainly by the treble syncopations over the regularly accented bass. Elements of the music, apart from the African rhythmic features, can be traced to Euro-American dances, post Civil War marches and New Orleans-born Louis M. Gottschalk's brand of European classicism.

The classically-trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his "Original Rags" in the following year, then in 1899 had an international hit with "Maple Leaf Rag." He wrote numerous popular rags, including, "The Entertainer", combining syncopation, banjo figurations and sometimes call-and-response, which led to the ragtime idiom being taken up by classical composers including Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky.

The Mississippi River towns of Sedalia and St. Louis became centers of the new music.

Blues emerged at the end of the 19th century as an accessible form of self-expression in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. Prior to the emergence of the blues, solo music was atypical. Booker T. Washington’s teachings, and the Horatio Alger model, which asserted that the individual molds his own destiny, influenced this form of personalized music.

As emancipated slaves took their freedom on the road they brought with them as part of their baggage two interrelated forms essential to the development of jazz -- the sacred music of the Baptist church and that music's profane twin, the blues. "One was praying to God and the other was praying to what's human," a New Orleans musician said, "One was saying 'oh God, let me go,' and the other was saying, 'oh mister, let me be.'"

The blues were good-time music, which was why, to many churchgoers, there were anathema, the work of the devil, forbidden to be saved. But musically, the blues and the hymns black Baptists sang and played in church had always been virtually interchangeable -- filled with identical bent notes, moans and cries. And in the 1890s, the distinction would blur still further as the new Holiness churches that had begun to spring up in the black neighborhoods of the big cities all over the country started employing tambourines, drums, pianos, cornets, even trombones in order to make their noise still more joyful to the Lord.

The migration of many blacks to the cities gave them a new freedom from the church and community that had not been experienced in rural areas. Blacks demanded entertainment, and black theaters, dance halls, and clubs were opened.

The origin of Blues music is associated with the Mississippi Delta area of the South. The music genre is based on the use of the blues chord progressions and the blue notes. Though several blues forms exist, the 12-bar blues chord progressions are the most frequently encountered. Blue notes are sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes.

The term "the blues" refers to the "the blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness. The colour blue expressed a feeling of sadness and depression, and of being lonely. While Negro spirituals lent itself to a choral treatment and expressed the blacks' need for spiritual guidance, the blues was about people and their everyday struggles. Blues lyrics was about money problems, broken hearts, loneliness and sickness. Melancholy, however is most frequently the theme; the essence of the blues is in such traditional lines as "Got the blues, but too damn mean to cry"

It has been claimed that Yoruba mythology played a part in early blues, citing Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" as a "thinly veiled reference to Eleggua, the orisha in charge of the crossroads" Some say Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil which Christianity has often associated with trickster figures from mythology like Eleggua.

Many early jazz compositions were based on blues principles. Boogie-woogie is a particular style of piano playing in early jazz. It is constructed on a 12-bar blues scale. In 1900 it was known as "honky-tonk" in New Orleans. Boogie-woogie is characterized by right-hand melody improvisation and left-hand repeated rhythmic motive, a sort of "walking bass". Like ragtime, it was music meant for dancing.

Blues music was collected, reworked, published and popularized by W. C. Handy, whose "Memphis Blues" of 1912 and "St. Louis Blues" of 1914 both became jazz standards. The blues tradition also is credited as the foundation for rhythm and blues which gave us rock and roll. Many have had the privilege to appreciate live great blues talents with deep roots in the living tradition like T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, B.B.King and Albert Collins.

In the 1940s and '50s, New Orleans-raised Professor Longhair incorporated the intricate rhythms of the Caribbean into his blues piano playing to create and record a unique style of the blues that has since been dubbed "rumba boogie." By the 1950s and '60s, Fats Domino began combining classic "boogie woogie" piano, a New Orleans beat, and R&B and jazz roots on hits like "Walkin' to New Orleans" and "Blueberry Hill."

During the 1950s, New Orleans was an important center of R&B recording in the South and successful musicians like Professor Longhair helped pave the way for upcoming artists such as Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr., aka "Dr John."

This was how the concept ‘plantation songs' started. The work song did not only function as a stimulant, where the rhythm of the song subsidized the work-rhythm, but also as a news channel. This was the only way the slaves could talk to each other during work; by singing.

Many spirituals have river motives." Songs like "Deep River", "Down by the River Side" and "I've got peace like a River", all talks about crossing the great river which is a symbol of rebirth.

The art of singing a spiritual demanded a style and talent to embellish a melody. This technique of improvising was one of the main influences in the development and evolution of the jazz style, and was to be one of the most exciting elements of jazz.

"A lot of times I tell people, I don't what it is (my sound), I just play it. But I do know what it is. It's mixed up with spiritual, sanctified rhythms, and the feeling I put into it when I'm playing, I have the feeling of making people shout. I put it right there in the shout mode, and they can't help it, 'cause I got it locked right in there. And that's what you gotta do. If you can't lock them into that mode, they don't move."

--Bo Diddley

In the Ring Shout celebrants dance around in a circle, stamping feet and hand-clapping in rhythm and singing spirituals. The hand-clapping and foot-stomping evolved to take the place of the drums and the ceremony was known for its revivalist frenzy.

Before the blues, black slaves who provided music for their owners and for their fellow slaves were considered an asset. For most of the 19th century the "Ethiopian minstrel" shows were America's most popular form of musical theatre. White performers dressed as African –Americans with blackface makeup gave white America their first exposure to black music, and later on more black performers could be heard and seen in minstrel shows, laying the groundwork for the later popularity of jazz and blues.

Soon after the end of slavery, the songster tradition began, such that it co-existed with blues music.  Songsters generally performed a wide variety of folk songs, ballads, dance tunes, reels and minstrel songs. Initially, they were often accompanied by non-singing "musicianers", who often played banjo and fiddle. Later, as the guitar became more widely popular, the songsters often accompanied themselves.

Songsters often accompanied medicine shows, which moved from place to place selling salves and elixirs. As entertainers, songsters had the task of enticing a public, to whom the concoctions were then offered.

"Oh Susannah" and "My Old Kentucky Home" written by Stephen Foster who was white, are examples of minstrel songs from that time that are still sung today.
By the late 1880's, Vaudeville had pretty much replaced the Minstrels but the rich tradition entered into the melange that became jazz.

After Emancipation, the music continued and in large and small towns across the South there were concert brass bands of black musicians, similar to those heard throughout white America at the time, as well as dance bands that combined brass and string instruments.

In New Orleans after the Civil War, it was much easier to get musical instruments, so newly freed African Americans, began to form marching bands that consisted of only brass instruments with the lone exception of a bass and tom tom drums. In the late 1890's and the early 1900's these brass bands began to be asked to perform at Jazz funerals. Jazz funerals were at the heart of an early African slave religious practice, of celebrating of the life of a deceased person.

Numerous marching bands played at lavish funerals arranged by the African American community. The instruments used in marching bands and dance bands became the basic instruments of jazz: brass and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale and drums. Small bands of primarily self-taught African American musicians, many of whom came from the funeral-procession tradition of New Orleans, played a seminal role in the development and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout Black communities in the Deep South and, from around 1914 on, Afro-Creole and African American musicians playing in vaudeville shows took jazz to western and northern US cities.

In New Orleans the second line parades have a long history together with the Social (Aide) & Pleasure Club of the neighborhood of the town. The S&P Clubs are today, a mere shadow of their former selves, and known not as the fore runners of the insurance industry in Louisiana, but as the, "Keepers of the Second Line Tradition."

A Main Line is the main section or the members of the actual club, that has the permit to parade. The main line is usually the Social (Aid) & Pleasure Club of the neighborhood in which they are parading. Behind this group is the second line. The name second line, is also the name of a unique dance, performed to the beat of New Orleans’traditional jazz. The dance is an evolved version of what is a natural form of African dance.

An especially lively and innovative black dance band scene developed in New Orleans

Taking the cake

"If you haven't been on a second line, there's something about jazz you don't know....We've gotten to think of dance music as something dumb, something that just goes thump-thump-thump, but dancing is an intense listening state.

---Ned Sublette

Dancing was the most popular form of social entertainment during the era of jazz evolution. The dance forms existing during jazz's evolution included: the French quadrille, the waltz, polka, schottische, and even the military march. The Cakewalk and its predecessor ragtime used the march form, adding syncopation and using the steady rhythm of the march. 

Perhaps the most popular social dance in the city of New Orleans, a French and Spanish City, was the Quadrille. The Quadrille is best described as a type of square dance but with more 'polite' movements, more grace, and more formal calls. It is a series of settings that alternate between the meters of 2/4 and 6/8. The movements were never in any set rhythmic pattern.

The Comus Waltz 1856 according to BasinStreet.com " when first introduced, was considered a very 'risqué' dance, and one of the first to have the two partners hold each other. It is one of the most graceful dances in dance history. "

Creole musicians -- sometimes whole orchestras, more often a string trio or quartet -- supplied most of the music for the city's dancers, both white and Creole: waltzes, polkas, schottisches, quadrilles, and sensual, syncopated contredanses, including habaneras, filled with Spanish rhythms carried to New Orleans from Haiti and Cuba. They played for the celebrated -- or notorious -- "quadroon balls," too, at which white men sought out Creole women to be their mistresses. Nonwhite males were officially barred, though since men and women alike often wore masks, it was sometimes hard to tell just who was asking whom to dance. As Danny Barker remarked, in New Orleans there has always been "a whole lot of integrating going on."

Three days later, on March 6, Gleeson used jazz extensively in a longer article, in which he explained the term's meaning, which had now turned from negative to positive connotations:

The article uses jazz several more times and says that the San Francisco Seals' "members have trained on ragtime and 'jazz' and manager Del Howard says there's no stopping them." The context of the article as a whole shows that a musical meaning of jazz is not intended; rather, ragtime and "jazz" were both used as markers of ebullient spirit.

the Literary Digest wrote on April 26, 1919, that "[t]he phrase 'jazz band' was first used by Bert Kelly in Chicago in the fall of 1915, and was unknown in New Orleans."

By the time of his death in 1971, the man known around the world as

 Satchmo was widely recognized as a founding father of jazz—a uniquely American art form. His influence, as an artist and cultural icon, is universal, unmatched, and very much alive today.

Louis Armstrong’s achievements are remarkable. During his career, he:

• developed a way of playing jazz, as an instrumentalist and a

  "What was the greatest band of the 20th century? Forget the Beatles - it was Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and its subsequent incarnation, the Hot Seven... these bands altered the course of popular music." -- Playboy magazine

  "Louis Armstrong is the master of the jazz solo. He became the beacon, the light in the tower, that helped the rest of us navigate the tricky waters of jazz improvisation." -- Ellis Marsalis

  "I think that anybody from the 20th century, up to now, has to be aware that if it wasn't for Louis Armstrong, we'd all be wearing powdered wigs. I think that Louis Armstrong loosened the world, helped people to be able to say "Yeah," and to walk with a little dip in their hip. Before Louis Armstrong, the world was definitely square, just like Christopher Columbus thought."

  -- South African trumpet legend Hugh Masekela

   vocalist, which has had an impact on all musicians to follow;

• recorded hit songs for five decades, and his music is still heard today on television and radio and in films;
• wrote two autobiographies, more than ten magazine articles, hundreds of pages of memoirs, and thousands of letters;
• appeared in more than thirty films (over twenty were full-length features) as a gifted actor with superb comic timing and an unabashed joy of life;
• composed dozens of songs that have become jazz standards;
• performed an average of 300 concerts each year, with his frequent tours to all parts of the world earning him the nickname “Ambassador Satch,” and became one of the first great celebrities of the twentieth century.

Through the years, Louis entertained millions, from heads of state and royalty to the kids on his stoop in Corona. Despite his fame, he remained a humble man and lived a simple life in a working-class neighborhood. To this day, everyone loves Louis Armstrong—just the mention of his name makes people smile.

“Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?”

Like almost all early Jazz musicians, Louis was from New Orleans. He was from a very poor family and was sent to reform school when he was twelve after firing a gun in the air on New Year's Eve. At the school he learned to play cornet. After being released at age fourteen, he worked selling papers, unloading boats, and Louis with his mother, Mayann, and sister, Mama Lucy (Beatrice), c. 1922  selling coal from a cart. He didn't own an instrument at this time, but continued to listen to bands at clubs like the Funky Butt Hall. Joe "King" Oliver was his favorite and the older man acted as a father to Louis, even giving him his first real cornet, and instructing him on the instrument. By 1917 he played in an Oliver inspired group at dive bars in New Orleans' Storyville section. In 1919 he left New Orleans for the first time to join Fate Marable's band in St. Louis. Marable led a band that played on the Strekfus Mississsippi river boat lines. When the boats left from New Orleans Armstrong also played regular gigs in Kid Ory's band. Louis stayed with Marable until 1921 when he returned to New Orleans and played in Zutty Singleton's. He also played in parades with the Allen Brass Band, and on the bandstand with Papa Celestin's Tuxedo Orchestra , and the Silver Leaf Band. When King Oliver left the city in 1919 to go to Chicago, Louis took his place in Kid Ory's band from time to time. In 1922 Louis received a telegram from his mentor Joe Oliver, asking him to join his Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens (459 East 31st Street) in Chicago. This was a dream come true for Armstrong and his amazing playing in the band soon made him a sensation among other musicians in Chicago.

Louis Armstrong

Perhaps the most significant departure from New Orleans was in 1922 when Louis Armstrong was summoned to Chicago by King Oliver, his mentor. Louis Armstrong swung with a great New Orleans feeling, but unlike any of his predecessors, his brilliant playing led a revolution in jazz that replaced the polyphonic ensemble style of New Orleans with development of the soloist's art. The technical improvement and popularity of phonograph records spread Armstrong's instrumental and vocal innovations and make him internationally famous. His Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925-28), including his celebrated work with Earl Hines, were quite popular and are milestones in the progression of the music.

The Spirit of New Orleans Brass Band performs at the French Quarter Festival, New Orleans, Louisiana, 11 April 2008.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the New Orleans brass band tradition experienced a renaissance, with bands breaking away from traditional stylings and adding elements of funk, hip hop, and bop to their repertoires. Some notable exponents of this style of brass band include the Rebirth Brass Band, the Soul Rebels Brass Band, Youngblood Brass Band and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, though a number of groups outside the United States have begun playing this style of music. The style has moved beyond New Orleans and can now be found in such places as Japan with the Black Bottom Brass Band, the Netherlands with the Happy Feet Brassband and the Hurricane Brass Band, Boston, Massachusetts with the Hot Tamale Brass Band and Madison, Wisconsin with Mama Digdown's Brass Band and Youngblood Brass Band.

A well-known use of these bands is for the New Orleans jazz funeral.

Brass bands have a long tradition of competition between bands, often based around local industry and communities. British-style brass bands are widespread throughout Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and continental Europe and are also found in North America. Annual competitions are held in these countries to select champion bands at various levels of musical competence.

The traditional British brass band consists of 27 players who play three basic types of instrument - a valved metal wind instrument ; the trombone; and percussion. The normal line up is as follows:-
 

The Salvation Army, part of the Christian church, has deployed brass bands since 1878 and they continue to be an integral part of that organisation. The most well-known Salvation Army brass band is The International Staff Band which is based in London. The cornet section of a Salvation Army brass band does not include a 'Repiano' and instead of 2nd & 3rd cornets there are 1st & 2nd cornets.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band have been at the forefront of the Brass Band revival in New Orleans over the last twenty-five years, but The Treme Brass Band are the real heart of the scene, and Uncle Lionel Batiste beats his bass drum at the heart of the heart, along with Kirk Joseph on sousaphone and

Courtesy GNOTCC, Michael Terranova and NewOrleansOnline.com

 Benny Jones on snare. The Treme are best seen and heard in the street at a second line parade, or at Donna's Bar and Grill on Rampart, but the 1996 CD that this is the title track from is the next best thing. It also includes a fantastic version of The Old Rugged Cross, which was the inspiration for my own cover version on the CD Shadow Economy in 2000.

This is a music blog curated by Blake Leyh. Music of interest is put here for your listening pleasure. It is updated regularly. Only five mp3 files are active at any given time; when a new file is added, the oldest one is taken away. More Info...

• Brass Bands- Information on the history of Brass bands
• http://www.nabba.org/ 
• IBEW- The complete information resource for brass bands worldwide
• 4barsrest- Up to date news and articles on the brass band scene
• Brass Bands- Services for contacting bands and players worldwide
• British Bandsman magazine
• Let Me Do My Thang: Rebirth Brass Band- a documentary filmed and edited by Keith Reynaud, Jr.
• Kingpin Brass Band
• http://www.dirtydozenbrass.com/
• http://www.hot8brassband.com/
• http://www.storyvillestompers.com/
• http://www.myspace.com/soulrebelsbrassband

Jelly Roll Morton

Jelly Roll Morton, another New Orleans giant, also made a series of influential recordings while based in Chicago in the 1920s. Morton's compositions added sophistication and a structure for soloists to explore, and his work set the stage for the Swing era.

Jelly Roll Morton was the first to get the very improvisational music of jazz on paper, translating the tunes into musical notation.

The legendary Buddy Bolden lived and played across St. Charles Avenue from the Garden District. 2309 and 2527 First St., Uptown.

 American cornetist and is regarded by contemporaries as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of rag-time music which later came to be known as jazz. A top draw in New Orleans from about 1900 until 1907, when he was incapacitated by schizophrenia. He left no known surviving recordings, but he was known for his very loud sound and constant improvisation.

He has been called the father of jazz. and is credited with creating a looser, more improvised version of ragtime and adding blues to it; Bolden's band was said to be the first to have brass instruments play the blues. He was also said to have taken ideas from gospel music heard in uptown African American Baptist churches.

Instead of imitating other cornetists, Bolden played music he heard "by ear" and adapted it to his horn. In doing so, he created an exciting and novel fusion of rag-time, black sacred music, marching-band music and rural blues. He rearranged the typical New Orleans dance band of the time to better accommodate the blues; string instruments became the rhythm section, and the front-line instruments were clarinets, trombones, and Bolden's cornet. Bolden was known for his powerful, loud, "wide open"

Some of the songs first associated with his band such as the traditional song "Careless Love" and "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It", are still standards. Bolden often closed his shows with the original number "Get Out of Here and Go Home", although for more "polite" gigs the last number would be "Home! Sweet Home!".

One of the most famous Bolden numbers is a song called "Funky Butt" one of the earliest references to the concept of "funk" in popular music, now a musical subgenre unto itself.

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,
Funky-butt, funky-butt, take it away.

Several musicians with clear memories of Buddy Bolden said that Freddie Keppard sounded the most like Bolden of anyone who recorded.

Buddie Petit, 1916

Buddy Petit (ca. 1890?-4 July 1931) was a highly regarded early jazz cornetist. By the early 1910s he was one of the top horn players in the new style of music not yet generally known as "jazz". He took Freddie Keppard's place in the Eagle Band (a place earlier held by Buddy Bolden) when Keppard left town.

Buddie Petit was known as a hard-drinking, fun loving man who played cornet with great virtuosity and inventiveness. He was briefly lured to Los Angeles, California by Jelly Roll Morton and Bill Johnson in 1917, but objected to being told to dress and behave differently than he was accustomed to back home, and promptly returned to New Orleans where he seldom left the Gulf Coast.

Joe "King" Oliver (December 19, 1885 - April 10, 1938) was a jazz cornet player and bandleader. He was particularly noted for his playing style, pioneering the use of mutes. Oliver played cornet in the New Orleans brass bands and dance bands and also in the city's red-light district, Storyville.
 The band he co-led with trombonist Kid Ory was considered New Orleans' hottest and best in the 1910s. In Chicago, as King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band performing at the Royal Gardens (later renamed the Lincoln Gardens) he was widely hailed as the "king.". Virtually all the members of this band went on to notable solo careers. Personnel were Oliver on cornet, his protegé Louis Armstrong, second cornet, Baby Dodds, drums, Johnny Dodds, clarinet, Lil Hardin (later Armstrong's wife), on piano, Honore Dutrey on trombone, and Bill Johnson, bass and banjo.
Oliver was not a good businessman and eventually ended up in  in Savannah, Georgia, where he worked as a janitor at Wimberly's Recreation Hall (526-528 West Broad Street) and died in poverty at a rooming house (508 Montgomery Street).
 He was the mentor and teacher of Louis Armstrong. Two of Armstrong's most famous recordings, "West End Blues" and "Weather Bird", were Oliver compositions. Armstrong called Oliver "Papa Joe" and referred to Oliver as his idol and inspiration all his life. In Armstrong's autobiography, "Satchmo - My Life in New Orleans", he writes about Oliver:

It was my ambition to play as he did. I still think that if it had not been for Joe Oliver, Jazz would not be what it is today. He was a creator in his own right.

-- Phil Johnson
News director, editorial writer
WWL-TV, New Orleans

The definitive Dixieland sound is created when one instrument, usually the trumpet, plays the melody or a recognizable paraphrase or variation on it, and the other instruments of the "front line" improvise around that melody. This creates a more polyphonic sound than the extremely regimented big band sound or the unison melody of bebop. The swing era of the 1930s led to the end of many Dixieland Jazz musicians' careers. The advent of bebop in the 1940s, saw the majority of younger black players move-on although the music of Louis Armstrong is often incorporated into their repertoires.

 The first was ragtime, the formal outgrowth of the decades-old African-American improvisational practice of "ragging" tunes -- syncopating and rearranging them to provide livelier, more danceable versions. Created by black musicians in the cities of the Midwest, who had found a way to recreate something like the percussive sound of the banjo on the piano, ragtime drew upon everything that had gone before -- spirituals and minstrel tunes, European folk melodies, operatic arias and military marches -- all filled with broken chords and set to fresh rhythms. Spread first by itinerant pianists, and then by the sale of sheet music, ragtime caught the fancy of young dancers all over the country who loved it all the more because -- since it encouraged young men and women to dance close together as couples rather than in groups -- their parents did not. "Ragtime is syncopation gone mad," the editor of Etude magazine would write, "and its victims, in my opinion, can be treated successfully only like the dog with rabies, with a dose of lead. Whether it is simply a passing phase of our decadent art culture or an infectious disease which has come to stay, like leprosy, time alone can tell."

Well-known jazz standard songs from the Dixieland era, are "Basin Street Blues" and "When the Saints Go Marching In" as well as "Muskrat Ramble," "Struttin' With Some Barbecue," "Tiger Rag," "Dippermouth Blues," "Milenberg Joys,"  "Tin Roof Blues," "At the Jazz Band Ball," "Panama," "I Found a New Baby," and "Royal Garden Blues"

We are blessed with timeless recordings of dixieland music by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong,  Jelly Roll Morton , Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Bix Beiderbecke,  Sidney Bechet, Clarence Williams, and others.

New Orleans-born musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and all recalled the influence Bolden had on the direction of the music of New Orleans, and jazz itself.

Pete Fountain, (born July 3, 1930) is a popular New Orleans clarinetist who comes out of retirement every Mardi Gras day to lead his of The Half Fast Walking Club, marching Krewe on Mardi Gras Day. through the French Quarter. Fountain's clarinet work is noted for his sweet fluid tone. He has recorded over 100 LPs and CDs under his own name, some in the Dixieland style, many others with only peripheral relevance to any type of jazz. For many years of his career he was associated with trumpeter and bandleader.

Al Hirt (November 7, 1922 - April 27, 1999) whose virtuoso dexterity and fine tone on his instrument attracted national attention. Hirt had 22 different record albums on the Billboard Pop charts in the 1950s and 1960s. The albums Honey In The Horn and Cotton Candy were both in the top 10 best sellers for 1964, the same year Hirt scored a top hit single with his cover of Allen Toussaint's tune Java. In 1987 Hirt played a solo rendition of Ave Maria for Pope John Paul II's visit to New Orleans, a performance Hirt considered one of his most important.

Hirt's recording of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee was used as the theme song for the 1960s television series The Green Hornet, and again gained public attention in 2003 when it was used in the film Kill Bill.

Nicknames include "Al (He's the King!) Hirt", "Sugar Lips" (after one of his most popular pieces) and "The Round Mound of Sound". Al Hirt had 8 children, 10 grandchildren, and 6 great-grandchildren. In 1990, Al married Beverly Estabrook Essel, a friend of 40 years.

• Ellis Marsalis, pianist; father of the others listed here
• Branford Marsalis, saxophonist
• Wynton Marsalis, trumpet player
• Delfeayo Marsalis, trombone player and producer
• Jason Marsalis, drummer

New Orleans Jazz Funeral for tuba player Kerwin James

•  The brass band assembled with members of the burial association at the lodge hall or headquarters. There the procession formed, the grand marshal or marshal's headed the band, lodge standard-bearers next, and lodge members, loosely assembled behind.
• The snare drummer would muffled his snares for the dirges and hymns.
• The band would play a hymn (Lead me savior, In the sweet bye and bye, In the upper garden) in dirge tempo, to establish a mood of mourning and solemnity.
• The procession moved in march tempo to the funeral home, church, or home where the body waited, playing familiar hymns and other pieces as medium-tempo 2/4 marches.
•  At the church the band played an appropriate hymn in solemn chorale style.
• Than the band waited outside the church, not playing at the time, for the service to conclude.
• After the service, the band reassembled and played a dirge (like Fallen heroes, Nearer my God to thee)) to signal the struggles, the hardships, the ups and downs of life, while the body was carried from the church to the hearse.

This moment was called “turning the body loose”

• 
  - According to the wishes of the church and the family, the band played a hymn at the graveside (Just a closer walk with thee). The minister might preach again and conduct hymn-singing. A trumpeter of the band might be asked to play “taps” as a solo.
• 
  - Outside the cemetery, the band regrouped while rites of interment were performed. The snare drummer retightened his snares and started a cadence at a bright march tempo.
• 
  At this time jazz tunes were popularly supposed to reflect the character of the deceased and his family.
  Notorious rounders were treated with Oh, didn’t he ramble or I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you. In later years purportedly naughty widows were admonished with Oh, lady be good.
• 
  - Once the band had moved a respectful distance from the cemetery, it played marches and popular tunes. This segment of the procession satisfied second liners and association members accompanying the band, signaled the obsequy’s end, and formed a final act of celebration.
• 
  - back at the lodge hall the band dispersed, to turn home or stop for refreshments inside the hall.

The wake
When someone dies, the community gathers to say farewell, a cutting loose of the soul from earthly ties. The ceremony begins at the wake, at the home of the deceased or inside the funeral home.


DIRGE
A dirge is a somber song expressing mourning or grief, appropriate for performance at a funeral.
Word history: The history of the word dirge illustrates how a word with neutral connotations, such as direct, can become emotionally charged because of a specialized use. The Latin word dīrige is a form of the verb dīrigere, “to direct, guide,” that is used in uttering commands. In the Office of the Dead dīrige is the first word in the opening of the antiphon for the first nocturn of Matins: “Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam,” “Direct, O Lord, my God, my way in thy sight.” The part of the Office of the Dead that begins with this antiphon was named Dīrige in Ecclesiastical Latin. This word with this meaning was borrowed into English as dirige, first recorded in a work possibly written before 1200. Dirige was then extended to refer to the chanting or reading of the Office of the Dead as part of a funeral or memorial service. In Middle English the word was shortened to dirge, although it was pronounced as two syllables. After the Middle Ages the word took on its more general senses of “a funeral hymn or lament” and “a mournful poem or musical composition,” and developed its one-syllable pronunciation.

These include the wake of inspirational gospel tunes, followed by the dirges, as the crowd accompanies the casket en route to the final resting place, and the joyful sendoff as the preacher cuts loose the body and the soul of the parishioner goes on home to be with the Lord.


FUNERAL MARCH
A funeral march or dead march is a march, usually in a minor key, in a slow "simple duple" metre, imitating the solemn pace of a funeral procession.

---Louis Armstrong, "Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans"

The Backstreet Museum, once the home of the Blandin Funeral Home, houses the city's largest collection of Mardi Gras Indian costumes. Much photos and video footage of Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals and second lines. Located at 1116 St. Claude Avenue and is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. -5 p.m. Admission is $5 per person. For directions to the museum or more information, call (504) 522-4806 or visit: www.backstreetmuseum.org. 

Mardi Gras Indians (Pelican Publishing Company, 1994), by Michael P. Smith

---Ned Sublette

Expect the Best. Respect the Rest

 ---Kermit Ruffins

The Cotton Centennial is credited by some historians as indirectly providing the raw inspiration for the Mardi Gras Indians' use of the "Indian costume" motif. In 1884 to 1885, concurrent with the Centennial, the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show wintered into New Orleans, and, according to cultural documentarian Michael Smith, "performed regularly, over a four month period, before large crowds in a popular black recreation area known as Oakland Park and Riding Stables (now the New Orleans Country Club)." Smith and others speculate that "50 to 60 Plains Indians, including four chiefs, were likely on the streets in New Orleans in their native dress during Mardi Gras 1885." Historians who accept Smith's thesis argue the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was the genesis of the Mardi Gras Indians. They specifically point to the name of Creole Wild West to support their argument. Unfortunately, for this point of view, none of the Mardi Gras Indians recall any references to Buffalo Bill's show and some of the Indians, Tootie Montana included, resent the implication that the masking Indian was started by or inspired by Buffalo Bill's show.

The Mardi Gras Indian tribes (or "gangs") of New Orleans are community-based, socio-cultural institutions over a century old. Like blues, jazz, and other deeply rooted examples of African-American culture, "Injuns" (as neighborhood people affectionately refer to them) date back to the post-reconstruction era. Exactly when and why the colorfully costumed, neighborhood-based gangs started is shrouded in uncertainty but most accounts point to the late 1800s, a significant period of racist repression and outright terror. On September 14, 1874, "Ex-Confederates of the newly formed White League barricaded streets, attacked, and killed many of the interracial Metropolitan Police, and seized the state capitol, which, at the time, was the old St. Louis Hotel. " 1 The Leaguers temporarily installed city officers--within three weeks they were removed. Although they were unable to dominate militarily after the infamous battle, this did mark the beginning of the hey day of segregation in a city which had known slavery under the French and Spanish but which had also always been racially mixed and had also had a significant element of free Blacks.

On a more positive note, 1884 to 1885 marked the celebration of a world's fair, the Cotton Centennial Exposition, which historian Leonard Huber assessed "while not a financial success, restored to New Orleans a feeling that the city was at last recovering its former commercial importance.2

These two events are often considered seminal elements in the founding of Mardi Gras Indians. The structures of Jim Crow ensured that the Indians would be a phenomenon that existed cocooned  within predominately Black and/or mixed Black/immigrant residential neighborhoods. There would be no Mardi Gras Indian activity up and down Canal Street, St. Charles Avenue or within the riverfront area of the French Quarter. During the 1880s not only the Mardi Gras Indians but also many other benevolent societies, particularly the neighborhood-based Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs (SA&PC) were also founded. This was a period of organizing within the Black community both for self-defense (both literal terms of withstanding segregationist terror and figuratively in terms of associations of mutual aid), as well as organizing for self-expression in formal as well as informal artistic expression--for example, here is when we witness the advent of professional bands, orchestras, and traveling theatrical/musical troupes.

A handbill for Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World'

The Cotton Centennial is credited by some historians as indirectly providing the raw inspiration for the Mardi Gras Indians' use of the "Indian costume" motif. In 1884 to 1885, concurrent with the Centennial, the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show wintered into New Orleans, and, according to cultural documentarian Michael Smith, "performed regularly, over a four month period, before large crowds in a popular black recreation area known as Oakland Park and Riding Stables (now the New Orleans Country Club)." They specifically point to the name of Creole Wild West to support their argument.

The New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian is a cultural phenomenon unique to New Orleans, Louisiana which participants believe pays respect and homage to the Native American for their assistance in escaping the tyranny of slavery.

When Caribbean communities started to spring up in New Orleans, their culture was incorporated into the suits, dances and music made by the "Indians".

In the late 19th century and early years of the 20th century, the tribes had a reputation for violent fights with each other. This part of Mardi Gras Indian history is immortalized in James Sugar Boy Crawford's Jock O Mo (better known and often covered as Iko Iko), based on their taunting chants.

"You've got first chief, which is Big Chief; First Queen; you've got Second Chief and Second Queen; Third Chief and Third Queen. First, Second, and Third chiefs are supposed to have a queen with them. That's just tradition.I found them doing that. Your fourth chief is not called fourth chief, he's the Trail Chief. From there on it's just Indians, no title. You also have your Spy Boy, your Flag Boy and your Wild Man. Your Spy Boy is way out front, three blocks in front the chief. The Flag Boy is one block in front so he can see the Spy Boy up ahead and he can wave his flag to let the chief know what is going on. Today, they don't do like they used to. Today you're not going to see any Spy Boy with binoculars around his neck and a small crown so he can run. Today a Spy Boy looks like a chief and somebody carrying a big old stick. It's been years since I seen a proper flag. Today everybody has a chief stick. The Wild Man wearing the horns in there to keep the crowd open and to keep it clear. He's between the Flag Boy and the Chief."

" Making Indian and sewing Indian suits is a time-honored tradition in the Montana family." Tootie's great uncle, Becate Batiste,was a founder of one of the first recorded tribes in the city, the Creole Wild West. Tootie's father, Alfred Montana, also masked Indian for many years and was Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas. The tribe that Tootie leds for most of his life.

Tootie began to mask Indian in 1947 after seeing his father helping young men in the Eighth Ward. Big Chief, Tootie provided an invaluable perspective on the history and changes of masking Indian in New Orleans. In the old days he says, "Violence was frequently associated with the Mardi Gras Indians. After World War II Carnival began to change and the fighting stopped. Today, Mardi Gras Indians don't fight physically, they fight with their costumes, competing to see which can be the prettiest."

Allison "Tootie" Montana, (December 16, 1922 – June 27, 2005) the "chief of chiefs," famously collapsed and fell dead of a heart attack on June 27 at the podium in New Orleans City Hall while addressing the City Council about the foul treatment of Mardi Gras Indians by police. With all his chiefs gathered around him, his last words were "This has got to stop!"

Many attended a three-hour mass July 9, followed by the colorful procession.

"Traditionally in New Orleans, jazz funerals maintain a slow, sorrowful pace until the point of "cutting the body loose," but the burial of a man of Montana's stature proved difficult to pace. The thousands of second-liners seemed to be busting at the seams, celebrating all the way to the cemetery, doing the samba-like second-line strut to the rhythm of the brass bands, twirling umbrellas, chanting old songs and shaking tambourines. Dozens of Mardi Gras Indian tribes, from Montana's Yellow Pocahontas, to the Golden Star Hunters to the Spirit of Fi YiYi, met each other in the streets enacting ritual war dances, stand-offs, and peace treaties. Even for New Orleans, it was a rare occasion to witness. On Mardi Gras Day, St. Joseph's Day and Super Sunday the Indians usually come out in large numbers. But on this day, even old Indians who hadn't masked in years came out in full regalia complete with new feathers and plumes on old suits for the funeral of funerals for the Chief of Chiefs."

---Marcel Diallo

St. Joseph's Night in New Orleans: Out After Dark with the Wild Indians @ satchmo.com  By John Sinclair

Allison_"Tootie"Montana

Buffalo_Bill  He was one of the most colorful figures of the American Old West, and mostly famous for the shows he organized with cowboy themes. Buffalo Bill received the Medal of Honor in 1872. Cody's father believed that Kansas should be a free state, but many of the other settlers in the area were pro-slavery (see Bleeding Kansas). While giving an anti-slavery speech at the local trading post, he so inflamed the supporters of slavery in the audience that they formed a mob and one of them stabbed him. Cody helped to drag his father to safety, although he never fully recovered from his injuries. The family was constantly persecuted by the supporters of slavery, forcing Isaac Cody to spend much of his time away from home. Buffalo Bill Cody was the most recognizable celebrity on earth. And yet, despite all of the recognition and appreciation Cody's show brought for the Western and American Indian cultures, Buffalo Bill saw the American West change dramatically during his tumultuous life.

"Earl King, the late songwriter and guitarist, said in an interview that he believed the word "funky" got popularized by Earl Palmer, the New Orleans drummer, one of the most recorded drummers in history, who would say in the studio, "let's play it a little funkier," at a time when singers came to New Orleans to make hit records. We'd be talking about the early ‘50s there, maybe even the late ‘40s.

I'll talk about this in my next book, The Year Before the Flood, which is both an account of my childhood in segregated Louisiana and a play-by-play of the last year that New Orleans was whole, the year 2004-2005, when New Orleans was being very much itself and looking forward to more of the same. What I found, living in New Orleans that year, was that whatever else they do, most bands in New Orleans basically play funk."

-Ned Sublette

The New Orleans Groove.

"The history of rock and roll as it had been written up to that point was, you know, black people playing rhythm and blues, and white people playing country and western, and they crossed over. But I came to realize that when you talk about these two sides of the fence, you'd better look for the Latin element, because that was the mediator. When you listen to Chuck Berry's "Maybellene," his first hit, or Bo Diddley's first hit, both of ‘em had maracas. And these three-chord loops that I knew and loved from rock and roll in the ‘60s came from Cuban music."

---Ned Sublette

electric guitar: California instrument maker Leo Fender released the first mass-produced electric guitar. Called the Broadcaster, it sold for $169.95 retail, worth about $1,500 in early 2008 dollars. Renamed the Telecaster in 1950, Fender's guitar quickly became a favorite of jazz and big-band musicians who had for twenty years been experimenting with ways to add amplification to their hollow-body guitars so that they could be heard above the trumpets and saxophones. Fender would later add the tone-control amplifier to the arsenal, allowing individual musicians to add bass and treble to their sound

Long-Playing Records: Another 1948 invention which allowed rock and roll to eventually rule the airwaves was by engineers at Columbia Records, of the 12-inch long-playing phonograph record. Earlier discs were recorded to be played at 78 revolutions per minute and could hold only eight to ten minutes' worth of material. The larger, and slower-playing, 12-inch records would eventually contain more than half an hour's music on each side, enough to let musicians extend themselves beyond the one-hit-wonder formula. The 45 rpm disk soon followed, furthering the sonic and cultural revolution by inaugurating the three-minute single.

Transistor Radio: The third innovation of 1948 brought rock and roll within hearing of anyone with ears was the transistor, patented by Bell Labs researchers John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley, would replace the bulky vacuum tubes that had powered radios and televisions up until that time. The transistor radio could now be massed produced. Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation. In his later life, Shockley was a professor at Stanford Unvirsity in the San Francisco Bay Ara, and his later years were controversial as he was a longtime staunch advocate for eugenics based on race.
 

Assorted discrete transistors.

Stanton Moore: Drummer from  New Orleans 

Gary "U.S." Bonds - New Orleans/Quarter To Three

Before then, the phrase "rocking and rolling", as secular black slang for dancing or sex, appeared on record for the first time in 1922 on Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me With One Steady Roll". Even earlier, in 1916, the term "rocking and rolling" was used with a religious connotation, on the phonograph record "The Camp Meeting Jubilee" by an unnamed male "quartette".^[5] The word "rock" had a long history in the English language as a metaphor for "to shake up, to disturb or to incite". In 1937, Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald recorded "Rock It for Me," which included the lyric, "So won't you satisfy my soul with the rock and roll." "Rocking" was a term used by black gospel singers in the American South to mean something akin to spiritual rapture. By the 1940s, however, the term was used as a double entendre, ostensibly referring to dancing, but with the subtextual meaning of sex, as in Roy Brown's "Good Rocking Tonight." The verb "roll" was a medieval metaphor which meant "having sex". Writers for hundreds of years have used the phrases "They had a roll in the hay" or "I rolled her in the clover"^[6]. The terms were often used together ("rocking and rolling") to describe the motion of a ship at sea, for example as used in 1934 by the Boswell Sisters in their song "Rock and Roll"^[7], which was featured in the 1934 film "Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round",^[8][9] and in Buddy Jones' "Rockin' Rollin' Mama" (1939). Country singer Tommy Scott was referring to the motion of a railroad train in the 1951 "Rockin and Rollin'". ^[10].

An alternative claim is that the origins of "rocking and rolling" can be traced back to steel driving men working on the railroads in the Reconstruction South. These men would sing hammer songs to keep the pace of their hammer swings. At the end of each line in a song, the men would swing their hammers down to drill a hole into the rock. The shakers — the men who held the steel spikes that the hammer men drilled — would "rock" the spike back and forth to clear rock or "roll", twisting the spike to improve the "bite" of the drill.^[11]

Five Guys Named Moe is a musical with a book by Clarke Peters and lyrics and music by Louis Jordan and others.---His woman has left him, he's flat broke, and it's almost five o'clock in the morning when Nomax suddenly finds Big Moe, Four-Eyed Moe, Eat Moe, No Moe, and Little Moe emerging from his 1930s-style radio to comfort him with the hit songs of songwriter and saxophonist Louis Jordan, whose new slant on jazz paved the way for rock and roll in the 1950s.

Although Jordan began his career in big band swing jazz in the 1930s, he became famous as one of the leading practitioners, innovators and popularizers of "jump blues", a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. The prime of Louis Jordan's recording career, 1942-1950, was a period of segregation on the radio. Despite this he was able to score the crossover #1 single "G.I. Jive"/"Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?" in 1944.

Jordan is often credited with providing many of the building blocks for rock and roll music. During an interview late in life, Jordan made the controversial remark that rock and roll music was simply rhythm and blues music played by white performers. Among Jordan's biggest fans were Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Berry clearly modeled his musical approach on Jordan's, changing the text from black life to teenage life, and substituting cars and girls for Jordan's primary motifs of food, drink, money and girls.

Jordan's vocal style was arguably an important precursor to rap. His 1947 sister tracks, "Beware (Brother Beware)" and "Look Out (Sister)", entirely delivered as spoken rhyming couplets, can arguably be classified as one of the very first true "raps" in popular music. "Saturday Night Fish Fry" (1950) also features a rapid-fire, highly syncopated semi-spoken vocal delivery that is strongly reminiscent of the modern rap style.

Bo Diddley was well known for the "Bo Diddley beat," a rumba-like beat similar to "hambone", a style used by street performers who play out the beat by slapping and patting their arms, legs, chest, and cheeks while chanting rhymes.^[11] This syncopated "hambone" beat — CHINK-a-CHINK-a-CHINK, a-CHINK-CHINK — is a cornerstone of rock & roll songs, from Diddley's own "Who Do You Love," "Mona," "Bo Diddley," and "I'm a Man" to the Who's "Magic Bus," Bruce Springsteen's "She's the One," the Pretenders' "Cuban Slide," the Strangelove's "I Want Candy" Somewhat resembling "shave and a haircut" beat, Diddley came across it while trying to play Gene Autry's "(I've Got Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle".

In its simplest form, the Bo Diddley beat can be counted out as a two-bar phrase:

"One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and..."

The bolded counts are the clave rhythm.

His songs (for example, "Hey Bo Diddley" and "Who Do You Love?") often have no chord changes; that is, the musicians play the same chord throughout the piece, so that the rhythms create the excitement, rather than having the excitement generated by harmonic tension and release.

In 1963, he starred in a UK concert tour where The Rolling Stones, still barely known outside London at that time, appeared as a supporting act on the same bill. Diddley's legacy was enhanced considerably during the mid-1960s, when many of his songs were covered by British Invasion groups like the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger stated that "he was a wonderful, original musician who was an enormous force in music and was a big influence on The Rolling Stones. He was very generous to us in our early years and we learned a lot from him." Jagger also praised the late star as a one-off musician, adding, "We will never see his like again.^[42] As his bass player, Debby Hastings said: he was the rock that the roll was built on."

The Dixie Cups, who had heard it sung by their grandmother, knew little about the origin of the song and so the original authorship credit went to the members, Barbara Ann Hawkins, her sister Rosa Lee Hawkins, and their cousin Joan Marie Johnson.

After the Dixie Cups version of the "Iko Iko" was released in 1965, The Dixie Cups and their record label, Redbird Records, were sued by James Crawford, who claimed that "Iko Iko" was the same as his composition "Jockamo".^[3] Although The Dixie Cups denied that the two compositions were similar, the lawsuit resulted in a settlement in 1967 with Crawford making no claim to authorship or ownership of "Iko Iko" ^[4], but being credited 25% for public performances, such as on radio, of "Iko Iko" in the United States.^[5]

"The song was written and recorded back in the early 1950s by a New Orleans singer named James Crawford who worked under the name of Sugar Boy & the Cane Cutters. It was recorded in the 1960s by the Dixie Cups for Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller's Red Bird Records, but the format we're following here is Sugar Boy's original. Also in the group were Professor Longhair on piano, Jake Myles, Big Boy Myles, Irv Bannister on guitar, and Eugene 'Bones' Jones on drums. The group was also known as the Chipaka Shaweez. The song was originally called 'Jockamo,' and it has a lot of Creole patois in it. Jockamo means 'jester' in the old myth. It is Mardi Gras music, and the Shaweez was one of many Mardi Gras groups who dressed up in far out Indian costumes and came on as Indian tribes. The tribes used to hang out on Claiborne Avenue and used to get juiced up there getting ready to perform and 'second line' in their own special style during Mardi Gras. That's dead and gone because there's a freeway where those grounds used to be. The tribes were like social clubs who lived all year for Mardi Gras, getting their costumes together. Many of them were musicians, gamblers, hustlers and pimps."

It has also been covered by Cyndi Lauper, the Grateful Dead (who made Iko Iko a constant staple in their live shows from 1977 onward), Cowboy Mouth, Warren Zevon, Long John Baldry, Dave Matthews & Friends, Indigo Girls, The Ordinary Boys, Glass Candy, and Sharon, Lois & Bram among others. Aaron Carter covered the song for The Little Vampire soundtrack, and The Belle Stars' cover was featured in the film Rain Man. A later version by Zap Mama, with rewritten lyrics, was featured in the opening sequences of the film Mission: Impossible II. Eurodance act Captain Jack re-popularized the tune in Germany in 2001.

Louis Prima (December 7, 1910^[1] - August 24, 1978) was an Italian-American entertainer, singer, actor, songwriter, and trumpeter. Prima rode the musical trends of his time, starting with his seven-piece New Orleans style jazz band in the 1920s, then successively leading a swing combo in the 1930s, a big band in the 1940s, a Vegas lounge act in the 1950s, and a pop-rock band in the 1960s. In each of his musical endeavors, he incorporated his exuberant personality into his act. Prima's 1936 composition "Sing Sing Sing" became one of his biggest hits and one of the most covered standards of the swing era.

Just a Gigolo

In 1947 he added singer Cathy Ricciardi, who recorded under the name Cathy Allen. She was succeeded in 1949 by Keely Smith (who was to become his fourth wife), and the band concentrated on novelty songs like "Civilization (Bongo Bongo Bongo)" and "All Right, Louis, Drop the Gun."

As the big band era waned in the 1950s, Prima morphed his act into the original Las Vegas Lounge act featuring his wife and female singer Keely Smith. On stage, Prima insisted that Smith would adopt a humorless, poker-faced character that would play straight to Prima's zany ad libs. Smith actually had a fine sense of comedy that is often audible on the team's recordings; no matter how much the incorrigible Prima tried to disrupt her vocals, Smith would often come back with a funny remark of her own. In 1959, Prima and Smith won the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group or Chorus for "That Old Black Magic." For almost a decade, Prima and Smith raised two children, while he made scores of records, owned racehorses, appeared on television, and they outgrew the lounge and were promoted to the big room.

In 1967 Prima's distinctive voice and jazzy delivery landed him a role in Walt Disney's animated feature The Jungle Book, as the raucous orangutan King Louie. He performed the hit song "I Wanna Be Like You" on the soundtrack, leading to the recording of two albums with Phil Harris: The Jungle Book and More Jungle Book, on Disneyland Records. He can also be heard on the soundtrack of another cartoon feature, The Man Called Flintstone. David Lee Roth,  covered his medley of "Just a Gigolo"/"I Ain't Got Nobody" in the 1980s, and Brian Setzer, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and other nouveau swing bands of the 1990s, covering such Prima standards as "Jump, Jive and Wail"
In 2008, Vanessa Claire Smith and Jake Broder wrote and starred in the new musical, "Louis & Keely Live at the Sahara," which premiered at Los Angeles' Sacred Fools Theatre Company

---Ned Sublette

"I can't imagine that there is anybody that Mardi Gras doesn't offer something for unless you don't like fun. Unless you don't like to have a good time."

---James Carville