Bassist Ben Jaffe, second from right, is the son of Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s founders, and right after college in 1993, he became the second-generation band director.
New Orleans has long been a melting pot where diverse cultures, ideas, foods and sounds have converged, mingled, and then resurfaced anew as hybrids. Nowhere is that idea more vivid than in Preservation Hall and its namesake Preservation Hall Jazz Band, both of which have been the standard-bearers of New Orleans-style jazz for decades.
Bassist Ben Jaffe is the band’s leader and the son of the Hall’s founders, and now directs the Hall from its French Quarter location, charged with the responsibility of protecting and preserving the traditional music and cultural identity of the Crescent City.
“My parents moved here in 1961 at the height of the civil rights movement,” Jaffe says. “They got involved with an art gallery that had been a center for artistic and political activity since the 1800s. They created a meeting place for social activists, artists, musicians – an environment welcoming people of all colors, races and religions. That place is Preservation Hall. In the process, they saved this music from complete obscurity.”
Jaffe grabbed the reins from his mother in 1993, right after graduating from college.
“It’s one thing to interpret repertoire that’s 100 years old,” Jaffe says. “It’s quite another thing to breathe life into it and keep it a living thing.”
Witness the band’s two latest studio efforts, 2013’s That’s It and this year’s So It Is, both of which chart a new path showcasing the band’s original music.
“I wouldn’t say that we broke with tradition at all,” Jaffe says. “We’ve expanded and extended our tradition, and left our imprint on it in the same way that Jelly Roll Morton did. It’s exactly the same thing.”
The result is a brassy snare drum-heavy melange of complex rhythms, with often more than one player improvising simultaneously.
“When we play music, the barometer for us as a band is whether people are reacting,” Jaffe says. “In New Orleans, music is on every street corner – it’s everywhere.
“We play music for dances and parades, at funerals and in church. It’s important to us to make music people connect to, that people really feel, emotionally and physically. That’s the tradition we grew up with, that’s what we know.”
PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND 7:30pm Thursday, Sept 7. Sunset Center, San Carlos and Ninth, Carmel. $39-$70.
620-2048, sunsetcenter.org
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