Update on jazz traditions – Preservation Hall Jazz Band debuts album of original music

In the unlikely event word has yet to reach you, Preservation Hall—that French Quarter bastion of traditional jazz appreciation—has been completely transformed in the past decade. On top of 50th-anniversary celebrations last year, museum exhibits and concerts, a pair of recent albums featured guest artists from all corners of the roots-music world.

The first, Preservation, is a studio effort with an international array of musicians, from Brandi Carlile and Memphis-based Amy LaVere to Merle Haggard and Pete Seeger, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Steve Earle and Tom Waits.

The second album, St. Peter & 57th St., documents the Hall’s touring band in a celebratory concert at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, with guests ranging from New Orleans’ own Allen Toussaint and the Lafayette-based GIVERS to The Blind Boys of Alabama and The Del McCoury Band.

Now comes That’s It!, the Hall’s first album of all-original music, reincarnating some of the requisites of traditional jazz—an invitation to visit New Orleans, several novelty tunes, a full-blooded spiritual and even a somber lullaby. Thankfully, it sounds nothing at all like the classic ensemble improvisations of traditional jazz, instead blending modern jazz influences—from Duke Ellington to the so-called hard bop of the 1950s and 1960s—with Caribbean rhythms, brass band funk, classic balladry and a rock ‘n’ roll swagger.

At the heart of this surprisingly contemporary mélange of sounds is an artistic partnership that’s been building for a couple of years between Ben Jaffe—the wooly-haired, second-generation artistic director of the Hall who also served as lead architect for its 21st-century transformation—and Jim James, the My Morning Jacket front man whose work on Preservation in 2010 turned him into a true believer.

Jaffe, who studied modern jazz at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music before assuming responsibility for the Hall in the early 1990s, brought the lion’s share of musical inspiration to what is basically an ensemble project, while James reconstructed his Louisville recording studio inside the Hall for a week’s worth of mixing, re-recording and creative input.

“This project never would have happened if Jim and I hadn’t been in conversation for the past couple of years,” Jaffe explained recently. “For the most part, the music on That’s It! reflects the kind of things we’ve been doing more and more of in concert but haven’t yet documented in a recording. One of the great things about being on the road so much and playing regularly at Preservation Hall as well is that you get to experiment a lot, reshuffling playlists, working out new compositions, trying songs you already know in new tempos. And you don’t have to wonder whether a new approach is going to go over with an audience; you can literally try something new and see immediately how people react to it. So we had a pretty good idea of how the music sounded before handing it over to someone else, who we hoped would bring a whole new vision to it.”

As an example, Jaffe mentioned the opening track, That’s It!, built on a rumbling bass drum paired with a funky tuba line. “[I was] thinking of it as a herd of elephants passing through the Hall,” Jaffe said. “Jim listened to it [and] said, ‘I hear where you’re going, but what if we really beef it up, so it sounds like a herd of elephants running through the Hall?'”

A herd of elephants stampeding through Preservation Hall? Welcome to the future of traditional New Orleans music appreciation and preservation, reinvigorated by a contemporary attitude and a creative open-door policy.