[Dixielandjazz] Bluegrass and Jazz

[Stephen G Barbone]

Bluegrass and Jazz Bands, With More in Common Than You’d Think

NY TIMES - JULY 24 2011 - By BEN RATLIFF


Del McCoury’s bluegrass group and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band did  
the proper adult thing on Wednesday night: they resolved their  
differences, surrounded by expensive claret.

On “American Legacies” (McCoury Music), their recent joint album,  
they’ve explicitly made their traditions melt together. This is an old  
story. Louis Armstrong did it with Jimmie Rodgers; Wynton Marsalis did  
it with Willie Nelson.  The pairing is not a stretch, though it can  
seem to be. For the first half of the 20th century bands from  
putatively different traditions implicitly understood their common  
origins and points of crossover. And their repertories overlapped.  
Type in the song title “Corrine, Corrina” on YouTube and you’ll get  
Red Nichols’s jazz version, Bo Carter’s string-band blues version, and  
various shades of country into rock ’n’ roll from the Collins Kids,  
Ray Peterson, Brooks & Dunn, Big Joe Turner, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Or you could do the same with “Milenberg Joys,” which the combined  
bands played near the end of their set at City Winery on Wednesday.  
It’s a song that Mr. McCoury — raised in the Black Mountain region of  
North Carolina — knew because he used to play it in Bill Monroe’s  
band, and the jazz group knew because Jelly Roll Morton wrote it. (The  
dynastic Preservation Hall band, from New Orleans, was founded in 1961  
by Allan and Sandra Jaffe, parents of its current tuba player and  
director, Ben Jaffe; it has no original members, but the current  
lineup is full of familial and professional ties to the group’s past.)  
In that song, and in a few other places, the musicians did right by  
the audience: they made music subtly pan across the stage, from one  
band to another, so you could hear the difference in rhythmic  
temperament, whether in grooves or in solos.

At full strength 12 musicians stood onstage, jazz guys to the left,  
bluegrass to the right. The Preservation Hall band used funk and  
parade beats and slid into the beginning of each bar, making the “one”  
indistinct; by contrast, Mr. McCoury’s group bit down hard on it.

Although Mr. McCoury filled half the set with his high, clean, no- 
nonsense voice, there was a lot more Preservation Hall in the mix;  
trumpet, trombone, saxophone and tuba walked all over guitar, banjo,  
mandolin and string bass. (The singing styles of the Preservation Hall  
musicians — the trumpeter Mark Braud and the saxophonist Clint Maedgen  
— take up more space than Mr. McCoury, through various shades of  
showiness.) And the Preservation Hall band’s strong drummer, Joe  
Lastie, stamped an irrefutable, seductive groove deep into each song.

There were lessons and discoveries in all of that, but you wouldn’t  
want to overthink it; the music was too amiable and easy to like.

The Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band will  
collaborate again at the Edmonton Folk Festival in Alberta on Aug. 6;  
preservationhall.com.