The legendary Dirty Dozen Brass Band will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. The Grammy Award-winning seven-member band is looking forward to a run of dates at the Blue Note during the Blue Note Jazz Festival June 8-10.
WBGO's Doug Doyle spoke with Roger Lewis and Trevarri Huff-Boone, two members of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band earlier this week.
The Grammy Award-winning New Orleans-based Dirty Dozen Brass Band has taken the traditional foundation of brass band music and incorporated it into a blend of genres including Bebop Jazz, Funk and R&B/Soul. This unique sound, descried by the band as "musical gumbo," has allowed the Dirty Dozen to tour across five continents and more than 30 countries, record 12 studio albums and collaborate with a range of artists including Norah Jones, Widespread Panic, Elvis Costello and the Black Crowes.
Roger Lewis is a founding member of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. He's a baritone saxophonist and vocalist. Roger says he's the same person he was when he helped form the band in 1977. At that time he was also playing with Rock and Roll pioneer Fats Domino. Lewis told Domino he was playing with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band at a little social club called The Glasshouse in uptown New Orleans.
"It was about the size of a garage. You put 25 people in that place and it would be packed. We put 125 people in there and it would be hot as hell. It was quite a shady neighborhood. It cost you a dollar to get in and you'd get a bowl of red beans and you had to buy a drink. The beans were good. One night we were playing, who was sitting at the bar with Heinekens, it was Fats Domino, the great Fats Domino. One night we had Dizzy Gillespie and Bernard Purdie sitting at a table. Everybody came through The Glasshouse."
Lewis says his band's upbeat music had many joints jumping and people dancing, including The Glasshouse.
"We always played traditional New Orleans music and bugle boy marches and then we started playing the music of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver, but we mixed it in with our style of music. We picked up the beat. People used to be sashaying down the street when they were dancing in the Second Line parade. When we came along, we picked up the beat and people started what they call bug-jumping and doing all this fancy footwork."
Roger Lewis is excited about playing at the Blue Note in New York City.
"It one of my favorite places to play. I really like that place. I like the closeness of the people right by you. You're standing on the stage and somebody is right there. I like New York. New York is cool."
Meanwhile, tenor saxophonist and vocalist Trevarri Huff-Boone has been a member of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for about five years. He says his time with the band has been fun and more importantly educational.
"For me, it's just such an incredible thing to be a part of, learning all the different songs they've written and certain things that I could learn and incorporate into my own playing. But the thing I like most is hearing all their stories. They got 50 years of stories."
Huff-Boone has his own band is also a part of the Delfeayo Marsalis & the Uptown Jazz Orchestra.
You can SEE Doug Doyle's entire interview with Trevarri Huff-Boone and Roger Lewis below:
