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THE CRESCENT CITY STOMPERS
Traditional New Orleans jazz, played by six people who have day jobs |
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Welcome to the home page of the Crescent City Stompers. I'm Lionel, I play trumpet, I lead the band (which mostly
means I'm the one who calls the tunes and returns the phone calls), and by day I'm a dentist. The rest of the band
is a schoolteacher, a pharmacist, a retired longshoreman, a city clerk and a fellow who sells insurance. None of us
is Louis Armstrong. All of us have been playing this music since we were kids in this city, and we've been playing
it together since 1991.
We play traditional jazz: the New Orleans style from the early part of this century, with a front line of trumpet, clarinet and trombone all playing at once, and a rhythm section of banjo, tuba and drums keeping it moving. No amplifiers except for the occasional microphone on the vocals. It's dance music, it's parade music, it's church music, and it's happy even when it's about a funeral. If you've ever heard a brass band in the street here, you already know it. |
FALL 1999 GIG CALENDAR
Everything is open to the public unless it says private. Come say hello on the break.
Carnival season starts January 6 and we'll be booked most weekends from then until Mardi Gras (March 7, 2000). If you want us for a Carnival party, write soon. |
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THE BAND
Lionel — trumpet, vocals, leader. Dentist. Started on cornet in the school band at twelve and never put it down. Owns too many mutes. Sings the ones nobody else will sing. Antoine — clarinet. High school band director. The best musician in the group and the only one who can read anything we put in front of him. Also plays soprano sax when the clarinet needs a rest. Walter — trombone. Retired from the docks after thirty-five years. Played in brass bands his whole life and has forgotten more tunes than the rest of us know. Does the tailgate slides that make the children laugh. Cheryl — banjo, vocals. Pharmacist. Came to the banjo late, from guitar, and now won't go back. Keeps the tempo honest and keeps the rest of us honest too. Sings the blues numbers. Reggie — tuba. Works for the city. Carries a sousaphone in parades and a tuba everywhere else, and both of them fit in his car, barely. The bottom of the band and the reason you can dance to it. Marcel — drums. Sells insurance. Plays a small kit with a big bass drum, press rolls, and a woodblock, the way it was done in 1925. Refuses to own a cymbal larger than 14 inches on principle. |
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WHAT WE PLAY
The standards. The tunes that have been played in this city for eighty years and will be played for eighty more. We know about a hundred and fifty of them; here are the ones that get called most nights. If you have a request, ask; if it's traditional and we don't know it, Walter probably does.
We'll play "Saints" once a night. Once. Ask for it a second time and Marcel starts charging. |
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A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MUSIC
The two-minute version I give at the church fairs, for people who ask where this stuff came from. New Orleans was a port, and a French and Spanish port before it was an American one, and it was a city where a lot of different people and a lot of different music ended up in the same square mile. In the 1800s, enslaved people were allowed to gather on Sundays at a place called Congo Square, just outside the French Quarter, to drum and dance and sing, and a lot of what makes New Orleans music sound the way it does starts there: the rhythm underneath everything. Add to that the brass bands, which every fraternal society and benevolent association in town had by the end of the century, for parades and funerals. Add the church music, the blues from up the river, the ragtime that was being played on every piano in the country in the 1890s, and the opera and the dance orchestras of the Creole musicians who could read anything. Stir. Around 1900 something new came out of all that: bands that took a march or a hymn or a rag and, instead of playing it off the page, played it by ear and all at once, each horn making up its own part, with the trumpet carrying the tune, the clarinet running around above it and the trombone filling in underneath. That's what we do. It got played in the dance halls, in the parks, on the wagons that advertised the dances, and in the Storyville district, the part of town where the city allowed certain businesses from 1897 until the Navy made them shut it down in 1917. The piano players worked in the parlors there; the bands mostly worked the halls and cabarets on the edge of it. When Storyville closed and the work dried up, a lot of the musicians left. Some went up the river on the excursion riverboats, which hired New Orleans bands to play for dances on the trip up to St. Louis and back, and which put this music in front of people in every river town. Others took the train to Chicago, and from Chicago to New York, and by the 1920s the whole country was calling it jazz and everybody wanted to play it. The names you know, Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, all came out of those few blocks and those few years. The music never left here, though. It went out of fashion for a while and then came back, and there have been bands in this city playing it more or less the way it was played in 1920 without a break ever since. We are a very small part of that. It's a privilege. |
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HIRE US
We play weddings, receptions, private parties, church and school events, company picnics, jazz funerals (yes, really, and we take those seriously), Carnival parties, and anything else where a six-piece acoustic band can fit. We have played in living rooms and we have played on a flatbed truck. We can march. We can do a second line from the church to the reception. We can do two hours or four. Rates depend on the day, the length and how far we have to drive, and we'd rather talk about it than post a number. We are reasonable. We are hobbyists with day jobs; we do this because we love it, and we price it so that people can afford to have real live music at their party. 
E-mail Lionel at [email protected] with the date, the place and
the kind of event, and I'll get back to you within a couple of days (sooner if I'm not at the office drilling).
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THE TAPE
We recorded a cassette last spring in Antoine's band room on a Saturday, twelve tunes, live to two-track, no overdubs, one or two clams left in because that's how it went. It's called "Live from the Band Room" and it is $8 at any of our gigs. Cheryl keeps them in her banjo case. We don't sell it by mail, sorry; that would make it a business and then Marcel would want to do the books. People keep asking about a CD. We'll see. First we have to sell the tapes. |
| Friends and neighbors: Miss Odette's Creole Kitchen (Miss Odette was my patient for twenty years and taught two of us in the fourth grade) · Krewe of Persephone (we've played their ball twice) · Hometown Pickers Bluegrass Jam · The Amateur Cellist · the rest of Bourbon Street |
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This site is a member of the Stage Door WebRing, owned by Lionel P. [ << Prev | List Sites | Next >> ] |
(No MIDI files on this page. Antoine says a MIDI trombone is an insult to Walter. He's right.)