reviewed together with James Booker’s Blues & Ragtime from New Orleans.

There are around 15 James Booker albums on the market, but in fact the Piano Prince released only five LPs of music during his lifetime. Four of these five should be considered the very best of his work. The easy-to-find ones are New Orleans Piano Wizard: Live! (issued first on Gold, then Rounder), and his debut (on Island, reissued on Hannibal), Junco Partner. For years, the other LPs, recorded on consecutive nights in Hamburg in 1976 and released on Aves, a German label, were very hard to find. Now they have finally been released in a digital format (MP3 downloads for now) on the German Black Sun label.

These tracks are as good as Booker gets. They sport a good, well-recorded piano, a simpatico audience and material he never recorded elsewhere: Dr John’s “Desitively Bonnaroo/Right Place, Right Time” for instance, and quirky originals like “Ora”, “Slowly but Surely” and “Love Monkey.” His take on “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” may be the luscious apex of his “butterfly stride” style, and his version of Allen Toussaint’s “Life,” the pinnacle of his virtuosity on record. All the emotions you want out of Booker, along with the crazed commentary, manic jollity and heartbreaking pathos come out in some of the best singing of his career.

I can say without question that I’ve listened to these two discs (in the form of an old cassette in the mid-‘80s) more than any two albums I’ve ever owned. If you’re a Booker lover and don’t have these discs, your train has just come in.

Buy James Booker’s The Piano Prince of New Orleans on iTunes

Listen to James Booker’s The Piano Prince of New Orleans on Spotify

reviewed together with James Booker’s The Piano Prince of New Orleans.

There are around 15 James Booker albums on the market, but in fact the Piano Prince released only five LPs of music during his lifetime. Four of these five should be considered the very best of his work. The easy-to-find ones are New Orleans Piano Wizard: Live! (issued first on Gold, then Rounder), and his debut (on Island, reissued on Hannibal), Junco Partner. For years, the other LPs, recorded on consecutive nights in Hamburg in 1976 and released on Aves, a German label, were very hard to find. Now they have finally been released in a digital format (MP3 downloads for now) on the German Black Sun label.

These tracks are as good as Booker gets. They sport a good, well-recorded piano, a simpatico audience and material he never recorded elsewhere: Dr John’s “Desitively Bonnaroo/Right Place, Right Time” for instance, and quirky originals like “Ora”, “Slowly but Surely” and “Love Monkey.” His take on “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” may be the luscious apex of his “butterfly stride” style, and his version of Allen Toussaint’s “Life,” the pinnacle of his virtuosity on record. All the emotions you want out of Booker, along with the crazed commentary, manic jollity and heartbreaking pathos come out in some of the best singing of his career.

I can say without question that I’ve listened to these two discs (in the form of an old cassette in the mid-‘80s) more than any two albums I’ve ever owned. If you’re a Booker lover and don’t have these discs, your train has just come in.

Buy James Booker’s Blues & Ragtime from New Orleans on iTunes

Listen to Blues & Ragtime from New Orleans on Spotify

Many of us in New Orleans have listened to Kathleen Lee’s swing music show on WWOZ for years. What a nice surprise, then, for us to hear her sing on this debut disc. If some of the covers (“All of Me,” “Fever”) are a little shopworn, other cuts are anything but ordinary. Her powerful take on “Something Real” makes one wish for more material in a gospel vein, and “Meet My Baby on the Night Train” is delivered with just the right soupçon of coyness. In a clever move, her only original here is delivered twice, first in French, then seven tracks later in English, and both artfully.

Backing her are stellar locals, including Jamil Sharif, Clarence Johnson III, Matt Rhody and nearly a dozen others. This is a project with a lot of soul behind it; let’s hope she gets the same airplay that she has given so many hundreds of artists over the years.

There are few listeners in New Orleans who’ve devoted themselves as fervently to the cause of covering traditional jazz as Tom Jacobsen. Traditional New Orleans Jazz: Conversations With the Men Who Make the Music is a unique oral history of a subject surprisingly neglected: the lives of people who’ve made their living playing trad jazz in our city over the last 40 years. The 14 essays cover a wide spectrum, from well-publicized entrepreneurs like Irvin Mayfield to splendid but unsung artists like Tom Fischer. The book is, in fact, pleasantly clarinet-biased with profiles of Fischer, Evan Christopher, Dr. Michael White, Joe Torregano, Tim Laughlin and the late Brian Ogilvie; it turns out Jacobsen is a long-time correspondent for the journal The Clarinet.

In my 28 years in New Orleans, I’ve worked with most of these musicians and know some of them quite well. Nevertheless, in every chapter I found new and interesting sides to these gentlemen. That’s what often happens when you let the musicians speak for themselves.

In the year 2011, there are still plenty of people around who saw James Booker and Professor Longhair perform on multiple occasions, or who caught the Dirty Dozen 20 times at the Glass House. But not many in this group has the writing chops to equal Michael Oliver-Goodwin.

Oliver-Goodwin has been an accomplished journalist for 40 years, and along the way has written on film and music for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone (where he was the mag’s first film critic), Creem, The New York Times Magazine and so on. This kind of resume requires deep life experiences, and he’s paved the way for this by living his entire life in the three capitals of American Bohemia: first New York, then San Francisco and finally New Orleans (he currently splits his time between NOLA and Oakland).

Heaven Before I Die deals almost entirely with his time in New Orleans. He first visited in 1977, and almost immediately became part of the city’s pool of cultural explicators by assisting Les Blank as an interviewer on the film classic, Always for Pleasure. A Jew from Queens, he writes at length about race relations, and these self-conscious moments are sure to make some people squirm as he intended. Nonetheless, most of this 475-page book is an apolitical account of the hundreds of music events—Mardi Gras Indian practices, trad and modern jazz performances, church services, parades— that have made him and the rest of us love New Orleans like no other city.

My faves here are the James Booker obit first published in The Village Voice, and a piece comparing the Mardi Gras Indian rituals to traditional practices in Trinidad (Oliver-Goodwin is a Trini obsessive as well, with an encyclopedic knowledge of calypso and a Trini wife). I’ve known Michael for 25 years, and must mention as a conflict of interest issue that one of the book’s 42 chapters deals with my music. Nevertheless, I think I can be objective here and say that this work is on the very short list of great books about New Orleans music. Oliver-Goodwin simply was present to write about too much good epochal stuff to be ignored.

Illustration by Tom McDermott.

Dickie Taylor, a drummer on the New Orleans scene for 45 years, passed away November 30. Taylor grew up in Chicago, where he began his career in blues and rock bands. He dated the future pop star Jackie DeShannon in high school and played a couple gigs with Muddy Waters, but turned down the regular chair with Muddy with regret.

He began playing with fellow Chicagoan Ronnie Kole in 1963. Ronnie Kole and the Heavyweights, with an average weight of over 300 pounds, toured nationally for three years before dieting down to the Ronnie Kole Trio. “When I met Dickie, he was a rock ’n’ roll drummer who didn’t own a pair of brushes,” says Kole. “But he developed into an outstanding, all-around player.” With Kole and bassist Everett Link, Taylor played a long residency on Bourbon Street’s Kole’s Corner, as well as many national and international tours, and Carnegie Hall in 1974.

The 1980s found Taylor working with a variety of trad jazz leaders, including Connie Jones, Eddie Bayard and Banu Gibson. It was not uncommon for him to play six days of double shifts per week, and at one point for a few months, he even played six days of “triples,” or three gigs a day. It was this kind of stamina that led musicians to compare his strength to that of five gorillas.

In 1990, Dickie was offered the leader’s chair in the Dukes of Dixieland. After the passing of the founding Assuntos, the band had lapsed far away from its trad origins, and Taylor is given credit for injecting a bit of New Orleans into the band and turning it back around. Dickie made his second appearance at Carnegie Hall with the band in 1992, and toured and recorded with them up until the summer of 2010.

Ronnie Magri, a New York drummer who heard Dickie many times during the last 15 years and who subbed for him towards the end, describes him as “a powerhouse, an athlete. He could play four hours of fast tempos and it wouldn’t faze him a bit. He swung hard. I’m not surprised to hear his favorite drummer was Ray Bauduc because he really sounded like him, especially later Bauduc when he used the ride cymbal more.”

Everett Link, who with Kole and the Dukes played more gigs with Taylor than anyone, says, “He was a brother to me, and was one of the kindest people you’ll ever meet. He was as loved by his fellow musicians as anyone I’ve ever met, and I don’t think you’ll find anyone to argue with that.” Dickie Taylor was 70 years old.

Danza at Donna's, New Year's Eve 2008. Photo by Josh Jackson.

It’s not all that surprising that Donna’s Bar and Grill, the Rampart Street club beloved by New Orleans music followers around the globe, closed its doors this summer. The joint was in disrepair, and Charlie Sims, the primary force behind the club for years, had turned 75 and had grown tired. “The owners wouldn’t repair the building, and we couldn’t see putting even more money into a building we didn’t own,” Sims says in a phone talk from his central Florida home. Indeed, the club had been in wobbly financial straits for years; it had been kept afloat in recent times by the pension Charlie receives for his 30 years as an Amtrak chef.

Donna’s was one of the three or four clubs responsible for the New Orleans music resurgence of the last 20 years. If there’s a New Orleans brass band playing in your city this year, there’s a good chance they played some of their first gigs at Donna’s. The club began in 1993, when Chicagoan Charlie met Donna Poniatowski, a New Orleans native. “The first musicians to play at our club were actually blues buskers,” Donna says. “But by the spring of 1994 we were the brass band headquarters. Treme was first, followed in order by the Soul Rebels, Pinstripe and Algiers. New Birth, Rebirth, Chosen Few, the Nightcrawlers, Hot 8, Mahogany. They all played here. We had brass bands seven nights a week, with double bills on weekends.”

Donna became a brass band impresaria, even taking brass bands on the road for a while. But the brass band-only phase lasted just three years or so. While the music was often fantastic, the couple tired of nights where three or four members out of an eight-piece band—or no one at all—would show up for the gig. Eventually, it was decided that smaller groups were more economically feasible, and the booking policy shifted primarily to smaller jazz combos.

Some memorable long-term gigs came out of the post-brass band period. Kermit Ruffins had the Monday shift for about three years. Leroy Jones probably played more gigs than anyone else at Donna’s over the years and was one of the last musicians to have a steady night. Shannon Powell, who used superb players like vibist Jason Marsalis and pianist Larry Sieberth, had the Sunday night shift for many years.

The wildest standing date was Bob French’s Monday night gig, a five-year stint that began around 1999. It was the most popular gig in town for a while. A typical Monday would feature blazing solos from sidemen like Eric Traub and Leon Brown, and fantastic talents like Davell Crawford or Henry Butler would sit in regularly. There were also some of the least musical singers sitting in you could imagine. It was a vaudevillian escapade that French kept well under control with his gift of gab.

“It’s hard to single out a Donna’s ‘greatest performance,’ as we heard hundreds of great ones,” continues Donna. “Perhaps one Dirty Dozen performance where Gregory Davis was cutting up nonstop, but you can hardly name someone in New Orleans playing straight-ahead or brass band who hasn’t played our club and had a great night. We had celebrities in the audience of course, but I really value the musicians who came in, from New Zealand to South Africa.”

One gets the sense that Donna and Charlie, while relieved to be free of the music business, are well-aware of how important their club was. “We didn’t just support the brass scene here; we planted the seed for bands like Mama Digdown in Madison and the Black Bottom Brass Band in Tokyo. We were at the center of New Orleans music for 17 years, but it was time to stop” Donna concludes. “We’re going to split our time from now on in New Orleans and Central Florida, and we’re writing two books, a New Orleans cookbook and a memoir about Donna’s.”

Less noticeable, but apparent to his bandmates, are Perrine’s arranging and composing chops. He writes music as ably as anyone living in New Orleans, and at his best can be lumped in with the most sophisticated of our city’s expat player/arrangers: Wynton, Harry Jr., and Nicholas Payton.

The core of the Sunflower City band featured here is a delicious mix: banjoist Alex McMurray, fiddler Matt Rhody, Perrine on sousaphone and Ben Schenck, who has never sounded better, on clarinet. Add percussion by Michael Skinkus or Carlo Nuccio, and you have a unique timbre on chamber jazz pieces like “Rooster,” or the Joplinesque “Nocturne.” Skinkus, in fact, must be accorded star sideman status for his additional work on “Sougouya,” where he adds some Cuban sabor to a West African feel, as well as his pandeiro and cuica playing on the Brazilian “I’m Not Choro.”

As Perrine’s debut album demonstrated, he has a flair for Trinidadian calypso, and “My Goat,” written and sung with panache by St. Louis Slim, may be the most loveable track here. This Latinate material is exceptional, but in fact, Bayou Road Suite is more trad-jazzish than his debut from 2007, Sunflower City. As Perrine explains, “I just started writing trad material and couldn’t stop.”

From Trinidad to West Africa to Brazil and back to New Orleans: it’s quite a ride. Perrine’s first album was exceptionally well-received and there’s no reason to think Bayou Road Suite won’t exceed these expectations. With his playing, arranging and composing, he continues to raise the bar for traditional music with a New Orleans flavor.

Scott’s second disc, the locally recorded Let the Devil Take Tomorrow, is certainly in the ballpark with that auspicious debut. And some of the credit must go to another outsider, the rhapsodic pianist Vadim Neselovskyi, who held the piano chair in last year’s version of the Thelonious Monk Institute band.

Nevertheless, this album triumphs because of Scott’s strengths. She has the serious jazz chops that enable her to improvise on a dime on whatever chord changes are thrown her way. Her jazzistic tendency to transform material manifests here on a de-tangofied “Kiss of Fire,” (with a cool Brian Seeger guitar solo), a spookily transformed Hank Williams tune, “I Can’t Help It,” and a nicely strutting take on Smokey Robinson’s “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me.” Even tunes that are performed with “appropriate” grooves (like “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps”) sound fresh because she throws in vocal ideas from outside the genre.

Scott was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and has lived all over the south. The country, blues and pop she grew up listening to all show up in her music. She has that “cry,” that heart-tugging thing that even good jazz singers can’t cop. This type of originality is increasingly hard to find.