Hearts Full of Soul
By Alex Rawls |
“I’d hear him backstage warming up, and that’s when I heard his voice as a solo artist,” Ben Jaffe says of Carl LeBlanc. LeBlanc plays banjo with the Preservation Hall Brass Band. That led to LeBlanc’s new self-titled solo album on Preservation Hall Records, an album that presents him as “New Orleans’ Seventh Ward Griot.”
The album will come as a surprise to fans of the Hall who expect traditional jazz. “Indian Love Call” weds an African-inflected banjo melody to a Mardi Gras Indian chat, and “Roll Call” is a spoken word recollection of friends over a logey Riot Goin’ On groove. The morning after cutting the track, LeBlanc called Jaffe: “I remembered 20 more.”
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Carl LeBlanc is one of two new albums coming out of the Hall. The second was a happy accident. During lunch time for a session for a Joseph Lastie, Jr. traditional jazz album, his aunt Betty Ann Lastie, organist Reverend Leon Vaughn and members of her choir came in to record some gospel tracks to be a part of his album. They set up and started performing with little interest in mics or levels, and when one song ended, they rolled into another and another and another. The musicians on the session including Elliot “Stackman” Callier and pianist Rickie Monie filtered back in and joined the session.
“I thought it was all a waste of time,” Jaffe says, laughing, but The Lastie Gospel Family presents a riveting, unpredictable gospel experience that made the rest of the tracks recorded for the session pale by comparison. “At one point, Leon was shaking while playing,” Jaffe says. “Clint Maedgen was their filming, and he’d never seen someone with the spirit in them before. He said, ‘That’s rock ’n’ roll.”
