Songs for Your Bluesday: Preservation Hall
March 16, 2010 by Joe Kloc
FREE SONGS FROM PRESERVATION HALL or WHEN TO CAPITALIZE “JAZZ”
On Preservation Hall’s website, they capitalize “Jazz” only when referring to “New Orleans Jazz.”
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Since the 1960s, Preservation Hall in New Orleans has been dedicated to preserving the lazy, easy, sound of old New Orleans Jazz that, according to the venue’s website, has “lost much of its popularity to modern jazz and rock and roll.” This compilation of songs, streaming for free online, was recorded at the hall by a collection of singers, from Louis Armstrong to Tom Waits to Yim Yames, all backed by the Preservation Hall band.
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The hall is open every night from 8PM to 11PM. This schedule was interrupted only after Katrina, when the hall was closed between August 2005 and April 2006.
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Hearing Yim Yames play “Louisiana Fairytale” one gets the sense he has come to pay homage to a place he would like to think he is from. Tom Waits is the same story. I make this claim (“like to think [they are] from…”) so freely because I suspect that, against this music, most of us like to think of the place as our own.
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After Katrina, Richard Ford wrote this in The Observer:
It is - New Orleans is - a city foremost for special projections, for the things you can’t do, see, think, consume, feel, forget up in Jackson or Little Rock or home in Topeka. ‘We’re at the jumping-off place,’ Miss Welty wrote. This was about Plaquemines, just across the river. It is - New Orleans - the place where the firm ground ceases and the unsound footing begins. A certain kind of person likes such a place. A certain kind of person wants to go there and never leave.
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“And while we’re lost in dreams / the world around us seems / like a Lou’siana Fairytale.”
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