Preservation Hall is located at 726 Saint Peter Street in New Orleans. It opened its doors in 1961 but I wasn’t lucky enough to walk through them until February or March 1968. It was during my first trip to New Orleans and I thought I was the luckiest guy on the planet. My girlfriend was a New Orleans native who knew the ropes, it was Mardi Gras season and the legendary Dr. Edmund Souchon had promised to offer his support in any way, even extending an invitation to the Rex Ball. But my main interest was Preservation Hall.

I think I went at least two and possibly three times during the trip. I took photographs on at least two nights because the people vary from frame to frame. I distinctly remember Sweet Emma Barrett and her jangling bells as she stomped her feet underneath the upright piano, but what I really remember is the first night I was at the hall. 

What made it so remarkable was not who was on stage, but who was standing in the back of the room. At the time I was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, on holiday in New Orleans. We had an office in New Orleans in those days, there were two men in the office and one liked jazz. It turned out he had two high level visitors when I was in town, the Director of Domestic Operations and the third ranking official in the Agency, the Deputy Director for Intelligence. It also turned out that while I was sitting in the front row, snapping pictures of Albert Burbank and Louis Nelson, the three guys from the CIA were standing in the back, enjoying the music.  Jim Garrison was still the New Orleans District Attorney, still looking for anything to prove his peculiar theories about the assignation of President Kennedy. If he’d know there were four people from the CIA at Preservation Hall that night he would indicted everyone in the room, including the band and charged us all with some kind of conspiracy.

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band wasn’t very well known in those years; they didn’t even release a recording until the late 1970s, but they were just as wonderful in 1968 as they were when they became better known. Maybe even better, because night after night, they didn’t just play, they entertained. They didn’t just play jazz standards; they played songs, mostly old songs. When they released their first record it included New Orleans standards like Tiger Rag and Joe Avery, but it also had songs like Memories and Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home.

In 1994, Cunard Line asked us to present a special event on the Queen Elizabeth 2 and we suggested a theme cruise we called Mardi Gras at Sea.  Cunard bought the idea and the first band hired was the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, because not only are they the real deal, they can also entertain. Jelly Roll Morton used to talk about “hot and sweet” and this is a perfect description for the band today. I snapped a picture of them one day, just as 85-year-old Narvin Kimball had burst into song. He may have been singing Memories, one of his specialties, just like he had on the first record. 

The band and the Hall still soldiers on despite the travails wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Three men in the 1994 picture, Frank Demond, Benjie Jaffe and Joe Lasti are still on the road with the band and they still play sweet and hot. The last time I saw them do it was at the special function at the United Nations a couple of years ago. They had the most international Second Line in their history.

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, November 9, 1994