Keeping the Beat on the Street Read online

  We were rolling—I mean, we had a trip up to Washington, D.C., round about 1972. We went up there with Fats Houston and the Olympia. The Onward Brass Band went. We all went up to play at the Kennedy Center for some function that was in honor of New Orleans music. My mother and Charles Barbarin Sr. would chaperone us, and of course Danny would come to keep us in line—we were all juveniles. It wasn’t any problem: we were always basically just interested in playing.

  We had a chance to appear in a movie with Tim Rooney, who’s Mickey Rooney’s son; he’s kind of an amateur trombone player. They filmed that in the Quarter, all due to Danny’s connections. He bent over backwards for us, and he really had a great affection for kids. He and his wife loved children.

  The band was like a pet project for him, and that’s why I couldn’t understand when people started accusing him of exploiting us. The union accused him, and that was how the Hurricane Brass Band came about in 1974. By then I was sixteen; Danny had taught me how to deal with business, like “Make sure you get your contract straight, always count your money, make sure you get a deposit.”

  We played every weekend. We were the hottest thing on the second line circuit. All of the social and pleasure clubs wanted the Fairview band and then, later, the Hurricane Brass Band. We created such a stir that the Olympia Brass Band, in particular, were getting jealous of us. Danny had to stop being associated with us because of the flak from the union. A false rumor was generated by some musicians who were jealous of what was going on, and it made the scene difficult for Danny. We weren’t all in the union, but some of the older guys were. At that time the AFM [American Federation of Musicians] was very strict about nonunion labor, or “scabs,” as they called us.

  Hurricane Brass Band at George “Kid Sheik” Cola’s birthday party, September 1973 (Anthony Lacen, Kid Sheik, Daryl Adams, Leroy Jones, Greg Stafford) Photo by Bill Dickens

  Danny gave us the name [for the Hurricane Brass Band]. He said, “Y’all come down the street blowing like a hurricane.” That’s what gave us the name. I was the leader of the Fairview. Danny saw leadership qualities in me when I was thirteen years old. He saw I was a serious young man, and very focused, which is probably how I could practice four or five hours a day. So when the Hurricane band formed, I did the business for that, in conjunction with Gregg Stafford, who would cover for me if I wasn’t available.

  Gregg and I were very tight with that. We were the commanders of that group. We’re very different musically, but at that time we were playing brass band music. We had people like Henry Freeman, a saxophone player who had been on the road with Ray Charles. He was a professional, man. He had been up to Baton Rouge, played in that [Southern University] Jaguar band; he knew Alvin Batiste—I mean, he could play, you know. So he was like a big influence. Magic Johnson, he came with the Hurricane. We had people like that coming in. I learned a lot from them. I mean, they knew music, not only just playing, but from a theoretical standpoint as well. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open, because I was absorbing a lot of information from these people.

  Then Greg Davis and the Joseph brothers, Kirk and Charles, joined the Hurricane. Then Kevin Harris came along. So part of the core of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band were in the Hurricane at one time. We started to play original stuff, juxtaposing the funk and pop music with the traditional stuff. Later on, the Dirty Dozen took it to the next level.

  In 1976, I branched off from the brass band thing and started playing rhythm and blues. The Hurricane still did gigs up to 1980, but then I got so involved with Bourbon Street, and I had a music scholarship to Loyola. I went there for a semester and dropped out because I didn’t like the program and wanted to make some money. My parents were going through changes. They eventually busted up when I was nineteen, so I wanted to get out of the house. So I got my first jazz gig in the Quarter at the age of twenty at the Maison Bourbon in 1978. It was Dixieland and swing.

  The job I took over was Jabbo Smith’s spot. The One Mo’ Time show came out, and Jabbo went up to New York with the show. That opened up the gig. Walter Payton was on bass with us, Joe Lambert on drums. That’s when I started singing. Nobody else in the band sang. I started learning two or three tunes a week, including singing and scatting. I used to scat a lot, from listening to Jabbo and Thomas Jefferson.

  It was great fun. It was exciting. It was just nice to be playing music. At the end of the week, you would be paid cash money, didn’t have to pay taxes or nothing. I moved into the Quarter and got an apartment. There was music everywhere, and all the clubs had jazz. I played the Famous Door with Olivia Chariot [Cook]. Me and Lucien Barbarian hooked up together again in 1980, working for June Gardner and other people.

  Then I formed my own quintet. We played at the old Paddock Lounge, and a bunch of other clubs up and down the street, for a limited amount of time because they were firing bands left and right. There were so many bands they could choose from. The first quintet I had was me and Lucien, trumpet and trombone. Then I had a young man who had gone to high school with me, Kenneth Sara, on drums. On piano I had James Moore—he doesn’t live here anymore, but he was from New Orleans. And on bass, I had Joe Payton. And after that, I had Herlin Riley on drums, before he went out with Ahmad Jamal. Then I had Erving Charles on Fender bass, and on piano I had Phil Parnell. Then I got Shannon Powell after Herlin left. Then Richard Knox on piano, then Walter Payton on bass.

  We made our first trip to Europe in 1982. It was great. I had started playing with the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble in 1980. I played on that record they did, Alive and Well. I went to La Rochelle in France with them in May 1982, and in November, I went to Holland with my own quintet. I was twenty-four years old. I was so excited I didn’t even feel jet lag.

  We got appreciation like I’d never seen before. I’d never seen people react to jazz music the way they did there. Bourbon Street was nice, and you’d get these people, and they’d get drunk and all of that, but this was sincere. That struck me. I felt like “I want to come back here again and again.” And of course, I have been.

  Back in the States, I carried on working the clubs in New Orleans. Then in 1983 I went up to Vancouver and spent three months working with Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. He was playing alto saxophone and singing, and I was with him at Gastown in Vancouver. I was up there with Shannon Powell—he had a lot of contacts up there, so we started working with different bands.

  I came back in 1983, and they were getting ready to hold the World’s Fair the following year, in 1984. The people that were behind the scenes for the organization were getting together a band called the Musical Ambassadors—this band was to go around promoting the Festival—they called it “A Year to Go.” Charlie Bering was the guy that had that club, Lu and Charlie’s. He was a great jazz lover and promoter of New Orleans music. Charlie got the band together, which consisted of myself, Phil Parnell, Walter Payton; Banu Gibson and Jeannie Ann Howell were the singers. On trombone was a guy called “Professor Gizmo”—I can’t think of his right name. We were a show band, played a bit of everything. We all sang, all had choreography and everything. Most of the charts were heads, and we played a few stocks.

  Then in ’84. the fair opened up and we played there a little bit. Then the Intercontinental Hotel opened, and at that time I was married to a young lady from Australia that I had met at Maison Bourbon back in ’78. She had a connection with the general manager of the Intercontinental, so I got to open at Pete’s Pub, with a quartet. I also got to play with Delia Reese for the grand opening. I had Shannon Powell on drums, Rusty Gilder on bass, and Ed Frank on piano. We were there for a year. It was a good gig. I was also playing at the newly opened Mahogany Hall, which used to be the Paddock Lounge. This was with me and Shannon, David Grillier on clarinet, Maynard Chatters on trombone; Mary Mayo was the singer, Emile Vinet on piano, and Curtis Mitchell on bass. My marriage was breaking up, but things were looking good from a business point of view. The Pete’s Pub gig folded, and the hotel started a jazz brunch on S
undays.

  In 1985, I left to go to Singapore with Trevor Richards and the Camelia Jazz Band. Trevor was on drums, Pud Brown on reeds, Quentin Batiste on piano. They opened in this five-star hotel. So I turned the brunch gig over to Lucien Barbarin, since I was going to be gone for three months. It ended up being over a year, because the gig was so successful that they renewed the contract. The first six months we had a chef from New Orleans. It was called the New Orleans Restaurant, very exclusive. Six nights a week, tuxedos every night.

  In January 1986, Pud went home because his wife wasn’t too well. Quentin Batiste went home too—he was homesick. So Ed Frank came in on piano and Charlie Gabriel on clarinet.

  We went on to play in Jakarta, Indonesia. I came home in September ’86, stayed for two weeks, and went again for nine months. Kuala Lumpur for a month, three weeks in the Philippines, and on to Manila. Then Bangkok, Taiwan, Hong Kong. Whenever we went to Indonesia, we’d stay three months in Jakarta. This went on all the way up until 1989. So I was in Asia for about four years.

  Then I hooked up with L. D. Young and Red Hope; that was the original Ramsay Lewis Trio. I met the guitarist Ernie Raglin, who was associated with the Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander. We did some recording together. We did a record called the Jazz Ambassadors with Lillian Boutté.

  When I came back, I’d really matured musically. We did this recording, and I’ll never forget Lucien Barbarin saying, “Wow, Leroy’s made it.” I did some gigs at Maison Bourbon, and I worked around with Wanda Rouzan. We played at the Meridien Hotel in Paris.

  Then I got a call from Harry Connick Jr.’s management. In May 1990, I went to play on the Brussels Jazz Rally, for a very nice guy called Jacques Cruyt—unfortunately now deceased. I got back from Belgium in early June and started rehearsing up in Princeton with the Harry Connick Orchestra. Harry had hit big with the motion picture soundtrack for When Harry Met Sally.

  That band gave me really great exposure that I hadn’t had before here in the United States. I fulfilled the same kind of role as Harry [“Sweets”] Edison in the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. We had a chart for “More” where I played what Sweets had played behind Frank Sinatra. It was the exact same Quincy Jones chart.

  At that time, I was in my second marriage. I had married a local young lady this time. Six months after I got married, I was on the road, so you can imagine what happened to that marriage! The big band headed to the top; then Harry switched to doing more commercial music. He did a record called She, and I performed on that as well.

  I got my first record deal on a major label because of Harry Connick Jr. He formed a record company that got distribution from Columbia. It was called More Cream from the Crop, and it was released in 1995. The next year I did Props for Pops, which was a tribute to Louis Armstrong, released in 1996. If it were not for Harry, I would not have had that opportunity. He had a lot of faith and confidence in me, and great respect for me as a musician.

  Since 1996, I’ve recorded several times with him and with other artists. I haven’t had the opportunity to record as leader, but that’s in the makings. Now, in 2001, I still work with Harry, and I’ve done some recording with some European friends of mine, including the Danish Radio Big Band. I’m still totally in love with music. It’s a blessing to play for audiences and for them to appreciate it.

  Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, Bass Horn

  BORN: New Orleans, September 15, 1949

  Played with Doc Paulin, Nat Dowe, the Hurricane Brass Band, the E. Gibson Brass Band, and Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band; founder and leader of the Chosen Few Brass Band

  Interviewed at his home on Dumaine Street, October 2002

  Photo by Marcel Joly

  The neighborhood I came up in was a family neighborhood, on Simon Bolivar. Everybody on the block stayed at my momma’s house. All the kids were raised right there. We all played together on the porch. It was just a big family house.

  My father used to hunt. We had hunting dogs and chickens and goats. Everybody on that block was from either Mississippi or Alabama. They had come to New Orleans to work the riverfronts, which was a blooming thing then. My mother would cook big pots of stuff; everybody ate greens and cornbread, fatback, ham hocks, all that stuff. My mother was from Georgia. She picked in the fields when she was a kid, so it was country cooking. Soul food. Everybody in the street would bring a plate, and she would feed everybody.

  When I was a kid, before integration, there was this place called the White Castle, had these little small hamburgers with onions and cheese on them. They were only a nickel apiece. We couldn’t go to the front of the White Castle because we were black—we had to go to the back window. My sisters would give me their nickels, and I’d go to the back and get them. We’d go in the backyard and eat them. My mother caught us with a whole box. She took them from us and threw them in the garbage can and threw some to the dogs. She said, “I don’t care how mad you get. You shouldn’t have gone there and bought them, because you can’t go and sit in there and eat them. Go and buy your hamburgers from the black people.” I said, “We don’t want to. We want the White Castle burgers.” My mother slapped me. She told me, as long as I live, don’t answer her back, and don’t ever go there and buy another hamburger. She was trying to make a point. It took me a long time to realize what she meant.

  There were no fences between the houses, we all just shared. In later years, the fences came. As the older people died off and other people bought the properties, that’s when the fences came. If somebody went out to the country, they’d come back with a hog and slaughter it. They’d cook it up in the yard and share it with everybody in the neighborhood. They’d have suppers in the backyard with a jukebox playing—yard parties.

  My father would hunt in the parishes, but you didn’t have to go that far. You could just go to New Orleans East and hunt—all that was woods and swampland back then. Now they built Jazzland, housing developments, shopping centers—you can’t hunt down there no more. He would go to St. Bernard Parish, Jefferson Parish over the river. There were a lot of places to hunt.

  My daddy must have had about fifty dogs at one time. They had pens in the yard for them. He had beagles, rabbit dogs, black and tick, bluetick hounds, all kinds of hunting dogs. My daddy worked on the riverfront. He’d bring home grits, mix up with some mash, feed the dogs. You could go to the Chinese restaurant—they didn’t use the livers and the gizzards; they put out big boxes of that stuff. What we didn’t use for the house, we’d put in a big pot in the yard, boil it up for the dogs. And go round the restaurants hustling scrap food. You fed dogs like you fed hogs—on anything.

  I was running wild, falling off the houses and stuff. I used to throw the Times-Picayune paper. There was a mortuary I had to deliver to. I used to throw the paper from my bike, but they told me I had to put the mortuary paper at the door—somebody had been taking their paper or something. I got off the bike and walked up to the door. I was just putting the paper down, when there was this knocking from the inside of the door, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Iran like hell and pissed all over myself!

  And there was an embalming studio right across from my house, on Simon Bolivar and Jackson, an old wooden building. Reb, the mortician, used to embalm the bodies in the back room there. We used to go get on the back fence and watch him working with the bodies in the back. He’d sneak round the side and catch us. “Get outta here, boy!” We’d run down the alley.

  We used to call Dryades Street the black people’s Canal Street. If you came to Canal Street in those days, you got a treat. This was segregation days. We shopped on Dryades, where the Jewish people had the stores. We didn’t go to Canal Street because we didn’t have the Canal Street prices. It was much cheaper uptown, like at the Big D department store. All that’s gone now; the buildings are still there. They’ve made apartment houses out of them, and there’s a black museum and stuff.

  The river trade went down, the oil fields went down, the city went down. Now, they’re trying to build the city on touri
st business. All the trade started going down in the early seventies. Everyone worked as longshoremen—the biggest industry down here was the riverfront. All the steel companies were open. Up by the convention center, you can still see some of the stacks where the steel mills were.

  There was live music all over the city. Down in the Tremé, there was the old Caledonia, Mama Ruth’s Cozy Corner. The old Caldonia’s gone, but they named another place the Caldonia. That’s after Armstrong Park came through and they lost all that development in there. Joe’s Cozy Corner used to be Mama Ruth’s; Kid Sheik and them used to play in there. I used to go down on my bike and watch the funerals and things. The bands would start by Ruth’s Cozy Corner. Actually, Harold Dejan was the first band that went in the Trem é to play jazz funerals. None of the other brass bands wanted to play funerals in the Tremé—they were frightened of it. The Tremé was always known for drugs and crime.

  The ward I stayed in was the Third Ward, but they called it Central City—it’s the center of the city of New Orleans. Where I lived was only about seven blocks from the Garden District. When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike and play up there—it was the hustling area. You needed money to go to a show, you go by the old folks’ home on St. Charles, help the people with their groceries from the car to their apartment, they would give you a quarter or something like that. I played ball on the street, helped people rake their yards, cut grass. I had a push mower—it used to put blisters on the side of your hand; you had to put a glove on. If you were hustling, you wanted that money. I hustled soft drink bottles; the glass bottles were worth three cents.