Keeping the Beat on the Street by Mick Burns

Bourbon Street in the evenings, and I heard these cats, slapping these basses. That’s where I got those turnarounds from .
    For some reason, I started to play left handed—I even put the valves in reverse order. I didn’t get the credit for bringing the swing to it—Kirk Joseph gets the credit for it. It came from me; I wanted to swing the band like an upright bass player .
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    By the time I got in with Danny Barker and the Fairview band, I was a grown man in my middle twenties—I’m fifty-two now. What happened, Gregg Stafford came to me. Danny needed somebody to play tuba with the band; the kids couldn’t get the tuba together. So I shaved my beard off and went down there. After a year or so, Danny said, “Y’all getting too big now. You, Gregg, Leroy, some of you others, y’all get together and form the Hurricane Brass Band.”
    We were powerful, and that was when the swing started to hit the traditional music— I was the oldest one in the band. We started to get a lot of second lines and a lot of convention work, the Fairmont and stuff too. That’s when I think Louis Cottrell, Harold Dejan, and Herman Sherman got together to split the band up. It got to the point where Gregg and Leroy were both playing with the Tuxedo; Joe Torregano and I went to the Olympia .
    The music started changing in the seventies—Daryl Adams and those kids, they were thinking of different modern riffs. In 1974, that’s when Milton started wanting to do different things with the Olympia, and Harold kept telling him, “No, we’re not going to do that.” That’s when “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” happened. I’ll never forget it: we were leading a Bacchus Parade on St. Charles. Then we got “I Got a Woman” together. That’s when the Olympia started changing. We played my tune “Tuba Fats.” How that came about, we were doing a parade, and when the band stopped, the second liners, with the tambourines and stuff, started singing “Hey Pocky Way”—the Indian song that the [Funky] Meters had recorded. So I started putting a bass part to it, and it became a song .
    That’s when I formed the Chosen Few Brass Band. Milton worked a bunch of second lines with us—I used to hire him and Edmund Foucher. We had Kermit [Ruffins] too, but he had to play with the Rebirth—they were just forming. So I would lose him. And I would hire Stackman or Freddie Kemp. We were really playing rhythm and blues with a brass band. It gave Milton a chance to play what he wanted, and we were already headed in that direction anyway. We would play the same tune for eight or twelve blocks .
    The Rebirth wasn’t as popular then; they got popular in the later years. I decided to get away from that. It was important to keep the traditional music going too—the guys in the Olympia were getting old, and there was room for another traditional brass band. There was a lot of work at conventions and stuff. Plus I was getting older, too .
    But what really changed things was the Dirty Dozen. That band was a funny thing, really, it started as a joke. Once Sunday parades were over with, I went by the Caldonia bar to see what was going on. Benny Jones and them were all there; they were second lining to the jukebox, beating on the tables, dancing out the door—it was eleven o’clock in the morning!
    They were all, “Hey, Tuba, get your horn!” And there was this trumpet player called Cyrille Salvant, he was a hell of a player. He was as drunk as a skunk, playing with them. So I went and got my horn—me and Cyrille started to play along with the jukebox. Then all these other guys went home and got drums and stuff—they all lived right there in the neighborhood. So then we took it to the street .

    Chosen Few Brass Band (Eddie Bo Parish, Anthony Lacen, Elliott Callier, Benny Jones, Kenneth Austin, George Johnson) Photo by Marcel