“You Get More With 504” is the slogan for this small but interesting British trad jazz label. And perhaps you do get a bit more bang for your buck from this little company that’s adopted our telephone area code as its trademark. You certainly get value—an impressive 27 cuts on the Six and Seven Eighths String Band disc, 23 on the Louis Nelson offering, and a healthy 20 on the Leon Prima/Sharkey Bonano collection, which is clearly the best of these three CDs that illustrate elements of the New Orleans jazz revival scene that began in the 1940s.

The live air shots of concerts by the Leon Prima and Sharkey Bonano bands are my favorite. They clearly demonstrate that there is a strong stylistic distinction between these New Orleans-based white bands and other “Dixieland” jazz groups in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles that were playing much the same repertoire at the same time. Even though the other bands often included New Orleans musicians among their members, these guys are more loose, more laid-back—more New Orleans in their approach to the music.

Louis Nelson was one of the masters of the old-fashioned “gut bucket” trombone style. Like many other older black jazz artists, he served as teacher, mentor, and role model for young European and Asian musicians who wanted to play New Orleans jazz. This Nelson CD was recorded in England with two groups of British players organized by drummer and record producer Barry Martyn.

The focus here is on the New Orleans tradition of playing all kinds of music in a jazz mode, but in this case it doesn’t quite come off.

Such varied fare as “Danny Boy,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” seem more in the nature of conjurer’s tricks than a serious musical effort. Several are described as previously unissued; the word “previously” might better be replaced by “mercifully.” But everyone at least is having fun.

Fun is the watchword for the Six and Seven Eighths String Band, a bunch of middle class New Orleans white boys who began playing together around 1912 or so and were still at it—at least the survivors—when these recordings were made nearly 40 years later. If you want to know why they called themselves the six and seven eighths band, you’ll just have to go out and buy the disc—after all, a reviewer isn’t supposed to give everything away. The announcer who tells their story at the beginning of the CD won my heart forever by describing the band as “the most professional amateurs in the world.” I’d be hard pressed to challenge that description, or to tell you that listening to these performances isn’t going to provide you with a rollicking good time. There might even be room for a band like this today.