Nickel A Dance, a series of free and family-friendly New Orleans traditional jazz concerts returns this spring to provide fun entertainment for those who may not be into the city’s nightlife scene. The Sunday afternoon jazz concerts are presented each spring and fall and remain a hit with children, families, seniors and the general public who don’t regularly go to nightclubs. Founded in 1994, the concerts attract a diverse group of fans who meet at The Maison to celebrate jazz as America’s original dance music. This season, the series features acclaimed band leaders from musical families that go back generations in New Orleans jazz history.
Nickel a Dance Spring 2022 Schedule
March 6 – Gerald French & The Original Tuxedo Jazz Band
March 13 – Kevin Louis & His Top Dollar Trad Band
March 20 – Wendell Brunious & The New Orleans Jazz All-Stars
March 27 – Tom Saunders & The Tomcats
Shows take place from 4-7 p.m. at Maison, 508 Frenchmen Street. Admission is free but donations to the bands are encouraged.
Gerald French is from one of the pioneering families of New Orleans traditional jazz and is known as “The Giant” for his own original style of drumming, which has taken him all over the world performing many types of music.
Trumpeter Kevin Louis is a 1995 graduate of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He earned a bachelor of music degree in jazz performance from Oberlin Conservatory of Music (’99), and a masters of arts from the Aaron Copeland’s School of Music at Queens College (’01).
Famous for “knowing more than 2,000 songs,” trumpeter and vocalist Wendell Brunious boasts a towering musical family tree primarily flowered with trumpets. He is the son of trumpet master John “Picket” (or “Picky”) Brunious Sr. and Nazimova “Chinee” Santiago, the niece of guitarist/banjoist Willie Santiago. Brunious credits some of his early development to having worked with the Olympia Brass Band under the direction of his cousin, bandleader/saxophonist Harold Dejan. Extremely knowledgeable in the tradition and history of jazz, Brunious enjoys sprinkling his conversation with advisory quotes from his father and other artists who have crossed his musical path through his decades-long career.
Trumpet and tuba player Tom Saunders’ 12-piece big band is a jazz orchestra known as the TomCats, playing 1920s “hot dance” and 1930s swing of New Orleans and New York’s Harlem. Tom Saunders and the TomCats perform a large repertoire with a focus on the rare, rarely heard “hot music” of this period.
For more information on Nickel A Dance, visit here.
