Two jazz forces meet for a magical jam session in the lively short documentary Resurrection! Airto Moreira and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Moreira, a world renowned Brazilian percussionist, meets the legendary Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Mardi Gras in New Orleans in a jam session arranged by filmmaker and jazz fan Dale Djerassi. The musical alchemy reignites the 76-year-old Moreira’s passion to play after a long period of inactivity. The film can be viewed on streaming devices worldwide through November 21 by way of the virtual cinema of the New Orleans Film Festival.
Moreira became a professional musician at age 13 as a pioneer of the emerging samba jazz scene in Brazil. In the 1960s, while in his twenties, he followed his wife, Bossa nova singer Flora Purim, to the US where she performed with Stan Getz. Moreira came into prominence performing with the likes of Miles Davis, Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter.
Djerassi became very familiar with Moreira’s life story while filming Nada Será Como Antes (Nothing Will Be As It Was), about the return of Moreira and Purim to Brazil in 1988. Decades later Djerassi turned his lens on Moreira again after arranging a musical meetup that exceeded all expectations.
Djerassi joined OffBeat editor David Johnson for a conversation about the film. Moreira’s daughter, Diana Purim, added extra commentary.
David Johnson: How did you first become familiar with Preservation Hall?
Dale Djerassi: As probably a 10-year-old in California, I was taken to hear the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Stanford University by my jazz-loving mother, and it left an impression to this day. I had a father born in Vienna who loved the opera, and I went to the opera and the symphony, but I went to jazz things with my mother. I heard Louis Armstrong at Stanford, and I went to the Monterey Jazz Festival. But I heard Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Stanford.
How did you reconnect with the band later in your life?
I spent a few years living in New Orleans, and I was obviously going to Jazz Fest, and around the French Quarter, and I went to Preservation Hall and fell in love with the place and the band that I had heard as a child. I managed to meet Ben Jaffe, whose parents started Preservation Hall. And I saw him then in San Francisco, and we got to know each other and became friends.
I was catching Preservation Hall in New York sometimes, and also when they came to San Francisco. There’s a fantastic jazz venue in San Francisco, the San Francisco Jazz Center, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band was coming and doing four nights there, and I was attending every one of those shows. They had a different guest every night. Now this is several years ago, and I was thinking, while I was sitting at the third show, the third night, and I knew some of the guests like Shovels & Rope, this little Americana group. I happened to know them from Charleston, South Carolina. They were playing with them. Preservation Hall played with all kinds of people, Chucho Valdés another night.
I did a film with Airto Moreira and Flora Purim in 1988, 20 years after they had left Brazil. I went to Brazil and traveled with them. So I had kept in touch. Airto was in Los Angeles and he had some physical issues that he was dealing with, and he was just kind of down. I had this thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to get Airto together with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band? So at the end of a show in San Francisco, I went to talk to Ben in the green room and I told him this: “You play with all these different people, have you ever thought about playing with Airto, if you haven’t already played with him?”
And Ben said, “Airto? Is he still alive?” And I said, “Yeah, he’s alive. He’s 75 and he’s in L.A., and I’ve spoken to him not that long ago. And by the way, I made a film in 1988 with Airto and Flora in Brazil.” And Ben said, “Send it to me. Can I see it?” I sent it to him, and I didn’t hear back for a while. And then I suddenly heard from Ben, and he said, “I watched the film. We were on the tour bus, I was with the band. I watched the film, the band watched it, and we totally want to play with Airto.”
Ben said to me, “Why don’t you come to New Orleans with Airto for Mardi Gras?” I’m like, “Sounds good to me.” And then I met with them and with Airto down in L.A., at Musso & Frank’s restaurant. I was just pitching this idea to go to New Orleans.
But Airto’s just down, he’s kind of hurting. He couldn’t quite get to that place of thinking “I’m going to go to New Orleans, and I’m going to play with…whatever.” But we were on it.
You did visit New Orleans for Mardi Gras 2017. How was the musical encounter?
Mardi Gras morning, as planned, we went to Congo Square. Ben had been in Florida, and he said at the last minute, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it, because my mother’s having surgery here.” She was living in Palm Beach.
Ben was like, “I’m sorry, I can’t believe it, but the band will be there,” and all that. And then his mother had a day that she had to take off before she was going to have the follow-up surgery, so he flew back up here in time and we all gathered in Congo Square on Mardi Gras morning. It was very quiet, not too many people up that early on Mardi Gras morning unless they had been out all night.
And so we were just out there, and you see that in the film, that was literally the first meeting. I mean, there is the shot of Walter and Airto saying, “How do you do?” followed by Walter saying to Airto, “Happy Mardi Gras.”
It didn’t take a whole lot to make the music happen, other than here we are. So then a few people drifted in and a lady started dancing, but it’s still Mardi Gras morning and quiet there. For me, that moment was magic, because that’s what I had imagined when I was sitting at SF Jazz for those four shows of Preservation Hall thinking it would be great to get Airto with these guys.
We went to the Zulu parade after that jam in Congo Square. And then that night we were somewhere looking at a parade up in some balcony at somebody’s place that we were taken to.
Airto also performed inside Preservation Hall. When did that happen?
Yes, a concert at the Hall was the next day, Ash Wednesday, because Mardi Gras is one of the two days that Preservation Hall has no shows. They are closed on Mardi Gras and Christmas but out there putting on shows every other day of the year. In the film I cut between Congo Square and the Hall, back and forth, but that was the actual progression.
What do you think this experience did for Airto?
It’s right there on the screen, when he says, in his own words, what it did for him. So I know that it’s not just me projecting this notion, because he says it, right? He truly got some kind of vitality out of it. Revitalization, whatever you want to call it. Because, as he says, “For five years, I didn’t even have the vibe.” He had been canceling shows.
Diana Purim: We thought it was over, we really did.
Dale Djerassi: And then, all of a sudden he’s like, “Yeah!” There is a little moment in that film—some significant months after the visit to New Orleans—we’re in a park in Brazil and Airto tells me, “For five years, I didn’t have the vibe. And then I met them, the Preservation Hall Band, and it was with them that I got this inspiration, and I’m back.” He had since recorded another record in Brazil.
Diana Purim: You could visually see the moment that he had been transformed. He was literally a husk of himself up to the point when we got to Congo Square and then he shook hands with Charlie. And then Walter started playing, and everybody just was like—there was just no pretension, it was as real as it gets. And I saw the hair on Airto’s arms go up, and the fire lit up behind his eyes. And he picked up his stuff, and he just started playing. And he was a different man from that point on.
Moreira’s visit to New Orleans also led to a collaboration between for Diana Purim and her band Eyedentity with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Preservation Hall is featured in a single on the album Pais Da Maravilha (Wonderland) on the Ropeadope label.
The 2021 New Orleans Film Festival includes 28 world premieres. For more information, visit here.
