Nickel-a-Dance, a free series of Sunday afternoon jazz concerts held each spring and fall is returning to its longtime home, The Maison music club, 508 Frenchmen Street. Free concerts will be held every Sunday throughout the month of November from 4 to 7 p.m. The series attracts a diverse group of fans who gather to celebrate jazz as America’s original music as performed by the best of today’s classic jazz bands.
Th fall series features four acclaimed band leaders.
November 7 | Thais Clark & Her Jazzsters
Thais Clark‘s voice has been compared that of 1920s-era classic blues stylists such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. Known for performing show-stopping renditions of old blues classics such as “See See Rider” and “Muddy Water,” Clark has performed at Lincoln Center and toured China with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. She was recorded on the cast album for One Mo’ Time and is a favorite at numerous local festivals and on concert stages throughout Europe.
November 14 | Gregg Stafford & His Jazz Hounds
Gregg Stafford’s trumpet playing is steeped in tradition. In his youth, however, he had no desire to become a musician. By chance, his high school band leader needed a trumpet player and recruited Stafford. Nine months later, he started marching in parades. He was sixteen years old, and at that time, in the late 1960s, brass band music was for “old men.” But Stafford had grown up watching brass bands and loved practicing tunes at home. He began playing in the E. Gibson Brass Band with childhood friends Tuba Fats Lacen and Michael Myers and subsequently in Danny Barker’s Fairview Baptist Church Band. Stafford also played in the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, which he went on to lead, and the Olympia Brass Band.
November 21 | Tim Laughlin Jazz Band
A native of NewOrleans, Tim Laughlin fell in love with the sound of the clarinet before he ever held one after hearing a childhood friend practicing his clarinet. He was nine when he received his first horn and shortly after became hooked on the New Orleans clarinet-style after hearing it on the radio. After finishing high school he began working around town and eventually joined the musicians union where he would meet and perform with some of his most influential mentors. He has recorded over a dozen solo CDs among which “The Isle of Orleans”(2003) is an award-winning collection of Laughlin originals.
November 28 | New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra
The New Leviathan Oriental Fox-Trot Orchestra is an American revival orchestra that performs authentic orchestrations of vintage American popular music from the 1890s through the early 1930s. The orchestra plays particular attention to the music of New Orleans. In addition to the well known compositions of jazz and ragtime composers like Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, and Eubie Blake, the orchestra’s repertory includes the work of less well remembered New Orleans Tin Pan Alley composers such as Larry Buck, Joe Verges, Paul Sarebresole and Nick Clesi.
Nickel-A-Dance is supported by the New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Fund and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. For more information, visit here.
