VERMONT’S PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND
Tom Stanizola, for instance, was so old that he needed help just getting onto the stage area at the Salisbury Congregational Church. But at his seat, with his clarinet, he went to some very high places that very, very few people ever reach.
I was only half joking when I told band leader and cornet player Gene Childers that I felt privileged to have seen the Jubilee Jazz Band in their prime. The 70-somethings that comprise this unit have lost little or nothing musically, and would be stirring to hear for someone who was blind and unaware of their longevity. I call them Vermont’s Preservation Hall Jazz Band in reference to a group of veteran New Orleans musicians whose performances became legendary in the years before Hurricane Katrina hit. “Living Treasures” would be good, too, since they, like the artists and artisans so honored in their home countries have kept alive skills and sensibilities that continue to enrich us.
For the Salisbury series, Childers had arranged a musical tour of the Roaring Twenties, as the decade preceding the Depression became known. Year by year, he picked a hit number that helped to convey that time of speakeasies, bobbed haircuts, and dancing the Charleston. Each time, his cohorts rose to the challenge and delivered a resounding performance, each musician taking his solo as well as contributing to the ensemble playing. No, he said afterward, they hadn’t rehearsed the program. He had sprung it on them that night—and troupers that they were, they came through in grand style.
For the record, in order as Childers wrote the names down, they are: Tom Stanizola, clarinet; Andy Ellenberger, piano; Woody Strobeck, trombone; Tom D’Andrea, drums; Peter Williams, bass; Gene Childers, cornet. Childers, by the way, is the father of Nathan Childers, who has gone on to a distinguished career as a New York City jazzman. Hearing the father, you understand why the son chose the saxophone, not the trumpet, as his instrument.
There is an Irish folk song in which an old woman recalls the heroes, long gone, of the first rebellion against English rule, and says, “We may have as good, but we’ll never have better. Glory-o, glory-o, to the bold Fenian men.”
Go hear the Jubilee Jazz Band if you can. Dance to their music if you still can, or if you can’t, remember when you could and smile.
Comments