The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is an American outfit based in New Orleans. The ensemble was established in 1977, by Benny Jones and members of the Tornado Brass Band. (Submitted photo)
Dirty Dozen comes to Yellow Springs
- Published: November 19, 2024
New Orleans musical legends the Dirty Dozen Brass Band are slated to take the stage at the Foundry Theater at Antioch College Wednesday, Nov. 20, bringing 47 years of musical innovation to a Yellow Springs audience.
The history of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which formed in 1977, can be traced back more than 100 years earlier with the formation of 19th-century social and pleasure clubs. These groups were formed by Black citizens of New Orleans to help pay for services, including insurance and funerals, that were often denied by white service providers. Brass bands have been closely associated with social and pleasure clubs since their inception, particularly as part of second line parades, which historically have often accompanied funerals in New Orleans.
By the 1970s, brass bands were still a part of New Orleans’ traditional musical culture. At that time, a group of musicians who had grown from a youth-centered band program at Fairview Baptist Church regularly played second line gigs in the city. They played together, off and on, enough that they called themselves the Original Sixth Ward Dirty Dozen — named for the Tremé neighborhood’s Dirty Dozen Social and Pleasure Club — with a rotating panel of musicians.
“Different cats were coming in and going out,” said Roger Lewis, a saxophonist and — along with trumpeter Gregory Davis and sousaphonist Kirk Joseph — one of three original members still playing and touring with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.
In speaking with the News last week, the New Orleans born-and-raised Lewis, now 83, said he had just come off a tour with Fats Domino’s band — with which he would continue to tour until 2008 — in 1976 when he returned to New Orleans to study music at Southern University. That was when he met and began playing gigs with the second line players who made up the nucleus of the Original Sixth Ward Dirty Dozen.
“They started calling me to sit in and play second lines and do some gigs,” Lewis said. “One of the guys was [trombonist] Charles Joseph, and he said, ‘Man, we’re always playing together — we ought to get together and start rehearsing.’”
So Lewis, Charles Joseph and his younger brother Kirk, Gregory Davis, trumpeter Efrem Towns, tenor saxophonist Kevin Harris, snare drummer Jenell Marshall and bass drummer Lionel Batiste got to work rehearsing.
According to Lewis, the musicians who would become the Dirty Dozen Brass Band performed traditional New Orleans-style brass band hymns and marches — the kind of music you’d expect at parades — but also incorporated jazz and big band elements from musicians including Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver and Duke Ellington.
“We started bringing that music to the streets — and the beat was slightly faster than normal,” he said. “It started a whole new trend of dancing, because before that, people were just sliding down the street.”
In rehearsals and indoor gigs, the Dirty Dozen were shaking up the traditional space, too. Swing, funk and bebop — the latter being a special focus for Lewis, he said — began making appearances in their repertoire.
“Whatever kind of music you were exposed to, you had an opportunity to play it,” Lewis said. “And if you had original songs you wanted to play … nine times out of 10, your music would get played.”
By the time the Dirty Dozen Brass Band released its first album, “My Feet Can’t Fail Me Now,” in 1984, it was clear the band had made its mark on both New Orleans music and popular music in general. Combining traditional brass band elements with a wide range of genre influences became the band’s calling card, and they regularly toured internationally in the 1980s and ’90s.
The Dirty Dozen’s popularity also helped spawn a burst of renewed interest in brass bands, and influenced the formation and musical direction of the Rebirth Brass Band and Soul Rebels, among others.
”We kind of started, I think, a whole new revolution and changed the history of New Orleans brass band music — but not even thinking we were making that kind of a statement,” Lewis said. “Then over the years, everybody wanted a little piece of Dirty Dozen.”
Lewis referred to the many musical collaborations the Dirty Dozen Brass Band has taken part in since the 1980s. They include albums with Original Sixth Ward Dirty Dozen band leader Danny Barker, Dizzy Gillespie, Branford Marsalis, Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, Dr. John, The Neville Brothers, Widespread Panic and Modest Mouse — among many others.
Over the years, the musical and personnel makeup of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band has changed — the traditional snare and bass drum were replaced with a trap set when Marshall and Batiste left the band in the 1990s, and keys and guitar have woven in and out over the years.
The freedom to change and grow, Lewis said, is a hallmark of the band, in which he’s now known by the nickname “Dirty Old Man” — which he was quick to point out had to do with his musical style and the creation of one of the band’s well-loved numbers.
“I wasn’t thinking about it like that!” he said with a laugh. “One night everybody else had left the stage and I was selling CDs, and somebody said, ‘Why don’t you play something?’”
Lewis, who said he used to have a one-man-band act in California in the 1970s, obliged, pulling out his baritone saxophone and improvising a tune. The low, bone-rattling groove of the baritone sax was soon joined by a drum beat from then-band members Terence Higgins on drums and Jamie McLean on guitar, and Lewis started riffing.
“I just said, ‘I’m a dirty old man, dirty old man, I feel like spankin’ somebody’ — just anything that came into my head,” Lewis said. “Now people want to hear it all the time, and people started calling me ‘Dirty Old Man’ — but I was thinking about it like the name of the band, Dirty Dozen.”
Lewis said he’s long considered himself a kind of “free agent,” in that the baritone sax — his specialty in the Dirty Dozen’s lineup, though he plays alto and tenor, too — is often confined to a piece’s bass line. Not so for Lewis, who moves between foundational bass and leading melody during a performance set.
“I can play with the bass player or I can play with the ensemble — or I create my own parts,” he said.
He added that the freedom to play around and find what works is all part of the band’s “musical gumbo” sound.
“It’s a lot of different ingredients, and then with seasoning and everything, it tastes so good,” he said. “It’s a mixture of every kind of music you can think of — everything is there.”
Lewis said Yellow Springs can expect the same kind of seasoning when the Dirty Dozen visits the Foundry next week — and referred to the band’s music as a dish that’s good for “mind, body and soul.”
He said: “If you’re a musician, you might come in and try to analyze the music, and that’s for your mind; if you come in and you wanna shake a little something, that’s for your body. And if you want to feel something, we’ve got something for the inner part of you — your soul.”
The Dirty Dozen Brass band will perform Wednesday, Nov. 20, beginning at 7 p.m., in the Foundry Theater at Antioch College. Concession offerings for sale will include appetizers, crafted by Dawn Richter, senior kitchen manager at Antioch College.
Regular general admission is $35 — and thanks to a grant from the Ohio Arts Council ARTS Rise Program, which expands representation and access to the arts, reduced-rate tickets at a price of $17.50 are available for this program. As always, $5 tickets are available for Antioch College students and youth under age 18.
For more information, and to purchase tickets, go to http://www.bit.ly/DirtyDozenFoundry24.
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