Over 45 Years of Musical Gumbo with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band

What are you going to wear to go out on New Year’s Eve?

If you’re hip enough and lucky enough to snag a ticket to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s shows at SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium on that terminal Tuesday, then 83-year-old baritone saxophonist Roger Lewis has some wardrobe and health advice: “Better put your sweatsuit and your tennis shoes on. And if you got a weight problem, I guarantee you’re going to lose about five pounds.”

That’s because there’ll be a roomy dance floor, and the extended listening to the dynamic seven-piece ensemble from New Orleans is going to have you up and on it for the greater part of those shows, which start at 8 pm and 10:30 pm (the later show for SFJAZZ Members only). “We play for the mind, the body, and the soul,” declares Lewis in a phone conversation from his home in the Gentilly Terrace neighborhood in the Crescent City’s 8th Ward.

The Dirty Dozen has been fulfilling that tripartite mission since its formation in 1977, with four of its current players still onboard since then: Lewis, trumpeter and vocalist Gregory Davis, sousaphonist Kirk Joseph, and tenor saxophonist Kevin Harris. They’ve evolved from second line street performers to a club band to a recording and internationally touring ensemble collaborating with musical celebrities from the worlds of jazz, funk, retro pop, and rock. Last year, they scored a GRAMMY for Best American Roots Performance, for the song “Stompin’ Ground,” with Aaron Neville.

Throughout their creative metamorphosis, the band has maintained allegiance to a brass band tradition that extends back to antebellum New Orleans, when mixed-race Creoles and so-called free people of color performed as professional instrumentalists. The instrumentation of military bands during the Civil War, primarily horns and drums, were adopted after Emancipation by Black brass bands. A parallel influence in the Black wards of New Orleans came from the spirit, rhythms, and dances of slaves, carried over from western Africa and the Caribbean, in Sunday gatherings at Congo Square, in the Tremé neighborhood.

The intertwining of European harmonic arrangement and African polyrhythms was furthered in the early 20th Century by the development of jazz, for which New Orleans has been credited as its birthplace. Brass bands, outfitted in matching shirts, ties, and hats, persisted into the middle of the century, in benevolent associations known as social and pleasure clubs, in the Black neighborhoods of the city.

In permitted processions through the streets, a tradition of the city, there would be a first line or main line of members of the social and pleasure clubs. They’d parade in celebration of anniversaries and holidays, or to and from funeral parlors and cemeteries, accompanied by a brass band. A larger second line of neighborhood folk dressed fancifully and twirling parasols, dancing and communing with each other, would follow the music, sometimes performed by additional bands. The second line developed as its own tradition, associated with a musical genre hybridizing older, staid brass arrangements with newer, more danceable elements.

As gigs for brass bands dried up during the late 1970s, young musicians took to rehearsing for their own social and musical edification, in the process forging new musical friendships. Roger Lewis had started on piano as a child, on the encouragement of his mother, “a church lady.” His dad had bought him his first sax, which he played in marching and concert bands during junior and senior high school. Lewis went on to accompany singer Irma Thomas in the late ‘60s, and he joined rock veteran Fats Domino in 1971. On break from touring with Fats, Lewis gigged in Las Vegas and Northern California, where he reconnected with Thomas and returned to New Orleans as her “personal saxophonist.”

In those informal rehearsals, “we played some traditional music,” says Lewis. “But by rehearsing every day, a lot of the guys wanted to play different kinds of music. Someone would say, ‘Hey, man, let’s play a Michael Jackson song!’ Okay, boom! Then someone else would say, ‘Let’s play “Caravan”.’ In their soloing, they sometimes channeled avant-garde improvisation.

“We were still a traditional New Orleans band. . . but we would start bringing tunes out to the street that people would play in clubs. The traditional music had been really laid back, but we picked the beat up, started playing faster. And that had never really been done before.” Says Times-Picayune journalist Keith Spera, “They took a music form that was a lot of fun and made it into something that was more sophisticated and complicated, but every bit as fun.”

Adopting and refining this updated mindset, Lewis and several musicians from dormant or extinct brass bands formed up as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Their moniker is likely associated with the game of Dozens, common in some Black communities and involving a competitive exchange of insults. When related to sexual issues, the game is renamed Dirty Dozens.

“We used to play picnics,” Lewis recalls. “We used to play at baseball games, and we even participated in a game once. All that kind of stuff. Our business card should read, ‘From Birthdays to Funerals.’ We cover the whole thing, so you could even book your own funeral.”

They accompanied second line processions from parks to popular Black clubs and eventually landed a regular Monday gig through most of the 1980s at the small Glass House.

Crowding into the Glass House among dancers eager to try new moves to the Dirty Dozens' energized eclectic song lists (“We’re like a big old musical gumbo”) were visiting celebrities seeking late night excitement after their own gigs. “It got to be so popular, man,” says Lewis. “One night we had Manhattan Transfer in the back of the room, Dizzy Gillespie and Bernard Purdy were sitting there at the bar.” Other new fans included Horace Silver and David Byrne. At another club, Daryl’s, they caught the ear of Jerry Brock, founder of WWOZ, the prime radio showcase for New Orleans talent. Brock produced the first of the band’s fifteen recordings (some of which have guested Gillespie, Branford Marsalis, Elvis Costello, John Medeski, Dr. John, and Norah Jones).

Brock also booked the band’s first ‘white club’ gig, at Tipitina’s, and through the rest of the ‘80s, while maintaining their home base at the Glass House, they went on to tour the US and Europe under the aegis of promoter George Wein. The Dirty Dozen toured with and/or guested on records with Elvis Costello, the Neville Brothers, Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews, the Black Crowes, Buddy Guy, and Modest Mouse, showcasing the breadth and adaptability of their musical approach. “They can work at that level and make these acts sound better,” says Keith Spera. “And that attests to how good they are, in and of themselves.”

Since the turn of the millennium, the Dirty Dozen has taken on younger members and has become an inspiration to numerous younger New Orleans groups, eager to meld newer sounds with the old. The band continues to adopt and rework material by their favorite colleagues, including Gillespie, Silver, and the Rolling Stones. In 2006 they released their version of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 disc What’s Going On, as a response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Lewis sees Gaye’s rhetorical question as still timely, on the border of a new year. “Like, what’s going on right now? Politically speaking, we got some crazy stuff going on, and it’s unnecessary. But I just want y’all to have a good time and let your hair down. Tomorrow ain’t promised.”

Dirty Dozen Brass Band performs two New Year's Eve concerts in Miner Auditorium on 12/31 at 8pm and 10:30 pm (10:30 performance for SFJAZZ Members only). Tickets and more information are available here.

As an award-winning veteran entertainment journalist and author, Jeff Kaliss has written for regional, national, international, and online publications about jazz, rock, blues, classical, and world music. He’s also a published poet, based in San Francisco, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.