Album Reviews

Best known for playing the traditional jazz it was founded to preserve fifty years ago, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band here celebrates its next fifty with a forward looking program of audacious, often raucous and sometimes mischievous new originals mostly written by 41 year old Ben Jaffe, Preservation Hall's current Creative Director and son of the hall's founders Allan and Sandra Jaffe. Please read Roger Hahn's superb two part Preservation Hall history.

The album co-produced by Jaffe and My Morning Jacket's Jim James is a non-stop romp through New Orleans music making, redolent with brass and reed and heavily syncopated rhythms. Trumpets blare, trombones slide and zoom, tubas growl and provide grumbling bass anchors, clarinets wail and all laugh, taunt, punctuate and weave their way through the tunes that exalt life and thumb their noses at death.

The high energy title tune opener, sounding like the soundtrack to an old Max Fleischer cartoon, gets things off to a raucous good humored start and the energy does not flag thereafter, even on the few ballads like the atmospheric, high humidity "August Nights" for me, one of the set's highlights. There are no low lights among the 11 tunes.

Once rehearsals had been completed James and recording engineer Kevin Ratterman drove a van full of recording gear down to New Orleans and set it up on the small hall's wooden benches. The sound is superbly spacious, harmonically rich and dynamically generous. If your system can do it, the bottom end extension and punch will just about knock you down. If it sounds bloaty and out of control down there, blame your system not the recording!

The hall isn't large. The space drawn by the recording is. I connected via email with mixer Michael Brauer who confirmed that the space is a combination of room sound and plate, not digital reverb.

The 180g RTI pressed LP packaging is well done, including nice jacket and sleeve paper stock and a full sized color PHJB poster. The sources were 96/24 bit files.

When you need a musical and sonic pick me up, look no further than this record. The title says it all: That's It!. Disclaimer: "no dynamics were squashed or injured in the making of this record!"