Dirty Dozen Brass Band: From Elvis Costello to the Black Crowes

A Half-Dozen Dirty Dozen Brass Band Facts: 

1) Style: New Orleans jazz warped with be-bop, funk, reggae and much more 

2) Founded: April 1977 

3) Releases: Nine full-length 

4) Recorded with: Elvis Costello, Widespread Panic, The Black Crowes, The Neville Brothers and more 

5) Shared stages with: Miles Davis, Al Green, Los Lobos, The Grateful Dead, Ray Charles, The Squirrel Nut Zippers and more 

6) Tours: 30 different countries; including Brazil, Japan, Israel, China, all through Europe and Asia

On the last record [Buckjump] you guys did a lot of live tracking. Has that been the norm?

It has. Well, there have been times where we've done that kinda thing. For the new record, the record company wanted a more live, unrehearsed, loose kinda record. Now, when we would normally go in to record, we would go in with a lot of rehearsal under our belt and then we'd run the tape and pick a song to check the levels and make sure everyone was comfortable and all that kinda stuff. And then we'd proceed with trying to get the perfect recording, or the one with the best energy. On this record, I think the record company wanted to do just the opposite — they wanted to record the process of us getting a song together. Now, some of the songs we already had together and knew how we were gonna play them and all that stuff. But there were several songs, for instance "Run Joe", that's a song we wanted to do several recordings back but just had never gotten to. So I made some tapes of Louie Jordan doing the song and we had it with us while we were on the road, but we had never rehearsed it or played it in public or anything like that. So the day we recorded that song, we put it up in the studio for everybody to hear, to sorta figure out what we were gonna do. Didn't write an arrangement of it or anything like that. And then we rehearsed our parts separately. We recorded it in [Daniel] Lanois' studio here in New Orleans, so there were several rooms. The trumpets could rehearse alone, saxophones, the rhythm section... so we did it like that, and then we came together to record.

So no individual section knew exactly what the other section was going to be doing?

No. And then we talked through it before we started to run some tape. Ran through it one time to make sure everybody was comfortable with the format of it, and then when we decided to give it a shot to see if the format was actually going to work, that was the first take on it, the first recording. And they kept that one.

That's great. Who was making the choices as to which takes?

Well, we were working in the studio at that time with John Medeski. He was operating as producer. When you operate as producer, you're primarily working for the record company. And so, we were going by what we thought they expressed to him that they wanted to get. Which was fine. The track ended up being fine. If you listen to some of the Buckjump CD, there are what would normally be outtakes — the talking and clowning around. And they decided to leave that in. Now, that's not how we would normally do it, y'know, but it worked.

Like the several false starts on "Old School"?

That's right. Exactly.

Well, it certainly gives you that feeling of a real band. You guys are such a renowned live act. So, regardless of how your recordings have turned out, everyone's always gonna say, "It's so hard to capture their live energy."

Oh yeah, I mean I enjoy the band live. If I had a choice of taking a band and recording in a studio or listening to it live, I would rather go live. There's just so much that happens live that you can't recreate in a studio setting.

I've been wanting to ask if you feel that there's much of a difference in how you play when you're onstage verses in the studio?

Yeah. Playing live, you're not as conscious of trying to get it right, so to speak, as you are in the studio. You take more chances playing live. There's more freedom to change things on a live gig than there are in the studio. For instance, a lot of what we do is counterpoint, so someone may get an idea to play something, add something to a song, or take something out. You can just lean over and work that out, whisper, talk about it on stage. You can't do that in the studio. In the studio, most of the time you're locked in to what you're doing. Now, one of the benefits of studio recording is you can go back and put in what you thought you wanted. But sometimes when you do that, it doesn't have the same life as it might have had if you'd done it in live performance, or had it happened right in the first place. So, for me, that is one of the reasons why I enjoy performing live over doing it in the studio. Now, there are times when the studio setting is the right place, like when we recorded "The Lost Souls" on the Open Up CD. That probably couldn't have happened in a live setting. At least not a live setting like a larger bar or nightclub or some festival. That has to be played in the right situation.

I think one of the things related to you guys that's sorta unique is that you skirt between being a party band and a composing band. You do a lot of original material for a brass band, and that, personally, is the stuff in your recordings that I really, really like.

Well, I think people have a perception about what a brass band is, and what it should be and only could be. And that didn't necessarily fit with what we were trying to do. Because in the beginning, y'know, we rehearsed a lot. Whereas a lot of people think brass bands just come together and play one kind of music and it's unrehearsed. But we spent, before we started getting gigs, 6-7 nights a week. Sometimes we'd start rehearsal at 9 and wouldn't finish until 2 in the morning, that kind of thing. And we were getting together to rehearse just for the hell of it, just to learn some music. Not with any intention of trying to get gigs or anything like that. So, a part of the rehearsal was people bringing in arrangements of music that they had worked out that they wanted the band to play. So that just tied right into trying to make sure we came up with original music to record and play on the gigs. At the time that all this stuff was happening, I was a student at Loyola, Roger and Charles Joseph (who was the trombone player) were students at Southern University in music, and some of the other guys were studying music on their own. So, for me it was an experimental situation in that I could do my assignment that I had to do for class, and then bring it in to rehearse with the band, y'know, and get it corrected. [chuckles] It ended up being that we were doing more in my rehearsals with the Dirty Dozen than I was required to do at Loyola.

My experience has been that just playing with other people in general, you learn so much anyway.

That was the thing. I mean, it was good to be able to go and get the book knowledge, so to speak, but you really don't know what it is and how it can be used until you actually test it. And my whole time that I was studying theory at Loyola, one of the things the theory professors always said was, "Don't use tritones." I don't know if you play or not, but you're not supposed to use the flatted fifth or the augmented fourth, but that's one of the sounds that just does something to me. I use it a lot, and it's worked.

In moderation.

Oh yeah, in moderation. But in places they were telling me not to use it, I used it in some of those spots. And for what we were doin'... it worked. There were certain things you're not supposed to be able to double and certain instruments were supposed to play certain roles. Well, one of the things that really worked for us was using the baritone sax as a melody instrument. And it ended up being that when Roger came to the band we were having 2, 3, 4 people playing tenor saxophone. So he said, "Well, shit, I got this baritone, let me go ahead and throw that in there." And it just made the sound so much fatter, to have the tenor and the baritone playing melodies and harmonies. So, you never know what you really have until you actually put it into practice and break some of the rules. Sometimes you break 'em and it doesn't work, so you stick to what you learned, but sometimes you break 'em and you find something new.

Do you overdub much?

Well, sometimes overdubs are necessary. When we don't have to use 'em, we don't. Or if someone's made a mistake... a lot of times mistakes are made in the improvisation of something, but the spirit of the music as it was recorded at that time outweighed whether or not we should try and let that person fix his improvisation or keep what we have and let the music, the song itself determine whether or not we should try and overdub and fix and all that kind of stuff.

So are you guys record fairly separately then?

At times. We've recorded with the horns in one room and the drums, the bass and the keyboards in another room. It just depends on what we were trying to get. Sometimes when the horn parts were very, very intricate, we try it both ways, recording with all of the horns in the same room and then try it the other way, just in case there was some mistake that would ruin the whole track, that you couldn't fix. But recording live all in one room, that's a little bit difficult to do. It just depends on what you have going on with drums, with percussion, what type of keyboard you're using. If you're trying to use a grand piano, sometimes you really can't do it in a room that's full of horns because you're going to start to get all these overtones bouncing all over the place. So it just depends on the song and what we were trying to accomplish.

Is it hard to adapt the Dirty Dozen to playing and recording for other artists?

The stuff that we've done with the Grateful Dead, or BB King, or Elvis Costello, a lot of people in general, we know how to make it work. Sometimes you have to adjust what you do to make it fit with what other people are doin'. And to me, that's the sign of the musicianship in the band, in that we're able to adapt, to make the situation fit what others would like it to be. Now, in the case of doing the recordings with Elvis Costello, he didn't want us to change or adapt to his style. He wanted to make his style adapt to what we did, or how we actually worked.

So it's more of a collaborative thing then just a "horn section for hire" kind of thing?

Yeah.

Would you be interested in doing any more composing for other people? Do you have any thoughts of becoming a sort of studio guy for awhile?

Ummmm... no. And of course if that happened and it made the overall situation better then I wouldn't have a problem with it. I don't think anybody in their right mind wants to stay on the road all the time. That is a hard, harsh life. No matter how much luxury there is out there. The bitch is in the traveling, getting from one city, or one country to the next. And there's nothing you can do about that, there's no "beam me up". [laughter] Sure it helps to be able to fly first class or business class and be able to recline, get champagne or caviar. But that does nothing to reduce the time it takes to get from point A to point B.

It can blur that time though... [laughter]

You can blur it in the back too, in economy. [more laughter] But, if the situation presented itself for the band to spend three months in the studio in New Orleans recording with someone, I'm sure that that is what we would do, because it would mean that we don't have to travel for those three months.

What about doing some scoring for some films or something like that?

That has come up. Actually, Harlem Nights, some years ago. Originally we were gonna do some of the music and Herbie Hancock was gonna do some. But at the time Herbie Hancock had more weight than we did so...

The thing that I find really appealing about the Dirty Dozen is the fact that you guys can do varieties of styles, especially using the sousaphone as more of a Fender bass.

Right. And that was another thing that happened, that we discovered in moving the show from the street processions onto the stage, and then onto the big stage. Had we not had the opportunity to work onstage with a stage production, real professional sound crews and all that, we would not have discovered what the sousaphone can actually sound like if it's properly mic'ed.

Right.

Kirk Joseph, he was able to hear the possibilities from a few shows that were properly mic'ed.

And what is that technique exactly?

Well, it's just a positioning of the mic in the sousaphone.

So it's actually laying on the bell on the inside?

Yeah, depending on the mic. Sometimes we put it down in there, or if it's a particularly sensitive mic, you have to tape it to the bell. But being able to get that particular sound involves being able to position the mic in such a way that it doesn't sound like it's in a box or an empty room. And you have to able to work with it so you don't get the feedback and the overload and all that stuff.

Right. So when it's placed on the inside is it just taped to the side? Is there foam underneath it?

No, well what needs to happen is most of the time is you need to put a windscreen over it so you don't have the clanging and so it sort of buffers some of the internal sound of the horn that you're not going to want to hear.

The mechanics of it?

Yeah.

And that's what you guys have done in the studio as well?

Oh yeah. Well in the studio, you don't necessarily have to put the mic down in the bell. So that involves just the positioning of the horn, the bell, close to the mic or whatever distance it needs to be so you're not overloading the system.

Do you have some other recording anecdotes you'd care to share?

I've learned a lot in the recording process, a lot of the techniques I didn't know existed like the looping of a track when you're trying to get it right. So, I would think that any musician who's doing any type of recording should go in the booth and actually see what the engineers do to try and make your music come out right. We've been fortunate in that we've had producers and engineers who are not just there to collect a check. In working with Scott Billington, we met him through Rounder, and kept him on when we moved over to Columbia/Sony. He cared enough to say, "Look I think such and such was out of tune when you made that pass." And sometimes that meant spending a few more dollars and playing the whole thing again or whatever. But it's good to have somebody in there who cares about what you're doing and not just there to pat you on the back and agree with everything that goes on. Same thing with one of the recording engineers, David Farrell. His job was to be the studio engineer, but he also was interested in the band and interested in making a good recording and not just in collecting a check. So he would point different things out as they occurred. A lot of times when you record, certainly for me, after I've recorded, rehearsed and played it a thousand times, I don't wanna hear it anymore. I really can't. It takes me almost a year after we've recorded something to really listen to it. And it's like that with all the records. But to have an engineer who would take the time to make notes as things were happening that you might want to fix, just a suggestion, was a benefit.

Discography: 1999 — Buckjump 1996 — This Is Jazz 30 (pre-released material) 1996 — Ears To The Wall 1993 — Jelly (The Dirty Dozen Brass Band Plays Jelly Roll Morton) 1991 — Open Up 1990 — The New Orleans Album 1989 — Voodoo 1986 — Mardi Gras In Montreux 1984 — My Feet Can't Fail Me Now