Rhythms of the ages

Southern Living, Jun 1997 by Berry, Jason

Listen up as a New Orleans jazz writer sings the praises of the venerable stars of Dejan's Olympia Brass Band.

On Sunday nights they crowd into Preservation Hall like pilgrims at a shrine. Shoulder tight on the creaky benches, they watch Dejan's Olympia Brass Band with a reverence for the authentic item-jazz as it has come down through a century in New Orleans, where it all began.

The musicians sit in chairs spanning the French windows, the guys in the front so close to the audience's benches you can touch their knees. There's no sound system. Overhead lights illuminate the band; the house itself is dark. No beverages are sold, not even Coke. A sign says "No Smoking." It's a $4 cover for a ringside seat to history.

Stout and sturdy, Nowell Glass, 72, pounds the big bass drum, launching "When the Saints Go Marching In" on an up-tempo drive. Glass hums to himself, his dark baseball cap and sunglasses moving to the beat. Now the silver horn of Milton Batiste, 61, the bearded, balding lead trumpeter peals out the melody of the time-honored hymn. He holds the horn high, as an old trumpeter taught him, so the sound will bounce off walls, reverberating back to the band. Clarinet notes soar like birdsong in countermelody, the sax man rolls out fluid lines, and the trombonist anchors harmony with the tuba player, bobbing in time to the bass drum beat, fringed by syncopations of the snare.

Next to Batiste is their leader, the 87-year-old Harold "Duke" Dejan, one hand resting on a cane. Slowed by a stroke, his parading days are done, but there he sits, a spirit of jazz, planted like the rock of ages. And just when you think the old bandleader has sunk into slumber, Duke Dejan stands, leaning on that cane, his right fist raised like some senator on the stump, his voice in clarion song: "Oh when the sun/ Refuse to shine/ Yes I want to be in that number/ When the saints go marching innnnn!" The crowd roars for the man rising, as if from the grave, to sing lines of resurrection.

Duke Dejan's history reads like that of New Orleans' music itself. One of 10 children born into a Creole family, he quit school in the eighth grade to pursue music professionally. In the Depression he played sax with the Olympia Serenaders, then joined the Eureka band after World War II. In 1958 he took over the Serenaders, changed the name, and restamped the group as his.

At home, Dejan's Olympia has played innumerable dances, ribbon cuttings, and conventions as well as parades. The group also has made 30 concert tours of Europe, played for three Presidents and Pope John Paul II, performed in a James Bond movie, traveled Africa for the State Departmenteven played a funeral in Wales for a multimillionaire who left the travel budget in advance.

Reflecting on his station in life, he says simply, "Everything is lovely"-the title of his signature song. And Dejan has made lots of things lovely during his reign as Olympia's leader. The Dejan years straddled eight Presidents. Olympia meanwhile marched through halls and festival grounds in America and abroad, displaying the processional tradition that bound African polyrhythm to European instrumentation and melody.

Brass bands exist in a constant dialog with the past, reworking traditional numbers while absorbing the flow of popular music. A song must stir hearts in the street before Olympia, or any brass band, will play it in a club setting. Yet as society has changed, so have the brass bands. Years ago, Dejan himself discarded military marches from Olympia's song list, adding pop tunes like "Let the Good Times Roll." Says Batiste, "Our repertoire had to change for the simple reason that the people wanted to hear songs that were popular on the radio."

They adapted Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" and Louis Armstrong's, "What a Wonderful World." Batiste himself composed "The New Second Line." "To keep the music going and also to quote with our inner selves, we spruce up the old tunes," says Batiste. "We like R&B, so we put R&B and jazz together."

Although jazz is associated with stomp-down good times, Olympia receives endless requests for religious songs at Preservation Hall. "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "The Old Rugged Cross" are played with a tender beauty that leaves many an onlooker with dew in the eyes. "We've buried a lot of our older musician friends, and we've taken lessons and teachings they've left behind," says Batiste, who produces a stream of CDs for Olympia and younger groups. "One of our old snare drummers used to say, `Don't play that fast stuff-stick to the ritual.' What he meant was keep playing gospel hymns and jazz standards."

They have-and for that credit Dejan who grew up in an environment where the "ritual" stuff flowed like water. As a youth he played in the Holy Ghost Catholic Church brass band and watched as the faithful sang and danced and swayed to jazzed-up hymns in the city's Spiritual churches. "The big churches, Baptist and all them, didn't have the bands playing, but the Spiritual churches did," explains Dejan.