Downbeat, September 2013
At Kermit’s Treme Speakeasy on a quiet afternoon in June, the lunch hour has come and gone but a mix of patrons linger, using the space more as a community center than a restaurant. In one corner, a woman counsels a recent high school graduate on her career goals. In another, members of the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans discuss how to fight a music gag rule the city recently levied on an 80-year-old venue in the Seventh Ward.
As the conversations in the dining room begin to wind down, the club’s proprietor, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, walks through the front door, ushering in with him a palpable burst of energy and chatter. He’s quickly drawn into the center of the cultural activists’ meeting and given unsolicited updates on the plight of the St. Roch Tavern. Smiling, nodding and shaking every hand proffered his way, the trumpeter looks like a chef in his kitchen pants and white T-shirt; he’s greeted like a de facto mayor.
In fact, Ruffins wears all those hats simultaneously at home in New Orleans, where his role in the music scene extends beyond the music itself. Here in his element, he is not just a bandleader; he’s a cultural curator. A vocal supporter of live music, Ruffins has owned multiple clubs in Treme, using them –- and his own sets around town -- to showcase local artists.
His restaurant’s menu is a survey of foods he’s been cooking since childhood, having grown up amid family-wide, fresh-caught seafood feasts in the Lower Ninth Ward. Even his participation in the city’s Social Aid and Pleasure Club parades has a curatorial aspect: armed with his iPad, Ruffins is the self-professed “go-to guy for video” at parades, making use of his lifelong obsession with video recording to capture the bands and dancers at their best and share the footage online.
The Music and Culture Coalition, or MACCNO, formed in September of 2012, after Ruffins invited the city’s musicians and club owners to a series of meetings at his restaurant to discuss new restrictions on live music being implemented across the city. The group organized itself under the MACCNO moniker and has been advocating on behalf of live music venues ever since.
“I just got so upset,” Ruffins says, settling into a seat in the restaurant’s kitchen with a cold Bud Light. “Why would they try to shut down a club of live entertainment? I mean, I understand -- some of the neighbors complained. I also understand some of those neighbors got there two weeks ago.”
He’s referring to a controversial aspect of what some are calling “the new New Orleans.” As the city rebuilt itself after Hurricane Katrina, thousands of newcomers began calling it home. Lured by deals on housing, tax incentives and a revitalized curiosity in the city’s culture, they have been held largely responsible for the gentrification of downtown neighborhoods, and the concomitant changes, both good and bad.
“Some of these people are millionaires, and the average musicians aren’t gonna know how to fight that,” says Ruffins. “So I thought rather than everyone trying to fight their one individual thing, let’s get together to deal with it.’”
While his club serves as an avenue for helping live music thrive in the historic Treme, his new album, “We Partyin’ Traditional Style,” is about sustaining the spirit of traditional New Orleans jazz. To achieve that goal, Ruffins gathered players who could best approximate the sound that first inspired him to play music for a living.
Some critics have questioned his choice of recording standard, if eloquently performed versions of traditional tunes rather than writing original material or taking his beloved classics in a new direction. But in a way, the album represents Ruffins playing host to traditional New Orleans jazz itself.
“I think the idea was to try to go back,” he says. “That’s what I kept wanting to do in my heart. When I first started playing -- going to Preservation Hall, going to Maison Bourbon, going to Famous Door -- and watching all the elderly guys play, it really touched me so hard. I think every human being just has to do what really makes them feel good, and if I had my way, I would sit down at Preservation Hall or at the Palm Court Café and play that music every day. Because it’s so comfortable and so satisfying.”
A bright and swinging rendition of “Chinatown” kicks off the disc, with clarinetist Tom Fischer playing trill-swathed lines around Ruffins’ melody. The lively horn interplay continues when Lucien Barbarin’s trombone comes onboard, purring through the low end of “Exactly Like You.” On “Marie,” pianist Steve Pistorius’ dexterity and lightness balances out Ruffins’ big, round, personality-drenched blowing, while the vocal part showcases an appealingly soft rasp in his voice.
As a singer, Ruffins has a way of drawing the listener in with his magnetism, regardless of whether he’s hitting exactly the right note. But over the years, he’s found ways to embrace his vocal quirks, pushing himself to intentionally comical octaves one moment, and leaning into a warm and throaty rumble the next.
As a trumpeter, Ruffins’ chops are undeniable. But even when he laces tunes with inventive solos and hot, swinging melodies, he doesn’t necessarily aspire to break new musical ground. Often the goal is simply to create his own version of the music that first moved him.
Ruffins discovered Louis Armstrong in his late teens, shortly after starting the Rebirth Brass Band with Philip and Keith Frazier in 1983. While working with the band and performing in Jackson Square for tips alongside Shannon Powell, Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen and Dirty Dozen founder Roger Lewis, Ruffins went deep into his Satchmo research, checking out every recording and video he could find. From there, he moved on to Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Lionel Hampton.
Asked how he made the music of Armstrong and others his own, he’s quick to admit that infusing it with his personality was key: “I had no choice, because I’ll never be able to play at the level that those guys play.”
“I mean, there are very few people in the world that can actually do that. So I would take little risks and then go back to playing my old traditional New Orleans stuff that I kind of figured out on my own [by] listening to the great brass bands like the Dirty Dozen and Olympia and the Chosen Few.
Thirty years later, Ruffins is still soaking up inspiration from the city’s best artists. His regular gigging band, the BBQ Swingers, features strong musicians with a collectively stunning range. But as is often the case when Ruffins heads into the studio, the album’s lineup – which, in addition to Barbarin, Pistorius and Fischer includes Shannon Powell (drums), Don Vappie (banjo), Richard Moten (bass) and singer Mykia Jovan – comprises a group culled specifically for their “traditional style” expertise.
The album was recorded without a rehearsal, and features mostly first takes from the session. The tunes on the list changed as the group played, with Ruffins directing players to take solos from moment to moment, just as he might during a club set.
The sole original, “Treme Second Line,” has an “Intro” track that feels as impromptu and spiked with humor as one of Ruffins’ live shows, with the trumpeter switching to kazoo as the rest of the band lets out yelps of laughter and applause.
While elements like the spontaneity of the recording process imprint the album with Ruffins’ endlessly charismatic vibe, there’s also a seriousness about the material that speaks to the direction he’s headed as an artist these days.
“As you get older, you start thinking different. You can get real silly onstage but you’re more concerned about the music. And you get more aware of what you stand for in the world. When it comes down to American culture, New Orleans culture, Louisiana culture … you just get aware of what you’re doing, what you’re representing and it’s way bigger than just being able to sing,” he says.
“At first, when you start playing music, you’re just like, ‘We’re playin’ a party!’ But then you [risk] changing the tradition.”
Unlike many of his peers who had formal training at NOCCA or whose artistry was passed down via family heritage, Ruffins came relatively late to his education in traditional New Orleans jazz.
Growing up in the Lower Ninth Ward, the young trumpeter listened to bands like the Commodores while helping his grandmother cook on Saturdays. “There was no brass bands just walkin’ around,” he says.
Ruffins’ ears began to widen when he left the neighborhood to attend Joseph S. Clark Senior High School in the Sixth Ward, where he met the Fraziers. Once they graduated and Rebirth began to take off, Ruffins stitched himself into the fabric of Treme.
Looking back on the scene there, his voice hits a percussive rhythm as if the memory itself were musical. “I could not believe what I was seeing that was going on in the neighborhood,” he says. “There was this traffic of people looking like it’s Mardi Gras every goddamn day of the week. Just the numbers of musicians hangin’ out. … They had bars and funeral homes throughout the whole neighborhood.”
In any other part of America, that might seem sinister. But in New Orleans, it means more parades, more jazz funerals, more music in the streets.
After high school, Treme “became my world,” Ruffins says.
“Hanging out with Uncle Lionel, [Batiste], [Dirty Dozen co-founder] Benny Jones, Tuba Fats and a whole lot of other great men that came right ahead of that. Every day, I’d be sitting at the bar with those guys, with Uncle Lionel singin’ tunes to me all the time, teaching me all kinds of stuff I had no idea existed in this world, let alone in New Orleans.”
Before long, his informal lessons started paying off. He found himself working for the Rebirth, Olympia, Dirty Dozen, Chosen Few and Treme brass bands simultaneously, playing as many as five gigs in a day and switching band T-shirts as he moved from set to set. “That was the time of my life: 19, 20 years old, with all those damn [brass band] t-shirts,” he says, laughing. “I’d get mixed up sometimes.”
In the meantime, Ruffins continued studying both live and recorded traditional jazz, practicing the riffs he heard and developing his own style, while marveling at “the spirituality those men brought onstage.”
“The beautiful suits and ties, the lifestyle,” he reminisces. “It just kind of grew on me. I said, ‘This is it. This is what I’m gonna do. I don’t know how I’m gonna get there. But I’m gonna be dressed up, playing that old school traditional jazz swing, all mixed together.”
He was still co-leading the Rebirth, but felt tugged in a different direction.
“I said, ‘Go for it, bro,’” recalls Philip Frazier, who had already noticed audiences were responding to Ruffins’ tone and charm onstage. “Kermit plays with that growl, there’s like a roll in it that people love. And people see that he just really loves life.”
By 1992, Ruffins had ventured out on his own, recording three albums for the Justice label before finding his groove with Basin Street Records and the BBQ Swingers.
A few days after the MACCNO meeting in June, Ruffins is clad in a crisp suit and bow-tie onstage at Tipitina’s for the new album’s CD release party. Seated in chairs around him and dressed equally to the nines, some of the city’s best traditional jazz players, including Pistorious and clarinetist Evan Christopher, back up a vibrato-heavy “All of Me,” courtesy of singer Mykia Jovan.
Even in this album-focused setting, Ruffins plays curator, presenting a wide swath of his music community rather than simply representing the new release. After less than an hour of searingly pretty performances based on the album’s material, the trumpeter introduces the band, then announces that the second set will be performed by his BBQ Swingers.
In the meantime, he jokes, “I’m gonna take a reefer break – I mean a 10-minute break.”
When he returns to the stage with the BBQ Swingers, they execute the eclectic mix of jazz, soul, hip-hop and R&B that fans of his live shows have come to expect.
“He’s really good at playing in that traditional jazz idiom -- when he wants to do it,” says drummer Derrick Freeman, who has been with the BBQ Swingers for nearly two decades,
“People ask us all the time, ‘What are you gonna do in the next set?’ I’m like, ‘I seriously have no idea. We might start the set with Tupac. We might start the set with Frank Sinatra.’ I don’t think he even knows until he starts singing or playing.”
At Tip’s, the set ranges from Ruffins rapping over a shuffled parade rhythm to regular guest Nayo Jones belting out “At Last” to a sit-in from a young female drummer to a Trombone Shorty cover.
“We paaaaaaaaartyin’,” Ruffins hollers, cracking himself up with his new favorite line. Then he buttons up and adds: “Traditional style.”
Over the course of the next week, Ruffins’ shows feature an even wider mix of music. On a hot Tuesday night at Bullet’s, “Skokiaan” turns into an instrumental version of the “Electric Slide;” singer Michael Baptiste takes over for Ruffins on “Try a Little Tenderness;” and Ruffins closes the set with a high-pitched, giggle-inducing refrain of “don’t leave me girl,” directed at actual women who are walking out the door. A set at Congo Square a few days later features five minutes or more of straight stand-up, with Ruffins faux-begging the crowd to buy his album and come to the afterparty at his “goddamn restaurant.”
“It really is the Kermit Ruffins review,” says Freeman.
Jokes aside, Ruffins’ huge personality and honest love for the musicians and so-called culture bearers around him have probably helped him succeed as much as his musical skill.
Trombonist Corey Henry, an alumnus of the BBQ Swingers who now tours with Galactic and leads the Treme Funktet, compares Ruffins’ role as a traditional jazz player to his role as a live music advocate, saying he “breathes new life” into both.
“Kermit’s been one of the main people keeping live music in Treme,” says Henry, citing other clubs Ruffins has opened over the years in the neighborhood.
“After the hurricane, people left and had gone in so many different directions, we didn’t know how to keep music afloat. [His club] was one way everything got kick-started again in Treme with live music.”
Like most things about Ruffins, the party vibe of his club comes from a place of honest sentiment. He says he’s always wanted to own a venue where he could keep alive his family’s tradition of gathering together with loved ones, good food and a few drinks.
“Since I was about 11 years old in the Lower Ninth Ward, me and my whole family, we would go out almost every Saturday -- fishin’, crabbin’, at 4 o’clock in the morning,” he says, pausing in the Treme Speakeasy kitchen to drain his Bud Light.
“At 11 in the morning, we’re comin’ back to the house … In the backyard, the grill is lit, the jukebox is going, my grandmother’s over there, everybody’s in their little station cleaning fish, gutting fish, cleaning crabs, then we’d boil ‘em. Put some aside for gumbo. There’s a cowan, which is a turtle. Hang it upside down with its head chopped off, blood drippin’ out,” he says, smiling, letting the image sink in.
“And the whole family would just sit down drinking those rickety pony beers, TV outside … my grandmother’s inside getting ready with 15 cakes for church the next morning.”
“I was helping – doing all that stuff. So you grow up seeing that, doing that and you continue doing what you’re seeing all your life. I always say, ‘Treat each day like it’s a picnic,’” he says, lifting his chin and smiling as he quoted himself.
“I’ve been having that picnic state of mind since I can remember. I think that’s what really gets me over. I think it comes across with music and my way of living.”
Looking ahead, Ruffins has plans to record an album with strings alongside members of the Louisiana Philharmonic, slated for a 2014 release. In the meantime, he has and another club to open -- the temporarily defunct Mother-in-Law Lounge -- and a dining room’s worth of trout to fry.
-Repubbed (pre-edits) courtesy of Downbeat's September 2013 edition, which also features a nice piece on Keith Jarrett by Ethan Iverson
