Keeping the Beat on the Street (21 page)

I had started snare drum by playing around the house: my brother Philip used to bring these guys round to play in the garage, so I said, “I guess I'll play drums.” So when I got to school, that was my first choice. Drums had been a long-term hobby, but when the Rebirth started, they needed someone to play drums. I said, “OK, I'll give it a shot.” It worked!

The Rebirth's been a great experience—traveling the world, playing for all kinds of important people, taking us to places we never thought it would. It was just a hobby, something to do during the course of the summer; it's turned into a full time job. We've played for George [Herbert Walker] Bush when he came down for the National Republican Convention, when he was president
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The bass drum's the most important thing in the band. We always say, “If the bass is not knocking, the band is not rocking.” So the bass drum has to be doing what it's doing. Some people don't understand that; they don't see it, they don't even know what it is. You can have people dancing just to the bass drum
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It takes a little time to develop an understanding with a snare drummer; myself and the Rebirth's current snare drummer have been working together for over ten years now—that's Ajay Mallery. He took a three-year hiatus from the band, and we used different guys. But with Ajay, we really don't talk, we just play
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Our first snare drummer was “Eyes” [Kenneth Austin]. He and I worked together for quite some time. He was one of the first people to play with the snare off all the time, kind of gives the drum a timbale sound. He was just trying something different—like when you're a kid, you're always experimenting
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We were real close friends—we knew each other from high school. Our families knew each other, and even when we weren't playing music, he used to hang out at our house all the time. It's important to get on well with the other guy. If you hate the snare drummer, it's not going to come off. Even if you're not friends, you try not to have any conflict with them
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When I first started playing the bass drum, I would listen to Mr. Benny Jones. He was with the Dirty Dozen at the time. The album they had out was “Feet Don't Fail Me Now.” I would listen to it all the time. I kind of picked up on a lot of what he was doing. He was playing more of a straight beat—one, two, three, four. That was the style, but it was different from what the traditional drummers were doing. It was modern, it was cool. I liked it. I don't know if the other guys in the band did, and I kind of picked up on it. I listened to the guys from the Chosen Few Brass Band. They were from uptown. They were one of the funkiest brass bands around. The first time I heard them was in the French Quarter
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I just picked up on it, and added my thing. What I try to do is like continuous bass drum—there's always a beat, always a sound coming from the bass drum. There wouldn't be a lot of spaces. With traditional bass drums, there's a lot of syncopation, and so you get a lot of spaces. What I was trying to do was not have any spaces, like with a heartbeat that doesn't stop. If you keep that going, the feel for the dancers dancing off the bass drum will always be going. It's kind of like the Rebirth style—it's always moving. Like in high school marching band music, the bass drum is marking the tempo, so it's like a one, two, three, four beat, never syncopated. We try and keep it filled in. I think we invented something there
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Most of the time, I play four beats on the cymbal. It's for the benefit of the horn players—if they can't hear the bass drum, they kind of lose track of the time, and the tempo will go down. It was a conscious effort to do something different. Some of the other bands, the drummers are syncopating a lot, and they're playing offbeats. It gets kind of boring if you're doing a parade for four hours. But if you see us on a second line, it's fast, and it's moving; there's never any space anywhere—it's always busy
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I have the bass drum muffled because otherwise the beats will carry over and run into each other. You muffle the drum, and that gives you that definition. Not so with traditional style: they could let the drum ring, because of the space
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One night, the thing I play the cymbal with, I lost it, and one of the band said, “Hey man, I have a screwdriver in my carl” I said, “Let me try that.” The metal on metal was a pretty good sound, sort of like water hitting the ocean—a splash, as opposed to a stick, which is a clear sound. Then everyone started playing with screwdrivers. They were like, “Well, we saw you doing it, so we figured it was something cool to do.”

I think it's great when other bands copy our style—it's like flattery. I'm glad people like it. I never had specific private lessons—I just picked up most of what I know from messing around and listening to other drummers. I try to tune to the B-flat from the tuba. Most of our tunes are in B-flat—it's a marching key, it sounds loud, so it carries on the street
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The Rebirth thing seems to be getting bigger and bigger—we play more in the United States than we ever did. In the beginning, we were always traveling to Europe, because they have a lot of festivals there, and the people seemed to appreciate the music, more than home. Then it started picking up in the United States, and we travel the States now more than ever before. My favorite place in the world to play is probably Amsterdam—it seems a lot like New Orleans
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I'll sometimes have a drink when I'm not on stage, but I prefer to stay sober when I'm playing; otherwise things can get sloppy. Because it's always busy, there's a lot going on. We do a lot of improvisation—we might change the head of a song right on the spot. You have to remember a lot. Sometimes somebody forgets, some guys will be playing one thing, some guys another. But if you do it almost every day, you already know, like, “We usually do this right here.” And we do different versions; according to what the drums are doing, the guys know which one we're going to do
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Sometimes it just happens; I don't know how the horn players do it. We're playing, someone is talking a solo, no one knows what's coming next, and the horn players are just talking, and they just come in on a riff together. And Philip gives a lot of signals from the bass horn
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It's never written down; we never know what songs we're going to play—it just happens. The music's just different things we hear—there's different age groups in the band, people listen at different stuff. People might come in and want to do, for instance, a Curtis May field song. They come in and give Philip the bass part, and the horn players figure it out. Although everyone in the band can read charts, we don't like to do it; people feel it more without
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The music was different, it was angrier, back in the late eighties. When you're dealing with synthetic drugs, you're dealing with a different kind of musician, and everything's just different
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Rebirth Brass Band, 1987 (Kermit Ruffins, Keith Frazier, Keith Anderson, John “Prince” Gilbert)
Photo by Marcel Joly

It's more mellow now. You get a different type of feeling in the city, and the music's different. I tell people that what the brass bands are playing now isn't even close to what we were doing ten jears ago. Our band is still good. But when we had Kermit Ruffins, Derek Wilej—the band we have now couldn't touch that band. Most of us were the same age; we came up playing the French Quarter together
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We would come up with songs—nobody ever called a background, it was so much easier. Nowadays, Younger guys don't really understand the format of our music—they can't feel it. Like seventies grooves and stuff, they don't understand it, because they're so Young. They're more into a hip-hop thing. Hip-hop music only has two sections, A and B. In the early eighties, we would do like A, B, C, D: it's different. I think this newer thing takes more than it adds. There's less music—it's more vocal-led than actual playing
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Sometimes we do certain songs—it's like, “I don't want to do that song. It's just not real music.” But we have younger people in the audience at the Maple Leaf, and they seem to enjoy it, because that's the music they hear on TV. I must be getting old. When I started, I was fourteen; I'm thirty-four now. I've seen so many changes in the music. When we do second lines, people are just dancing to the drums. I would say the horns are just not happening—they could just take a holiday, go and sit down somewhere
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Most of the bands coming up now, they're really not doing anything that we haven't already done. The quality's going down, it's not going up. I mean, at one time, we used to play traditional songs at the Maple Leaf. We don't do that anymore. When we started, the Olympia Brass Band was still doing second line parades—they don't do that now. The tempo of songs at second lines now is superfast
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The Dirty Dozen was the band that inspired us—we always used to go to the Glasshouse on Monday night. We wanted to emulate what they were doing. Their music is different from ours—we call it “New York.” It's fast, it's clean; the New Orleans feel is more laid back. After the Dirty Dozen stopped doing second lines, it was just the Rebirth for nearly ten years. There were some other bands doing it, but they weren't really organized bands like we were
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I tell the younger bands now, “Everything you're doing, we already did it—you sound like you're copying the Rebirth.” We're in a band called Forgotten Souls; it's a mixture of guys from other bands, and we try to do something different. We use the bass and snare drums along with a set drum player. It's pretty much a stage brass band. I don't really know what you could do that's different—I know we haven't covered everything. There's something else out there, but it's up to someone else to find it
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Someone like Shamar Allen (he's our newest trumpet player), he's more of a straight-ahead jazz player, whereas Glen Andrews is more street, and “Kabuki” [Derrick Shezbie] is like a mixture of jazz and street. We have three different styles of trumpet playing. “Street” is more improvisation than jazz—you're doing a lot of stuff that you can't do in jazz. If you're playing jazz in the key of B-flat, you can't start playing in the key of A, because it's not going to fit, whereas in street, you can be playing a B-flat when the note's supposed to be B. You know it's wrong, but you can squeeze it in there. Or, on a scale, you can play a D when you're supposed to be playing an F—it's not actually right. In jazz, you have to play the chords correctly for the song to be right. But in street you can play outside the chords—it can sound good if everyone's doing it. You get one horn playing jazz and another playing street, it can be like a train wreck. But people say, “Sounds pretty good!” if it comes off. As a musician, you know it's wrong, but you do it anyway. One of the younger guys from the Lil' Stooges is saying to us, “Man, y'all playing some kind of chords'.” We're like, “Look, man, you're on the street. Ain't nobody worried about what kind of chords y'all playing—just play.” If people are dancing, it's not wrong
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BORN
: Chicago, July 18, 1964
Played with the Young Men Brass Band (originating from the Tambourine and Fan Club), the Rebirth Brass Band, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Regal Brass Band, and the Olympia Brass Band; currently freelancing
Interviewed at the Crescent City Brewhouse, Decatur Street, September 2001

Keith Anderson, Copenhagen
Photo by Peter Nissen
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I was born in Chicago. My parents were from here, but my daddy had moved to Chicago before I was born. The family didn't move back to New Orleans until I was nine years old
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That's when I first heard kids my age playing on the street. Man, that tripped me out. Right there, I
knew
what I was going to do. I knew I had to be a musician. Like, even today, my daddy runs a trucking business, and my brothers and sisters all work for him—I guess it makes me kind of the black sheep, but I couldn't do all that sitting behind a desk, you know?