Protect, Preserve, Perpetuate!

This year, the Preservation Hall Foundation will open a new campus facility at 730 Saint Peter Street adjacent to the existing building and under a 50-year lease. The beautiful space will create new opportunities and income streams for musicians, provide visitors to the Hall with a more engaging interaction with the owner’s collection of archives through exhibition space, and create unique residency spaces to house visiting artists, students, and musicians. Additional vocational rooms will be available for intergenerational mentorship and music creation. Ben Jaffe, bass and sousaphone, is the Creative Director and son of Allan and Sandra Jaffe, who ran the Hall for years after taking over management from founders Ken Grayson Mills and Barbara Reid in the early 1960s.

We visited the not-quite-ready space at one of the Midnight Preserves fund-raising events during Jazz Fest in April. It will be a phenomenal venue and I am looking forward to its completion.

NPR’s Matt Bloom (All Things Considered) visited Preservation Hall recently to spotlight the Preservation Hall Foundation’s Kids In The Hall field trips, featuring an interview with trumpeter, bandleader and Musical Director Wendell Brunious. He acknowledged that the organization is making sure kids know all about the genre and that New Orleans continues to live up to its fame as the Birthplace of Jazz.

This program, Kids in the Hall, at Preservation Hall, is in partnership with music organizations around the country—providing unforgettable, experiential settings for students, learning by playing, and experiencing lasting mentorship with musicians, tradition bearers, and teaching artists from the Preservation Hall collective of over 60 musicians.

With the new campaign Pass It On, this five year, $25 million campaign will fuel this next exciting chapter for the Preservation Hall Foundation.

So far this year, music students from across the country traveled to Preservation Hall to immerse themselves in its rich history, experience its deep connection to New Orleans culture and engage in unforgettable Kids In The Hall field trips and workshops with the musicians. For many of these students it’s the first time they’ve experienced a live music venue, interacted with musicians, and seen a variety of instruments up close—which will hopefully spark a life-long curiosity and love for the very special music of New Orleans. It is more than an educational program. Over 2600 students from 40 schools visited the Hall in the first quarter of 2025 alone! 17 States were represented and over $87,000 was dispersed to musicians for community engagement, education and additional Foundation programming. The Education Media arm of the Foundation had over 172,000 views with the United States, Brazil and Germany leading the streaming efforts with instructional information. Free to music teachers and music educators, the webinars and lesson plans are actively engaging these students.

During the pandemic when streets were empty, Preservation Hall organized online benefit concerts and fundraising campaigns to support musicians economically affected by the pandemic. They streamed live concerts on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, and donations went to help the musicians. Additionally, Preservation Hall Legacy Emergency Relief Fund and other community organizations provided relief funds and grants to musicians to reflect the values and practices from Preservation Hall’s history, ensuring the culture bearers are honored and that their enduring contributions to New Orleans music, culture and traditions are celebrated and rewarded for generations to come.

I encourage you to visit their websites to learn even more about the directions that the new campaign and the Kids In The Hall project will have on these future musicians from around the world! It is also fascinating to read about how Allan and Sandra Jaffe, after a casual visit to New Orleans, entered into a lifelong commitment to protect, preserve and perpetuate this unique music. The information is this column was taken directly from the various websites that Preservation Hall has regarding its Foundation, its Legacy Program and its many other projects including the Master Practitioner Award and Hall Fellow program, all emanating from that venerable and iconic venue. The Salon726 site features stories by the musicians of playing music and carrying the torch of New Orleans traditions all over the world.

Another “kid” project happening in New Orleans is the New Orleans Foundation for Experiential Arts Reach (nofearnola.org) started by Tim “Sully” Sullivan, a reed player we met earlier this year at a Preservation Hall afternoon set. His foundation is up and running and I’m sure it will have interaction with the Preservation Hall Foundation too.

An added note to my June column: Cab Calloway and his Hi-De-Ho Orchestra is the correct name of the orchestra that toured in the years when Danny Barker was a member. Cab’s grandson, Christoper Calloway Brooks, was kind enough to contact me with that information as he is the Director of The Cab Calloway Orchestra which was not trademarked as such until 1998. I am glad he is a reader of The Syncopated Times!