Raymond Burke • The Southland Recordings 1958 &1960

Returning to my notes on an album before writing a review I often find more exclamations than insights but sometimes they point me in the right direction. My notes for Raymond Burke: The Southland Recordings 1958/60 include the exclamation “This is grail stuff!” For once I know exactly what I was getting at. This album feels like a discovery, a peek into a moment you didn’t know you needed to uncover. Bourbon Street in the heyday of the Jazz Revival, with musicians who had been there all along, and still had decades left to play. New Orleans has always stood alone for jazz, not simply as the birthplace or the southern frontier but also as a distinct sound. Jazz headed North but those who never left the city kept it culturally relevant; jazz isn’t folk music, but in New Orleans, it comes close. There is a continuity to find between the Halfway House Orchestra, the Bourbon Street of the post war period represented here, the music of Preservation Hall, and the generation playing Frenchman St. today. One can get picky about White New Orleans styles vs. Black New Orleans styles, but more broadly there is a feel of New Orleans that permeates all of it, a certain happiness, a punch. For what it’s worth even on his 1940s recordings Raymond Burke is heard with a mixed band in the still segregated city. Raymond Burke (1904-1986) was a life long New Orleanian. He began playing out at