By 1960 the second revival of New Orleans traditional jazz was well underway, but the older black musicians who still played it had few places where they could get together to perform. Bourbon St. clubs were almost all featuring strippers who were accompanied by loud, non-jazz “music.” To provide a site where these musicians could gather and play to discerning aficionados, Preservation Hall was established by some jazz enthusiasts. The story of the founding is a convoluted one which other researchers, such as William Carter (Preservation Hall, N.Y., 1991), have attempted to simplify and, where erroneous, rectify.
Richard Ekins feels that no account of the origin of Preservation Hall has fully and accurately conveyed the story, so he takes on the mantle, focusing especially on what he considered one egregious omission: an acknowledgment of the role that Ken Grayson Mills, in particular, and his fellow jazz devotee, Barbara Reid, played in the establishing of the Hall. And this omission, he believes, was no accident: it was a deliberate excising of the names of Mills and Reid from the history. This book, therefore, is in large part a rectification of that exclusion.
The blame for excising the co-founders’ names Ekins places squarely on the owner of the building that housed the Hall, Lorenz “Larry” Borenstein, and on the Jaffes, Alan and Sandra, who took over the management of the Hall after the ouster and were quite content to have themselves cited as the “founders.” Mills and Reid were never mentioned.
Initially Borenstein had invited the musicians to conduct “rehearsals” in the room to which the general public could provide an audience, contributing to a “kitty.” Borenstein had then turned over the enterprise to a group titled the New Orleans Society for the Preservation of Traditional Jazz, of which Mills was President and Reid, along with Bill Russell, were Vice-Presidents. Mills found the “kitty” enough to provide the musicians with union-scale wages, and successfully negotiated with the musicians’ union to allow the “rehearsals” to continue.
Borenstein, however, objected to the Mills/Reid group’s handling of the affair and then proceeded to transfer the running of it to the Jaffes . They were business-minded and set up an admission charge and, to encourage the general public’s attendance, had the musical content changed from play lists familiar to old-style musicians to “Dixieland hits” more familiar to tourists: “Basin Street Blues,” “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Somebody Stole My Gal,” “When the Saint Go Marching In,” et al. In addition, Ekins avers the format was changed to what would become the basic Preservation Hall sound, as the bands gradually shifted from an edgy, somewhat ramshackle variegated, mainly heterophonic sound to the Preservation Hall clichéd format of opening two ensemble choruses, a string of solos, with closing two semi-rousing ensemble choruses. (290)
Along the way Ekins shows that Mills was the first to encourage TV filming in the Hall, and he, not Jaffe, was the first to take a Preservation Hall band out of New Orleans, booking gigs for several groups of New Orleans musicians in places outside of Louisiana.
In the book Ekins also traces the development of Mills’ record label, Icon Records*, on which Mills issued the recordings he made of these old-style musicians. After Mills sold the label to George Buck, Buck then reissued the Icon LPs on American Music CDs, keeping them available to collectors. In addition, Ekins relates how Mills, after the ouster, went on to found Icon Hall to fulfill his thwarted intentions for Preservation Hall. Not long thereafter, the name Icon Hall was changed to Perseverance Hall before finally closing. One can well imagine Mills’ satisfaction over any confusion of the two names: Preservation and Perseverance!
734 St. Louis Street, New Orleans, September 1962.
Photograph by Eric J. Brown, courtesy of Per Oldaeus
So the subtitle of the book, The Ken Grayson Mills Story, becomes quite clear. All that is missing is a detailed biography of Mills, Ekins supplying as much as he can from the limited sources available to him. He bases all of his conclusions on careful research of all extant communications pertaining to the subject.
In a sense, of course, the book is a “reissue,” almost all of the content having been first issued in monthly installments in the British magazine Just Jazz. To that publication Ekins supplied “articles”—one each month—for some 19 months. Each of these articles, in turn, formed a chapter in the book, where Ekins supplies a transitional statement at the head of each chapter, thus providing a continuity I found absent in the magazine series. As a result, the book provides more cohesion, there being no waiting a month between each chapter as was the case with the magazine’s installments. Those who read the series first in Just Jazz will undoubtedly find the book experience more gratifying, as I did. It is also more convenient to have the whole in one place, rather than in an accumulation of magazines. However, while the book’s table of contents provides a kind of “readers’ guide” to the project, I find the absence of an index is frustrating. Perhaps a future edition will supply one.
In closing the final chapter of the book, Ekins alludes to “a forthcoming companion volume, The Birthing of Preservation Hall: the Barbara Glancey Reid Story.” Such a volume would be welcome: Reid’s role, fully limned, deserves an accurate telling to complete the entire story.
Note: The Genesis and Exodus of Preservation Hall: The Ken Grayson Mills Story is available from Just Jazz Magazine. One can contact the editor, Pete Lay, email: justjazzmagazine@btinternet.com
or phone: +44 (0)1737 822726 for the cost of the book and shipping. It is payable by PayPal using account: petegambit@gmail.com. Please put your name as reference.
The Genesis and Exodus of Preservation Hall:
The Ken Grayson Mills Story
by Richard Ekins
London: La Croix Publications, 2024;
in association with Just Jazz Magazine, Ltd.
Paperbound, 397 pages
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*In addition to Icon Records, Ekins alludes in passing the roles Mike Dine’s 504 Records and William Russell’s American Music Records played in the Mills story.
Born in Dundee, Scotland, Bert Thompson came to the U.S. in 1956. After a two-year stint playing drums with the 101 st Airborne Division Band and making a number of parachute drops, he returned to civilian life in San Francisco, matriculating at San Francisco State University where he earned a B.A. and an M.A. He went on to matriculate at University of Oregon, where he earned a D.A. and a Ph.D., all of his degrees in English. Now retired, he is a professor emeritus of English at City College of San Francisco. He is also a retired traditional jazz drummer, having played with a number of San Francisco Bay Area bands, including And That’s Jazz, Professor Plum’s Jazz, the Jelly Roll Jazz Band, Mission Gold Jazz Band, and the Zenith New Orleans Parade band; he also played with some further afield, including Gremoli (Long Beach, CA) and the Phoenix Jazzers (Vancouver, B.C.) Today he reviews traditional jazz CDs and writes occasional articles for several publications.
