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 o
