From the late 1960s into the mid-1980s a New Orleans-based record label, the Smoky Mary Phonograph Company, released fourteen LPs by some of the city's most revered and respected elder jazz musicians. The labels's owner, trombonist Frank Demond, produced Smoky Mary's sessions and often played on them, including many of the songs anthologized here on Traditional Jazz From New Orleans. A native of Los Angeles, Demond fell love with the Crescent City trad sound after hearing the Preservation Hall Band perform in California. That transformative moment inspired Demond to move to New Orleans, sit in with the band, and eventually join it. Smoky Mary refers to a nineteenth-century train which many musicians rode between gigs in downtown New Orleans, bythe Mississippi River, and. Dome five niles away, in Milneburg on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Demond focused on recording such venerable veterans as singing pianist Sweet Emma Barrett, trumpeter Percy Humphrey and his clarinetist brother Willie Humphrey, trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine, trombonist Jim [Big Jim?] Robinson, and a host of their colleagues.

Tracklist:

Whenever You're Lonesome
Blues in Algiers
Kid Thomas Blues
Albert's Blues/Bucket's Got a Hole in It
Blues for Emma
Girl of My Dreams
After You've Gone/Basin Street Blues
How Long Blues
When You're Smiling
Big Butter and Egg Man
Little Liza Jane
Shake It and Break It
Bogalusa Strut
Willie's Cabbage Song
Bill Bailey
Eh la Bas
Just a Little While to Stay Here/Just a Closer Walk with Thee

UPC: 096094200426
Label: Mardi Gras Records
Release Date: 7.17.26
Format: CD

[PRE-ORDER] Various Artists - Traditional Jazz From New Orleans / Various (CD)