Preservation Hall Presents: Preservation Brass
For Fat Man
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New Orleans’ legendary Preservation Hall Presents Preservation Brass’ acclaimed album For Fat Man have received their first ever GRAMMY nomination for Best Regional Roots Music Album. The special project released via Sub Pop was dedicated to the memory of longtime Preservation Hall percussionist Kerry “Fat Man” Hunter.
Proceeds from For Fat Man benefit the Preservation Hall Foundation, currently engaged in a transformational campaign enabling an expanded campus and enhanced offering of musician support, education and community engagement programs. Every musician featured on this album is active in the foundation's programming and represents both the beneficiaries and benefactors of the foundation's intergenerational approach to protecting, preserving and perpetuating New Orleans' musical traditions. More information is available here.
More on Preservation Brass For Fat Man:
BOOM.
It’s the first thing you hear, the first thing you notice. A bass drum strike so hard and heavy, its sound carries for blocks. In fact, you probably feel it before you actually hear it.
BOOM BOOM.
A bottom-end so deep, it lets everyone know: the band is on its way.
BOOM BOOM BOOM
And before you can even see ‘em, you can hear ‘em, clearing the way: angel trumpets, devil trombones, rat-a-tat snares, pulsing tubas, and at the center of it all, the anchor, the rock, the gravity that keeps it all from spinning out and flying off into space, the bass drum. The steady beat that lays the foundation for every feat the brass band can accomplish. The beat that sets the slow and reverential pace for a walk of remembrance towards the cemetery. The beat that dictates the rhythm of the joyous dance on the corner. The beat that puts butts in motion. That bass drum beat is the heartbeat of New Orleans, the organ that pushes the blood through the arteries and veins of our city streets, and the biggest and strongest heart was Kerry “Fat Man” Hunter. When the bass drum was strapped over his shoulders and the mallets were in his hands, he let ‘em know–loud, proud and undeniable was his style, and it’s that style that’s at the heart of For Fat Man, the new recording by the Preservation Hall Brass.
The album was guided from inception to completion by Preservation Hall cornet player Kevin Louis, He wanted to capture what was going on at the Hall on Monday nights, and from the beginning, Fat Man was key to the recording. “Fat Man and Jap [Julius McKee] came to me and said, ‘We need to lay this down, nobody’s doing this,’” Louis explains. “I called on Mark to be my extra ear. It took a while to assemble the A team, ‘cause everyone’s in demand but when everybody had the time, I called Marigny Studios, brought the cats in and we laid down four or five songs, listened to that and said, ‘Yeah, we got something.’ And once we made it happen, it happened like a mf!”
The album kicks off with the sort of atmospheric percussion you might hear from a distance on a Mardi Gras or St. Joseph’s Day, or emanating from a neighborhood bar during the legendary practice sessions held by New Orleans’ Masking Indian tribes. It’s one of the unique sounds of our city. “Fat Man and my podna Gerald French came in and we made those interludes,” says Louis. Those sound pieces are interwoven with the songs on the album, and together, they create a stunning document of a group bound by tradition, anchored in the now, and looking towards what’s to come. This is the sound of the past, present and future getting down all at once.
“We had just grown as a band so much, we had established such a great repertoire and camaraderie,” says trumpet player Mark Braud, describing the bond between the band that can be heard between the lines and the notes throughout For Fat Man. “Playing together every week for years and years, you develop a certain thing as a band. It’s not just a gig anymore.”
But that’s the bittersweet thing about life. The bonds of friendship and love we form lift us up, but those bonds will inevitably be broken, sometimes tragically. We all know how it’s going to end, and in New Orleans we choose to live with that knowledge and make it a part of our day to day. We figure, why not acknowledge the reality of the wheel of life and make its inherent sadness and inevitable happiness a part of how we face every day? There’s pain for the loss and that pain is no joke, but we can’t forget that there’s a life to be remembered, a journey to be celebrated with our tears of memory and our joyful noises, each in their time, and often at the same time. That’s just the way it is here, and we’re lucky to have our music to help us mark these milestones.
“Fat Man was the heartbeat of all of this,” says Ben Jaffe, the Creative Director of Preservation Hall. “He brought a sense of freedom whenever he played. He understood the ability and power of music to make people feel joy, happiness and be therapeutic. It was important to him. This record’s an incredible tribute to him and who he was. He was entirely a singular, unique human being. There’s not many that embodied second line culture in New Orleans like him. It’s a way of life, and such a beautiful thing to be a part of.”
Equal parts remembrance, document, and party, For Fat Man wasn’t meant to bear that title. Kerry’s untimely passing during Mardi Gras is sadly but irrevocably now a part of the story of this record, which began as a celebration of where the brass band tradition at Preservation Hall was at and where it’s going. And thank goodness, the story doesn’t end. Life, like any good brass band, keeps moving. This record is a joyous link in the chain that is the story of New Orleans and its music. It’s for the ancestors, for the culture, for the people in the street, for those that mourn and those that celebrate and everybody somewhere in between. This record is the sound of that chain, that heartbeat, that rhythm. That sweet and thunderous BOOM.
And it hits so hard that the Fatman can probably hear it up in Heaven.
Kevin Louis - long cornet
Mark Braud - trumpet
Wendell Brunious - trumpet
Ronell Johnson - trombone
Richard Anderson - trombone
Roderick Paulin - tenor saxophone
Bruce Brackman - clarinet
Julius McKee - sousaphone
Glen Finister Andrews - snare drum
Kerry “Fat Man” Hunter - bass drum
Gerald French - percussion
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