Each week, American Routes brings you Shortcuts, a sneak peak at our upcoming program. New Orleans banjo and guitar player Carl Leblanc has been playing music professionally for over 40 years, from Preservation Hall to Avante Jazz with Sun Ra. The guitar was his first instrument, and he learned a lot about it, right in his neighborhood.
CL: The Seventh Ward is a very unique historical part of New Orleans. The Mardi Gras Indians used to always pass outside of my door, and they had the benevolent association, like the social and pleasure club, the autocrat, the wonderful boys club, which incidentally was where my first gig was, and also night clubs, about five or six of them within a three or four block walking distance from my house, so I learned how to play really just by taking my guitar and going from club to club. They would let me sit in even though I was too young to get in, you know, because they didn’t mind teaching a youngster how to play this music. So I was very fortunate to grow up in the setting, the brotherhood of New Orleans musicians that I grew up in.
NS: At some point in your life, you made a decision to leave. Tell me about leaving New Orleans and going off to play music elsewhere.
CL: The first time I left for an extended period of time was because I had a scholarship to go to Columbia University in 1972. And I spent about two and a half years there, before I realized that we hadn’t brought an instrument to class yet. Now, I found out that Columbia is where people who write music textbooks matriculate. You know, it’s not really for performers. So I transferred and came back and went to SUNO and got my degree with Kid Jordan.
NS: Southern University of New Orleans and Kid Jordan, the patriarch of the famous jazz, modern jazz family, here, the Jordans.
CL: Right. So Kid Jordan played with Sun Ra in 1955, the year I was born. And so when I graduated he got me a job playing with Sun Ra and that was the second time I left New Orleans and I moved to Philadelphia to play with the Sun Ra intergalactic orchestra.
NS: Now when you were in the world of Sun Ra, and the avante jazz world, did you miss New Orleans? Did you, I mean did you ever get nostalgic for back home?
CL: Are you kidding? Sun Ra played Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, a song that he taught me called “You Can Depend On Me”. I came home, ten years later, started playing at Preservation Hall, and found out that this was Mr. Norvin Kemballs theme song - he’s the first banjo player at Preservation Hall. And I had to go all the way to Saturn to learn a song that was played nightly at Preservation Hall.
NS: Carl, over the years, you’ve experimented in so many different directions. And on “His Las Parade,” the trumpet’s played by Marc Breaux, Lucien Barbaran on trombone, and Bruce Brackman, clarinet. So it’s got a real trad sound, it sounds like you’re keeping the tradition going by playing a dirge and a march.
CL: Well yeah, this music has to be played in a certain way. I tell my students that music is not only about notes and sounds, it’s about approach and concepts and attitude, you know the way you’re approaching the music. Nowadays, they don’t even play dirges, you know when they bring the body out of the church or whatever, they ready to start dancing, they putting 40s of liquor on top of the casket and they ready to dance and everything, and that’s sort of disrespectful to me.
NS: You’re concerned about how the New Orleans traditions are being used or changed away from some of the classic signs of both respect and celebration.
CL: Yeah, just the respect part is the part that I would like to see us get back to.
NS: Yeah, the celebration you think will take care of itself probably