Who's Your Crawdaddy? Dixieland Jazz Band Live at Barbes Brooklyn

Who's Your Crawdaddy? plays Dixieland jazz, Second Line music, and R&B. The musicians are: Sam Hoyt on trumpet, Ryan Keberle on trombone, Anat Cohen on clarinet and soprano saxophone, Keith Yaun on banjo, Ron Caswell on tuba, and Brook Martinez on drums.

Barbes is a small, intimate space, and in such a setting it's easy to observe the communication among the musicians. Watching the signals exchanged through eye contact, body language, and hand gestures helps the non-jazz musician finally begin to understand on a practical level how collective improvisation is possible. The atmosphere in the dim, tin-ceilinged club is relaxed and exciting.

The energy of the musicians, already high at the beginning of the evening, feeds off itself and grows throughout the set. The respect and affection among them is obvious. During particularly hot solos, they shout encouragement to each other, and the clarinet player in particular is prone to doing gleeful little dances during rests.

Personally, this is my favorite sort of jazz. I've got old-fashioned taste in music, I guess, and Dixieland just makes me ineffably happy. The Second Line music felt particularly appropriate - any momentary melancholy inspired by the constant presence of New Orleans in the room was immediately overwhelmed by the life and joy in what was being played.

In analyzing the performance, I will first make some general observations about the music, then make some more specific observations about each instrument, and finally discuss three of the ten songs that were played in the set. I chose these three both because they stood out in my mind and because they seem representative, in format and techniques, of the performance as a whole.

The horn solos generally start with the soloist playing alone over the rhythm section for eight bars; the other two horns then come in in a supporting role, often playing short two- or three-note comments in unison, at other times playing countermelodies.