The Heart and Soul of Dixieland | Wall Street Journal

"You know what makes me feel old?" Harry Connick Jr. said to me recently. "When I learned that some of the musicians I work with are also playing in the Preservation Hall Jazz Band."

As its name implies, the idea behind the venerable New Orleans hall and its house band was to create a permanent home for the region's older forms of jazz—and continued employment for the rapidly aging musicians who played them. As it turned out, that wasn't completely necessary: Even though the city also developed a parallel heritage of rhythm and blues (later forms of jazz, like big-band swing and bebop, never really gained a foothold there), the classic "dixieland" style would always be the Crescent City's musical mainstay...

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