Narvin Kimball & Friends

What you will hear on this disc is not just the usual energetic, celebratory retrospective of traditional jazz we have come to expect from Narvin Kimball and his friends from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. This is also, and most importantly, the feature debut of Narvin Kimball, an 85 year-old phenomenon on banjo and voice, who graciously guides us through some highlights of the American songbook. Converted from his high school ukulele to the banjo, Kimball began his professional career paying his dues and refining his craft aboard the now legendary paddle-wheel steamers - "showboats" really - that traveled the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Paul for the Streckfus riverboat line. "If you had an opportunity to play on the steamers it was like having a post-graduate degree in music," Narvin recounts. This brings us to his teacher, the formidable bandleader, disciplinarian and calliope player with the wonderful name, Fate Marable. The under appreciated and underrecorded Marable was apparently a genius at transforming talented but untutored, and sometimes ungovernable, New Orleans' musicians into disciplined players who were taught not only to read music but were also forced to learn the varied repertoire needed to please the varied audiences - both white and black - that were drawn to this itinerant music. This recording is much more the music of the river than of the city. It's a sampler of musical Americana, jazz-inflected and - make no mistake - New Orleans style.