New Orleans' Own Dukes of Dixieland

When the saints go marching in, they’ll be doing it to the high-steppin’ sounds of New Orleans' Own Dukes of Dixieland. With trombones, trumpets and clarinets raised high, the Dukes proudly carry on one of New Orleans’ most valued traditions. If you want to get technical about it, Dixieland is an amalgam of brass band marches, French Quadrilles, ragtime and blues, played in a polyphonic format. For the rest of us, that means a spirited, joyful variation on jazz known to early musicians as small-band swing. For nearly a century it’s been inexorably associated with the free-wheeling party atmosphere of New Orleans’ French Quarter. As for the Dukes, teenage brothers Frank Assunto (trumpet) and Fred Assunto (trombone) put the original band together in 1948, to play at Mama Lou’s Seafood Restaurant. Young Pete Fountain often joined in on clarinet. They called the band Dukes of Dixieland simply because so many groups at the time used the word “Kings.” In 1950, the Assuntos and company became the house band at the Famous Door on Bourbon Street; by the mid ‘50s they’d been established in both Chicago and Las Vegas nightclubs. They appeared on Ed Sullivan’s TV variety show and recorded albums with Louis Armstrong. The momentum had slowed considerably by the early 1970s, and the band broke up, but in 1974 a “new” Dukes was formed (not associated with the Assunto family), and it’s this outfit that’s carried the good word of N’awlins around the world. Fronted by drummer Richard Taylor, and spotlighting the clarinet artistry of Earl Bonie, today’s Dukes of Dixieland blend pop, gospel and country into the gumbo of their small-band swing, and audiences from San Francisco to Sydney happily let the good times roll when they come to play.