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There’s a really good Johnny Dodds album that’s interesting because Louis Armstrong couldn’t really release music under his own name outside of his record deal, so there’s a record billed as Johnny Dodds’s Hot Five or similar, where the trumpet player is actually Louis Armstrong — he wasn’t allowed to put his name on it or he’d get in trouble. A couple of tunes on there stuck with me a lot. There’s a great tune called Ballin’ the Jack (B-A-L-L-I-N, Ballin’ the Jack) by the Chicago Footwarmers — basically Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five but with a different cornet player, Nathan Dominique. That whole compilation album’s really good. It’s the New Orleans Bootblacks, and then he went up to Chicago and became a Chicago Footwarmer — a lot of that music did travel up on the train, from New Orleans up to Chicago.
There’s a tune at the very end of the [Easy Rollers] album — and usually at the end of the live gig too, since it’s one of the few songs I’ve written that’s just happy and fun — called Just One of Those Days, which taps straight back into New Orleans, swampy stuff. My way into that was originally through more modern groups — at uni everyone was obsessed with a group called Younger Brass Band, and they had a tune called Brooklyn, which doesn’t sound much like New Orleans jazz, but they were a killer, funky brass band from your era. Once you’re in, you follow the line back — it’s so easy now, you hear one tune and you’re a click away from all that band’s albums, then 40 years before them. Younger Brass Band and people like that were big, then that led me to being more aware of the New Orleans traditional thing, and then at 18 or 19 you start properly looking into jazz history and find out about Congo Square.
Because there’s a rhythm section on Just One of Those Days, not just a brass band, it’s probably more influenced by Jelly Roll Morton and later stuff like Dr John — that swampy, even New Orleans blues thing. Often I find myself influenced by the stuff that was around when I was first getting into it, then working backwards. A lot of Dr John, and a band called the Dirty Dozen Brass Band — I was bought a live album by them as one of the jazz CD gifts from my godfather.
Taken from an interview with Jamie Stockbridge of The Easy Rollers in conjunction with Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot – You can get tickets for the band’s show there on the 15th July, along with their other upcoming gigs at https://www.theeasyrollers.co.uk/diary and you can view the other upcoming events at the Shakespeare North Playhouse at https://shakespearenorthplayhouse.co.uk/
