In writing about music, we often discuss the powers of influence and novelty. In favor of these, a concept that's been overlooked is the role of heritage in the creation of music. This concept describes something so entrenched in a particular culture that its expression is preserved and treasured. Yes, it's also a banal concept historians like to use, and that's too hefty for any music review of reasonable length. Still, heritage is something all forms of music possess, even if it's not acknowledged or, furthermore, felt. On the self titled, live recording, Sweet Emma and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the spirit of heritage is cradled, heralded, honored, and impossible not to sense. The recording takes jazz, America's most idiosyncratic art form and fosters it in New Orleans, America's most idiosyncratic city (sorry citizens of Red Haw, it's true). The result is music of both movement and reflection: there are celebratory pieces for the dancehall as well as mournful spirituals.
New Orleans Jazz, rising in the early 1900s from the blues and ragtime sounds that pervaded the American South, is the first incarnation of the Jazz genre. Its most fundamental elements included bass, banjo, woodwinds, and brass. Whether spectacular or solemn, the music sought to celebrate the human experience. Sweet Emma pays complete homage to this notion. Recorded live at Preservation Hall in New Orleans, the record reels in slow with the introduction of each player and instrument. The band then launches into "Clarinet Marmalade," a roaring piece that epitomizes the New Orleans Jazz experience: bursts of clarinet, trombones and trumpets that double, then run contrary to each other, with drums, banjo, bass, and piano pacing the action. Amid all of this, there's little showmanship: each player is a master of a single instrument, and each is given ample and equal space. "Ice Cream" and the ubiquitous and important "When the Saints Go Marching In" continue the tradition in this vain. The slender and aged Sweet Emma herself takes vocal responsibilities on the monument to unrequited love, "I'm Alone because I Love You," and the funeral standard, "Closer Walk With Thee." Drawing the listener in further is the charismatic MC work of trumpeter Percy Humphrey.
Regardless of the precise context of each of the selections on Sweet Emma, the overall tone is one of resounding celebration. In this sense, it finds kinship with Irish folk music. Both forms insist to us that a life lived, whether tragic, common, or heroic, should be documented and honored with a sense of joy. Three years after the recording of this record, Sweet Emma suffered a stroke leaving the left side of her body paralyzed; 40 years later, Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans leaving a swell of catastrophe and loss. In spite of these, Sweet Emma, like the city she loved, remained true to her heritage. Unmoved, she crept back up to the stage, sat at her piano, and played on.