Last November, my nephew Louis Graup from Auburn paid his first visit to New Orleans. Doctoral candidate in environmental science at UC Santa Barbara, he was there to participate in an international conference on water and the environment. Yes, it was a good conference, he told me. Yes, participants reacted well to his presentation. Yes, all very interesting, but how could any conference compare to the excitement of the French Quarter of New Orleans!
Louis drank French coffee, ate French food, but mostly he listened to music in the famed New Orleans jazz clubs. When I told him the most famous of all was founded by a man born and raised in Pottsville, at first he didn’t believe me. After doing a quick search on his phone, finding the facts to corroborate my words, as we used to say: “it blew his mind.”
In September 1961, Allan Jaffe, son of Harry and Fanny Jaffe, who owned a paint, wallpaper and art supplies store on Centre Street in Pottsville, took over Preservation Hall in New Orleans, and the rest is history. Today Preservation Hall Jazz Band is known throughout the world and has performed on nearly every continent. It is a New Orleans institution and a monument to American jazz.
In 1961, Allan and his wife Sandra, born in Philadelphia, were wrapping up a long honeymoon. They had just spent three months in Mexico and heading, home, stopped off in New Orleans, where they discovered “the most foreign place you could go where they still spoke English,” as Allan Jaffe told William Carter, author of Preservation Hall: Music from the Heart, published in 1991.
Allan and Sandra were jazz lovers. They were seeking the true New Orleans sound. Following musicians through the streets, they ended up at an art gallery run by Larry Borenstein, an art dealer from Milwaukee, who had set himself up at Preservation Hall. From time to time, he invited musicians in to play, a venue with no stage, no food, no drinks, a formula that stuck. The Jaffes showed up and loved it. Soon they got involved. A few months later, they took over the lease on the hall and began running the place.
 |
| Musicians and a young Ben Jaffe outside Preservation Hall |
Allan Jaffe was destined for a career in business and had a degree from the Wharton School of Philadelphia. Sandra Jaffe had studied journalism and public relations. After one evening at Preservation Hall, they were hooked. New Orleans jazz got under their skin and, in a matter of months, they embarked on a completely new life.
That took guts, and the Jaffes had plenty, but mostly they were moved by a love of jazz and their new “hometown.” When Allan Jaffe was asked if his business expertise helped him set up the band and keep the operation running, he answered in the negative. What counted most, he loved what he was doing and he was having fun.
Allan and Sandra quickly set up a division of labor. Allan worked with the musicians, listening and smoothing over differences between them. Sandra posted herself at the hall’s front door, holding out a hat for donations because, in the early days, there was no entrance fee. Both rolled up their sleeves and took care of the upkeep of the place. Allan also played tuba with the changing groups of musicians who eventually became Preservation Hall Jazz Band, “the most mythical of traditional jazz orchestras,” as it is known here in France.
 |
| Allan and Sandra Jaffe outside Preservation Hall |
Allan Jaffe’s love of music was born at home. His father Harry, before coming to Pottsville to open his store, was a teacher of stringed instruments at the Settlement Music School of Philadelphia, founded in 1908, today the largest community school of the arts in the United States. He continued an amateur musician all his life and Allan remembers his father playing with two paper hangers in their living room. They had a mandolin, a banjo and a violin and simply passed them around, all three man playing all three instruments, picking up polkas and popular tunes by ear.
Allan began playing the tuba in eighth grade. He became a member of the Third Brigade Band and the PAHS marching band. For his junior and senior years in high school, he earned a tuba scholarship to Valley Forge Military Academy. The school’s orchestra of scholarship students played for Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Later, with Preservation Hall, Jaffe played for all US Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan.
Allan Jaffe died of cancer in 1987. During his 25 years in New Orleans, he became “the spark plug of traditional New Orleans music,” according to William Russell, a good friend, the first curator of the Jazz Archives of Tulane University, and a record-store owner in the city. Thanks to his wife Sandra and son Ben, tuba and double bass player and creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the band played on. Today it is thriving, having weathered Katrina and the covid pandemic.
 |
| Ben Jaffe in gold at left with PHJB |
Last month, on December 27th, Sandra Jaffe died at age 83 in a hospital in New Orleans. In the early days at Preservation Hall, when laws mandating racial separation were still in force, she was arrested for flouting them because her Preservation Hall was integrated from the start. In the early days, her cohorts were jazz pianist Sweet Emma Barrett, who could sing and play a mean “Bill Bailey,” and brothers Percy, on the trumpet, and Willie, on the clarinet, Humphrey.
 |
| Emma Barrett with PHJB |
Today the band is interracial, as it has always been, and intergenerational because, according to Ben Jaffe, “you get more out of life when you believe in building bridges.” In 2018, he and PHJB released the prize-winning documentary “A Tuba to Cuba.” This is a tribute to his father Allan, a musical journey in search of the missing pieces of the sounds of New Orleans jazz. The band, playing and dancing their way across the island, found the music’s roots in the streets of Havana and in the port city of Santiago de Cuba.
Across the years, I’ve sought many “French connections” that could bring Pottsville, France, and French culture closer together. This detour by the way of the French Quarter of New Orleans is one of the strongest and most exciting of all. Pottsvillians should feel proud that a native son, his wife, and his son are “the spark plugs” of Preservation Hall, the greatest traditional jazz band of the United States.
