Various Artists – Traditional Jazz From New Orleans (Various Artists)

From the late 1960s into the mid-1980s a New Orleans-based record label, the Smoky Mary Phonograph Company, released fourteen LPs by some of the city's most revered and respected elder jazz musicians. The labels's owner, trombonist Frank Demond, produced Smoky Mary's sessions and often played on them, including many of the songs anthologized here on Traditional Jazz From New Orleans. A native of Los Angeles, Demond fell love with the Crescent City trad sound after hearing the Preservation Hall Band perform in California. That transformative moment inspired Demond to move to New Orleans, sit in with the band, and eventually join it. Smoky Mary refers to a nineteenth-century train which many musicians rode between gigs in downtown New Orleans, bythe Mississippi River, and. Dome five niles away, in Milneburg on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Demond focused on recording such venerable veterans as singing pianist Sweet Emma Barrett, trumpeter Percy Humphrey and his clarinetist brother Willie Humphrey, trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine, trombonist Jim [Big Jim?] Robinson, and a host of their colleagues.