The High Society New Orleans Jazz Band’s debut album, Live at Birdland, released on Turtle Bay Records, captures the high-energy, traditional jazz (trad jazz) the ensemble performs during its weekly Thursday residency at New York City’s Birdland Jazz Club. The ensemble is essentially a continuation of Woody Allen’s New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra without the director himself. Co-leaders Conal Fowkes (piano) and Simon Wettenhall (trumpet) spent nearly three decades performing with Allen at the Café Carlyle until 2020.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the group established a new base at Birdland, maintaining their dedication to preserving 100-year-old ensemble jazz. Selections for the recording came from two sold-out performances in August 2024 at the Birdland Theater, the club’s more intimate basement venue. The release comprises an eight-song, 50-minute set that focuses on authentic arrangements rather than mere imitation. This music and performance are reminiscent of Eddie Condon’s and Jimmy Ryan’s jazz clubs, havens for the maintenance and ritual of that music that floated up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Chicago, taking the train to New York City.
The concert repertoire spans the earliest eras of jazz—from the mythic Buddy Bolden to Bix Beiderbecke and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra—with specific showstoppers, including: the traditional New Orleans funeral/second line mashup, “Flee as a Bird/Oh Didn’t He Ramble” and the band’s namesake, “High Society” the Porter Steele standard, originally recorded in 1911. King Oliver’s 1923 Creole Jazz Band piece, ”Dallas Blues,” was the first published blues tune, featuring an emotional banjo solo by Josh Dunn. The Irving Berlin rarity “When I Leave the World Behind” from 1915 provides the set’s coda.
The band’s nominal core comprises trumpeter and vocalist Simon Wettenhall, pianist Conal Fowkes, trombonist Harvey Tibbs, clarinettist and alto saxophonist Tom Abbott: Clarinet, guitarist/banjoist Josh Dunn, bassist Brian Nalepka, and drummer Kevin Dorn.
