Wendell Brunious hasn’t played a live gig since March 13. A trumpeter, singer and composer from one of New Orleans’ great musical families, Brunious played two shows that day with the Preservation All-Stars at Preservation Hall.
During the coronavirus pandemic and shutdown of music venues in the city so deeply dependent on live music, months of no gigs have obviously been hard times for Brunious and his peers. Turning 66 years old on October 27, Brunious has been a working musician for 50 years.
Photo by Curtis Knapp
“That has been a hole in my life, man,” he said of the absence of gigs. “I’m used to getting dressed up, grabbing my horn and getting to a gig. Now that’s really missing for me.”
On an upbeat note, Brunious recently filmed a quartet performance for Seven Days of Satch, French Quarter Festival Inc.’s multi-platform celebration of jazz star and New Orleans native Louis Armstrong. His hour-long set with pianist Tom Hook, bassist Richard Moten and drummer Karl Budo debuts at 3 p.m. Saturday, August 1 via Facebook Live. The performance includes such Armstrong rarities as the Duke Ellington-composed “Azalea,” a song on The Great Reunion, one of Ellington’s two album collaborations with Armstrong.
“We play many songs from Louis Armstrong, but songs you wouldn’t normally hear,” Brunious said. “We all have our original songs and that’s great, but on this particular gig, we should honor the greatest, the most influential artist and musician.”
Greg Schatz, entertainment director at French Quarter Festivals, Inc., which produces Satchmo SummerFest, praised Brunious’ Seven Days of Satch performance in advance of its Facebook Live premiere.
“Wendell did a great job talking about the songs and their relevance to Armstrong,” said “And his whole band sounds great.”
Seven Days of Satch —running July 27 through August 2—also features James Andrews, John Boutté, Topsy Chapman and Solid Harmony, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns, Herlin Riley, the Treme Brass Band and Tuba Skinny. A performance schedule is online here. After the performances debut, they’ll be available for repeated viewing.
Wendell Brunious and Freddie Lonzo at Satchmo SummerFest 2018. Photo by Noe Cugny
Brunious’ musical family includes his late father and older brother, trumpeters John “Pickey” Brunious Sr. and John Brunious Jr. His other musician relatives include his trumpeter nephew, Mark Braud; grand uncle, Willie Santiago, an early jazz guitarist and banjo player who performed with Armstrong, Paul Barbarin and, reportedly, Buddy Bolden; and his pianist uncles Lester and Burnell Santiago.
Because of John Brunious Sr.’s place in local music, he naturally was among the 1,000 people who greeted Louis Armstrong at New Orleans International Airport on October 31, 1965. The elder Brunious brought his sons Wendell and Burnell with him to the great event. The homecoming fit for a king is among Wendell Brunious’ most vivid childhood memories. He’d celebrated his ninth birthday a few days before.
“My daddy said, ‘Hey, Pumpkin. I’m going to take you to see Louis Armstrong.’ “Well, Louis Armstrong was like God. How could you even see Louis Armstrong? It was like he was in heaven somewhere.”
By Brunious’ estimation, the crowd at the airport included 100 musicians. “Every musician that you could think of,” he recalled. “George Lewis, Paul Barbarin, Louis Nelson. Alfonse Picou. So many people like that were at this airport to see Louis. And why would you miss that?”
Jazz musician and writer Danny Barker wrote a contemporary report about Armstrong’s arrival for The Second Line magazine. “They were all ages, old men, old women, teenagers, many Orientals, all colors, many nationalities—all dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, quite a few box-back coats and old Stetson hats. And they were all trembling with excitement. … I saw Buddy Touro, Armstrong’s childhood pal; Gibby Guilliot, another faithful friend and admirer; many middle-aged women who knew Louis personally. The vast majority of greeters were people who had that personal attachment to the King.”
“Louis was the last person off of the plane,” Brunious recalled 55 years later, “Paul Barbarin said, ‘There he is, right there.’ And I could see Louis coming down (the detachable airplane steps). He had a white baseball cap on. Oh, man, boy, the atmosphere, you could cut with a knife. Louis came out and the brass band started to play ‘The Saints.’ And when Louis Armstrong smiled, the sun came out of his mouth. He was so touched. He said, ‘This is all the boys I grew up with.’”
Armstrong’s whirlwind fly-in raised funds for the New Orleans Jazz Club. Accompanied by his wife, Lucille, the visit included a reunion with Peter Davis, his trumpet teacher at the New Orleans Colored Waifs Home; a reception at the Royal Orleans hotel; and his nearly three-hour concert at the Loyola Field House.
Brunious sees Armstrong as “the foundation that we’re all operating on. I love King Oliver. He was hip. He was Louis’ mentor. And I love Bunk Johnson and the tunes he picked and his interpretation of melody. But Louis embodies all of that. He had great chops and great technique—he could sing, he could do everything. He wrote a few songs, but his interpretation of every song is most of the time the best version of the song. Another thing with Louis, you can hear the fun that he had in the studio. And that’s what I try to do. I want to play the best I can, but I want to have fun and I want the audience to have fun. I want to make them happy.”
As consequential as Armstrong is, Brunious instinctively appreciates his hometown’s musical legacy in total.
“When you say New Orleans music, you’ve said a mouthful,” he said. “Where would the world be without us? Louis Armstrong. Fats Domino. Jelly Roll Morton. All of those guys. The stuff they brought and made happen. This little city is a powerful little place. These big New York guys, God bless them. But New Orleans, there’s nowhere else in the world like it. Coattails of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Al of those things that couldn’t come from nowhere but here.”
One of eight musical children raised by his father, John Sr., and mother, Nazimova “Chinee” Santiago, Wendell Brunious also recalls the Atlantic Records recording session that happened at his family’s home on North Conti Street in the fall of 1958. His father played for the resulting 1959 Young Tuxedo Brass Band album titled Jazz Begins: Sounds of New Orleans Streets: Funeral and Parade Music. A photo of Brunious and his older sister, Lorraine, appears in the album’s gatefold liner notes.
“My daddy, Albert Walters, Andy Anderson, that was a hell of a trumpet section,” Brunious said. “And Paul Barbarin [snare drum], Emile Knox [bass drum], Wilbert Tillman [sousaphone]. People I had known since I was born. But that [open-air recording session] was the first time I saw them perform. Wow, boy. And it was the first recording of ‘Whoopin’ Blues.’ That was so special.”
Brunious’ music mentors include Danny Barker, the singer, songwriter, banjo and guitar player, raconteur, historian and beloved advocate for New Orleans music. Barker paid Brunious for his first professional engagement, a brass band gig at an early New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
“I wasn’t really even hired,” the trumpeter remembered. “I was just marching next to my brother and my daddy, but I could play those easy songs. Danny Barker came to our house to pay my daddy. And when I came home from work at the drug store, my mother said, ‘Danny Barker was here today. He left this for you.’ And she gave me an envelope full of money. That’s when I realized hey, man, you can make money playing trumpet! Then Danny hired me and Shannon Powell to play in his stage band with his wife, Blue Lu. I was just out of my teens.”
Working with the Barkers was a great education for a young musician.
“Danny was a master at singing and entertaining,” Brunious said. “He wrapped people around his finger. And he had all kinds of crazy stuff he would say that was based on rhythms. Caribbean rhythms with a New Orleans feeling. There was so much to learn from him. I’ve been so lucky to be around people like that. If you’re a musician, you’re lucky to be born in New Orleans. I wouldn’t swap it.”
Brunious’ other mentors include guitarist Justin Adams, Olympia Brass Band leader Harold Dejan and Ellis Marsalis, the pianist and educator who died at 85 in April from COVID-19 complications.
“Ellis Marsalis touched so many people in New Orleans and so many musical lives,” Brunious said. “All of us, if we wanted to know something, we could always ask Ellis. I didn’t really study with him, but I learned so much from Ellis. And he realized the value of me. I was a bridge between bebop and traditional songs. That’s why he asked me to teach that class [at the University of New Orleans]. I did my best for those young musicians.”
Photo by Camille Lenain.
Brunious wants to help sustain the New Orleans jazz he was born into, in part through his performances.
“All of my experiences, growing up hearing people on Bourbon Street, like Avery “Kid” Howard and Thomas Jefferson, and my daddy, my brother, John, Teddy Riley and all those great trumpet players. Their influence comes out in me.”
Performing with young musicians is another way Brunious hopes to keep jazz as he’s known it vital. With that goal in mind, he doesn’t give young musicians slack. When he was a young musician, Brunious recalled, Justin Adams insisted he pull his weight when they played the first brunch at Commander’s Palace in the 1970s.
“Justin fussed at me because I didn’t know that many songs,” Brunious said. “‘You better learn the damn song!’ But he was just giving me little swift kick in the butt, to make me do what I’m supposed to do. This is why I’m not so lenient on young musicians. I’m like, ‘Hey, brah. I got a kick in the butt. Now it’s time for me to kick your butt. Because to those that much is given, much is expected. Yeah, I’m expecting something from you, because you’ve been given something.’ And that’s the way they’re going to grow. And I played many gigs with Ellis (Marsalis) and, boy, Ellis took no prisoners. He was like, ‘Brah, you gotta get that together. Okay?’”
Despite having no gigs to play during the coronavirus pandemic, Brunious practices every day. And he works at his computer, typing the books for two musicals, Hannah and My One and Only Love, originally written by hand during his post-Hurricane Katrina years in Sweden.
“It’s not razzle dazzle,” Brunious said of the musicals. “It’s directly from an artist’s soul. People can try to write what it’s like to be a musician on Bourbon Street and stuff like that, but that’s what we did. That’s our life.”
“Hard Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah,” the 100-year-old standard about “the meanest gal in town,” inspired the Hannah musical.
“I was trying to write about Hard Hearted Hannah, but I don’t know that lifestyle,” he said. Brunious consequently made Hannah a young woman who sings in a Baptist choir. “It’s funny how you start writing and then things start to happen. You accidentally on purpose wind up with a theme and a real story.”
The song “My One and Only Love” and its performance by Johnny Hartman inspired Brunious’ musical of the same name.
“I love Johnny Hartman’s singing of this song,” he said. “And the story is about the experiences I had when I lived in California.” Brunious is writing a third musical, based on his years of performing on Bourbon Street and the characters he observed there.
Having lived in places other than New Orleans, Brunious ultimately picked his hometown to be his permanent residence. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina and the unprecedented flood that followed it abruptly displaced him and many of his musician peers and fellow New Orleanians. On tour in Japan when the storm struck, Brunious wound up at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in early September. Unable to go home, he flew to Europe ahead of an already scheduled tour there. Sweden served as his home base for nearly a decade. In exile, Brunious came to know precisely what it means to miss New Orleans.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “I had gigs in Europe. I had money. But there was a musical void there. I was just like, ‘Hmm-hm. I gotta get back to gumbo, man. I gotta be back with the people I groove with.’ So, I left all of that and came back. We have a flow of life here that is, as I like to say, often imitated, never duplicated. There’s something here that you gotta be here to get. You can’t learn to sing or play like Louis Armstrong from a record. You can imitate those notes, but that heart comes from New Orleans.”
Wendell Brunious’ Seven Days of Satch concert debuts at 3 p.m. Saturday, August 1 at Facebook Live. Cover photo for the August 2020 issue was taken by Camille Lenain.
The post Getting back with people to play with, Wendell Brunious grooves to Seven Days of Satch appeared first on OffBeat Magazine.