Word: hirt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nobody," says a fellow Bourbon Street trumpeter, "ever outblew Al." Even allowing for civic partisanship, the boast is not unreasonable. New Orleans Trumpeter Al ("The Monster") Hirt, 38, is a "center-lip" man who blows straight from the diaphragm and generates such a wind that trying to top him, testifies another associate, is like "blowing down the throat of a hurricane." In recent months, the hurricane has swirled through Las Vegas (The Dunes), Manhattan (Basin Street East) and the TV networks with an impact that has made Trumpeter Hirt one of the hottest properties in jazz...
Casual Kazoo. Last week, fresh off the road, Hirt was packing them in at the Pier 600 Club on Bourbon Street, where his success began. A huge (6 ft. 2 in., 300 lbs.), bush-bearded man, he stands on the bandstand, his trumpet like a toy kazoo in one hamlike hand. With his other hand, he sketches out a casual beat. Then he may break into a surprisingly agile buck and wing and lead his combo (trombone, clarinet, drums, bass, piano, trumpet) into a searing chorus of Down by the Riverside. Snarling, growling, shivering into a remarkably clean vibrato...
...style, by Hirt's own definition, is "roving Dixieland." Programs that include numbers like Tin Roof Blues and South Rampart Street Parade are leavened with tricked-up standards-Lover Come Back To Me, All the Things You Are. But Dixieland or standard, the audience vibrates to everything Hirt & Co. produce-even, a critic remarked last week, if it is sometimes "a little hard to hear the trombone...
...everywhere. San Francisco now has Earl ("Fatha") Hines, Kid Ory and Marty Marsala. Chicago has Art Hodes, Bill Reinhardt, Franz Jackson and his Dixieland All-Stars, a popular and authentic group, the average age of whose members is 65. In New Orleans the big names are Pete Fountain, Al Hirt, Mike Lala. And almost anywhere the Dukes of Dixieland can be heard. "The customers," explains one jazz critic, "like to get loaded and imitate trombones...