The High Society New Orleans Jazz Band
Thursdays at Birdland Theater

The history of jazz is more driven by geography than most of us may want to admit. You could say that the High Society New Orleans Jazz Band is a dixieland band, or a 1920s-style hot jazz band, but, as the name indicates, New Orleans jazz is the central ideal to which the band aspires.  

It’s a fairly flexible goal: The group, which has been holding forth on Thursday evenings since March, opened its most recent set with a venerable dixieland warhorse, “Buddy’s Habits,” composed and introduced in 1923 by bandleader Charley Straight but immortalized that same year by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band featuring Louis Armstrong.  

At the end of the set, the High Society band played another piece of the same general provenance, Jelly Roll Morton’s 1924 “Shreveport Stomps.” Throughout both, the group played with admirable drive and energy in the best traditional jazz style, so that was a solid move in terms of establishing the basic approach of the group.

Yet New Orleans jazz doesn’t necessary only mean early jazz or 1920s jazz; the High Society band harkens back to the founding fathers, but also to the entire history of jazz in the Crescent City, including the so-called New Orleans Revival of the 1940s and ’50s — the glorious age of Bunk Johnson and George Lewis — and all the subsequent revivals. Anyone who lived in NOLA even in the 1960s could testify there were old-school-style bands that played not only King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, but a wide range of pop songs from across the generations, all interpreted in the polyphonic, mostly two-beat style.

F’instance: After “Buddy’s Habits,” bassist Brian Nalepka sallied forth with his first of several features, which turned out to be “Only You (And You Alone),” a 1955 doo wop hit by the Platters. This is precisely the sort of tune that you would have heard in a New Orleans dance hall at the time. The bassist’s other vocal was “On a Cocoanut Island,” a 1936 Hawaiian-style tune famously christened by Louis Armstrong backed by a group called the Polynesians. For this tune, drummer Kevin Dorn played a distinctly Professor Longhair-style Bourbon Street parade beat.

The High Society New Orleans Jazz Band has been playing under this name and in this venue for barely three months, but the core of the group has been together for at least 25 years, playing under the leadership of Woody Allen as well as the late banjo virtuoso Eddy Davis, who served as musical director. Although Mr. Allen toured with most of these players as recently as last summer, the filmmaker and clarinetist plays less frequently now at the age of 88.  

The band is officially led by two player-singers who were raised rather far from New Orleans, pianist Conal Fowkes of Britain and trumpeter Simon Wettenhal of Australia, each of whom sing several times a night. Josh Dunn, who doubles on banjo and guitar, is from Tasmania and was introduced by Mr. Fowkes as “The Wonder From Down Under.”

The group hewed to the roots with a fundamental folk blues, “Corrine, Corrina,” featuring Mr. Wettenhal, and a bluesy ballad titled “Mama’s Gone Goodbye,” by a somewhat less-appreciated Louisiana bandleader, Armand J. Piron. It was famously sung by Peggy Lee but was performed at Birdland as a very danceable instrumental. As with the other pre-modern jazz groups that have regular spots in the Birdland Theater — Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks on Mondays and David Ostwald’s Louis Armstrong Eternity Jazz Band — the only drawback to this attractive space is the lack of a dance floor. 

New Orleans is a town of churches as well as dance halls, and the group played several hymn-inspired pieces of the kind favored by marching bands, starting with the spiritual “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” sung by Mr. Fowkes and with a moaning solo by trombonist Harvey Tibbs. A traditional funeral mashup of the dirge “Flee As A Bird” was followed by the swinging march “Didn’t He Ramble,” with the band chanting in unison, representing the procession both to and from the cemetery. 

Clarinetist Tom Abbott sang on “Muddy Water,” a 1926 jazz classic with lyrics by a pioneering African American songwriter, Jo Trent. The band concluded by tearing back into the fundamental NOLA canon with Jelly Roll’s nod to the city’s neighbor in the north of the state, “Shreveport.” The longer that the High Society New Orleans Jazz Band keeps going at Birdland, the more firmly it will establish that New Orleans isn’t just a place but a state of a mind, and a state of music.