Bria Skonberg
‘What It Means’
Cellar Music

Appearing at Dizzy’s
Jazz at Lincoln Center
September 20-22

The title of the new album by Bria Skonberg, “What It Means,” is taken from one of the most famous songs ever written about the city of New Orleans. “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” was written by two stalwart songwriting veterans, Louis Alter and Eddie DeLange, and then introduced on screen by two of the greatest artists in all of American music, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, in a rather dreadful movie titled simply “New Orleans” in 1946.  

A trumpeter, singer, composer, and bandleader, Ms. Skonberg has extrapolated those three words out of that rather lengthy song title to indicate that with this project, the idea is to contemplate the larger meaning of New Orleans music. 

She succeeds on a literal level: All 11 tracks were recorded at the Crescent City, and she employs a collective of mostly local musicians with national reputations: guitarist Don Vappie, saxophonists Rex Gregory and Aurora Nealand, trombonist Ethan Santos, and powerhouse drummer Herlin Riley, among others. The longtime director of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Ben Jaffe, makes a cameo appearance on sousaphone.  

Ms. Skonberg also includes two standards by Nola luminaries: Louis Armstrong’s “Cornet Chop Suey,” now given a parade-like bounce, and Sidney Bechet’s “Petite Fleur,” transmuted into an exotic minor that suggests the composer’s 1949 “Song of the Medina.”

Yet the album reflects the spirit of New Orleans on a philosophical level as well. More than any other metropolis on the musical map, the Crescent City represents an amalgam of American and sometimes European styles and sounds — blues, spirituals, marching band music, and ragtime, as well as opera and symphonies — that repeatedly come together to create new musics: jazz, at the turn of the last century, then an important strain of R&B and soul a few decades after that.  Even in its purest form, New Orleans music is a hybrid unto itself no matter what era.

There are plenty of beats on “What It Means” that are specifically Louisianan — if that’s even a word — but what really impresses is Ms. Skonberg’s penchant for combining different songs and strains into surprising and delightful concoctions.

A 1966 hit by Sonny and Cher, “The Beat Goes On,” caught me completely by surprise; as originally written by Sonny Bono, it’s very much an undernourished melody and lyric. As session bassist Carol Kaye famously said, “It was a nothing song, and then the bass line kind of made that.” As with “These Boots are Made For Walkin’,” the bass line adds so much to the song that it’s hard to imagine “The Beat Goes On” without it.

Yet that’s what Ms. Skonberg and her Crescent City compadres have done: They’ve removed the iconic original bass line and substituted not just more of the same, but a countermelody, and the result is that they give “The Beat” song an entirely new beat.  Basically, they’ve taken one of the most famous tunes of 1960s jazz, Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder,” and repurposed it into the other half of “The Beat Goes On.” The two tunes are overlaid into a glorious whole.

Two tracks reflect Ms. Skonberg’s status as a young parent, both of which use jazz classics in support of rock-era lullabies.  “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” one of the last songs written by John Lennon, opens with just enough notes of the Count Basie/Neal Hefti “Li’l Darlin’” to make it recognizable; Thad Jones’s “A Child is Born,” frequently recycled as a Christmas tune, frames Billy Joel’s “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel).”  

She also reconceives “Sweet Pea,” by the contemporary singer-songwriter Amos Lee, to make it sound like it could have been written by Hoagy Carmichael, a sweet jazzy lullaby in the tradition of “Snowball.”

“Comes Love” is a jazz standard written for a revue — the 1939 “Yokel Boy” — and it too is an ingenious hybrid: She opens with a slow, growlingly bluesy treatment employing a cup mute. Following a brief chorus, there’s a discernible fermata, after which the ensemble returns, this time playing the same tune now as a salsa number in something closer to an Afro-Cuban 6/8, and detouring through a few bars of “Caravan.”

This is a rare album wherein virtually every track is memorable and delightful: “Elbow Bump” — perhaps a nod to all the elbow-bending that goes on in Nola during parade season, or any season — is an original street parade march with elements of calypso; Van Morrison’s 1995 “Days Like This” features an exceptional Italian-American singer, Gabrielle Cavassa, who made an impressive imprint on Joshua Redman’s latest album. “In the House” is a catchy minor riff that serves to remind us that this music is for dancing.

Which brings us back to the sort-of title song, “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” is just about the most-performed Nola-centric song of the last 75 years or so, taking the place of earlier generations’ “Way Down Yonder In New Orleans” and “Basin Street Blues.” It’s mostly Mr. Vappie’s guitar behind Ms. Skonberg, though by the end of the first chorus, pianist Chris Pattinshall and bassist Grayson Brockamp are also prominent.

 Ms. Skonberg plays a brief trumpet solo, crooning just as sweetly on her horn as she did with her voice.  There are hundreds of recorded versions of this song, frequently abbreviated to “DYKWIMTMNO,” but this one is special. 

Still, I can’t help but think of another performance of this song, which I only know about second-hand. My parents, who were Crescent City residents in the 1950s, told tales of a famous drag queen on Bourbon Street whose specialty was singing the song with the title slightly adjusted to “Do You Know What It Means to be Miss New Orleans?” But that’s another story. And the beat goes on.