The Dixie Syncopators
Carlton Reiley, leader
Dick Robins, cornet Tony Altwies, clarinet
John Soulis, trombone Richard Eckhart, tuba
Dave Norris, banjo Jackson Stock, piano
Melinda Coffey Armstead, organ
Chapel Concertino
That’s A Plenty . . . . Lew Pollack (1914)
Amazing Grace . . . traditional
Down by the Riverside . . . traditional
What A Wonderful World . . . Weiss & Douglass (1967)
Offertory
Count Your Blessings . . . I. Berlin (1952)
Communion
Just A Closer Walk With Thee . . . Traditional
The Old Rugged Cross . . . Geo. Bennard (1913)
Postlude
When The Saints Go Marching In . . .Traditional
In New Orleans the carnival season opens on Twelfth Night (Jan. 6) and climaxes with the Mardi Gras season, which begins 10 days before Shrove Tuesday. The French name “Mardi Gras” means “Fat Tuesday”, from the custom of using up all the fat in the house before Lent. It was known informally as Quadruple Bypassover owing to the remarkable habits of the French, who will eat practically anything, including melted ham fat seasoned with truffles and garlic. The origin of the “carnival” is uncertain, although it may be traced to the Medieval Latin “carnem lavare”, loosely rendered “wash up (and come to dinner) cause them dogs is messing with your meat agin’”. Carnival is the final festival before the beginning of the austere 40 days of Lent, during which Roman Catholics, in earlier times, abstained from eating meat
If your toes want tapping you’ve come to the right Sunday, as Dixieland Jazz is our Mardi Gras Connection. “Dixieland” most often refers to the work of certain white (!) jazz musicians, deriving from the name of the first important group of this kind, the “Original Dixieland Jazz Band”, a group of five white guys (cornet, trombone, clarinet, drums and piano) from New Orleans. It was an unusual, indelible mixture of black jazz and white middle class dance music. Anyway, they moved to Chicago in 1916 and to New York a year later, skyrocketing to fame, until the mid 1920s, when they ran out of gas, answering the white genetic imperative to get out of music and into something profitable.
