Clive Wilson’s New Orleans Serenaders

London-born trumpeter Clive Wilson — Moved to New Orleans in 1964 — Leading the Serenaders ever since

Clive Wilson’s New Orleans Serenaders is a traditional New Orleans jazz band led by London-born trumpeter Clive Wilson, who moved to the Crescent City in 1964 and never left. With clarinetist Tommy Sancton, trombonist Freddie John, pianist Butch Thompson, bassist Tom Saunders, and drummer Norman Emberson, the six-piece band keeps the classic repertoire of Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and Jelly Roll Morton alive.

Never heard the Serenaders before?

🎺 The Sound

Six-piece traditional jazz band

🎶 Repertoire

Armstrong · Ory · Morton

🎵 Start With

Heart Full of Rhythm (2008)

A beautiful specimen of that increasingly rare New Orleans sound, the six-piece traditional jazz band.

— OffBeat

Why We Love Clive Wilson’s New Orleans Serenaders

Some bands play traditional jazz; the Serenaders are the tradition, carried across an ocean and six decades. Clive Wilson heard George Lewis’s band on tour in London, gave up physics, moved to New Orleans in 1964, and spent his nights at Preservation Hall until the band told him to get his horn and sit in. The musicians he gathered — Tommy Sancton, Butch Thompson, and company — learned at the feet of the living legends, and their friendships go back nearly forty years. Hearing them play “West End Blues” or “King Porter Stomp” is hearing the music the way it was meant to be handed down: in person, in the room, by people who lived it.

Biography

Sixty Years of the Real Thing

Clive Wilson took up the trumpet after hearing the George Lewis New Orleans Jazz Band on tour in his native London. He studied physics at Newcastle University, but jazz was his passion — and after moving to New Orleans in 1964, he decided to make music, rather than physics, his career. He went to Preservation Hall every night; at the end of his first week, the band told him to get his horn and sit in. Within a year he was living around the corner from the Hall. “Preservation Hall was our front room,” he remembers. “We’d go down there at 8:30 or 9 and spend most of the night there, every night.”

Wilson gathered the New Orleans Serenaders from players with whom he shares musical friendships going back nearly four decades — clarinetist Tommy Sancton, trombonist Freddie John, pianist Butch Thompson, bassist Tom Saunders, and drummer Norman Emberson. Most of them spent their formative years in the 1960s and ’70s listening to, studying with, and playing with the living legends of New Orleans jazz, in jam sessions, concerts, parades, and even New Orleans funerals. Their repertoire revisits the music of Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong, and their era: Ory’s “Creole Trombone,” “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Potato Head Blues,” “West End Blues,” “Maple Leaf Rag,” and “Gatemouth.”

"Preservation Hall was our front room. We’d go down there at 8:30 or 9 and spend most of the night there, every night."

— Clive Wilson

The Serenaders have played concerts and jazz festivals on both sides of the Atlantic to critical acclaim, and their two GHB Records albums are models of the style: Sweet and Hot: The Music of Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory (2004) and Heart Full of Rhythm (2008), which OffBeat praised for repertoire “nothing too hackneyed” and Thompson’s masterful Morton piano. Wilson — also the author of the memoir Time of My Life and a recipient of a Preservation Hall Legacy Award — still leads the band at festivals including the French Quarter Festival, six decades after he first fell for the music.