[Tradjazz] Just found

[johnlauer]

Just found you guys today.  Wondered if there was anyone doing Dixieland (Traditional jazz) on the Internet.  My name is John Lauer and I have a Dixieland Jazz Band in Atlanta called the Roswell Dixie Kings.  However, my background goes all the way back to 1953 when I did a half hour Dixieland Show on Radio KEAR aboard the USS Kearsarge.  I was in a 17 piece U.S. Navy band after coming out of the Navy school of Music.  The Admiral aboard the ship didn't like the way the radio station sounded so he came to the guys in the band and asked us to take over the station.  Bunch of guys got transferred, I ended up running the station, went to Syracuse University and I've been in the radio business ever since.  A couple years ago I resurrected the Dixieland Show as an hour on Sunday afternoons on WMLB here in Atlanta....show has always been called Strictly From Dixie, which is probably politically incorrect, but that never bothered me.   I have an excellent Dixieland collection, and most of what you are playing I have...all the Turk Murphy, the Firehouse Five, most of Louis, all of Pete Fountain, all of Al Hirt.  Back in the 50's the carrier was stationed in San Francisco while we were in dry dock, and we regularly went to Earthquake McGoon's to listen to Turk Murphy's Jazz Band.  When I got to Syracuse I played a couple of gigs with the Salt City Six, made up of guys from Syracuse University (except for trombone player Will Alger who was a townie), the most notable of which was Jack Maheu who went from there to the Dukes of Dixieland.  Our band plays 3 or 4 times a month here in Atlanta for churches, retirement homes and other places that still love our kind of music.  I play sax, clarinet, and string bass in the Roswell New Horizons bands...a 75 piece concert band, a 17 piece jazz band, the Dixieland Band, and a sax quartet. Just heard a classical piece (Rachmaninoff).  One of the greatest I ever heard was the Salt City Six rendition of the William Tell Overture on their one and only album called the Salt City Six visit the classics.