Photo credit: Josh Goleman
Preservation Hall Jazz Band has released the video for their song ‘Keep Your Head Up’. The track, which features Cuban singer Eme Alfonso, appears on their new album A Tuba To Cuba, the soundtrack to the critically acclaimed documentary directed by T.G. Herrington and Danny Clinch, out now via Sub Pop. Watch and share ‘Keep Your Head Up’ below.
“‘Keep Your Head Up’ is a simple message with a big meaning,” says Ben Jaffe. “Walk with your head high, walk with pride, and live your life with grace and honour and an appreciation for all humanity. Don’t let things break you down and don’t allow anyone or anything to diminish your spirit.”
“We met the wonderful Eme Alfonso at a performance at an amazing old factory that’s been converted into a multi-disciplinary art space called Fabrica Del Arte. That same evening we met she came up and improvised lyrics in Spanish on the spot. Eme later told me the words she sang have a deep meaning in Cuba, the translation is something like “walk with your head out front, don’t be so down, walk with joy.”
“To say Preservation Hall Jazz Band is to refer to the purest essence of our traditions and to discover NOLA, through the band and Ben its director, was for me one of the most beautiful experiences of my life,” says singer Eme Alfonso. “Because in New Orleans… Jazz and art flow from the streets of this city and it’s clear that it has a direct connection to Cuba, Havana, and all of those who came before us. Our grandparents are connected through these rhythms, dances, melodies, and customs and this shared history of our ancestors unites us all.
“New Orleans and Cuba are deeply connected,” Alfonso continues. “This collaboration is a conduit, a lesson to show our people, and others in the world that we are all family and that art and music has the power to unites us.”
“We went to Cuba in prayer position,” says Preservation Hall band leader and bass player Ben Jaffe when he speaks of the pilgrimage he and the group took to Cuba in December 2015. “We went to receive and offer at the same time. We had never experienced a moment like this, it felt as though all roads were intersecting at once.” The critically acclaimed 2019 documentary A Tuba to Cuba documented the band’s journey as they explored the links that connect New Orleans and Cuba so indelibly – their shared, tragic history as destinations where enslaved Africans struggled to simply survive, and their current status as places where the cultural inheritance from those ancestors is kept alive in both song and deed – but that was only half the story. This collection of songs, a musical account of a generations-in-the-making reunion of musical families separated by time, politics, and distance, tells the other half.
When asked to describe the collection of songs assembled on Tuba to Cuba, Jaffe sums it up by saying, “It’s like listening to the radio.” And yes, A Tuba to Cuba actually feels less like an ordinary soundtrack and more like a living document, a recording of a broadcast that’s been waiting to exist, a modern version of the static-y radio signals that were broadcast between America to the Caribbean in the early and mid-20th century, sending the sounds of jazz and mambo and R&B and more back and forth across the vast divides of water and culture and politics. It’s a story, this album, and the tale being told mirrors the band’s experience.
The resulting collection of songs is what Jaffe describes as “a beautiful conversation.” The music of A Tuba to Cuba is an ecstatic expression of that ongoing conversation, a restless and lush trip up and down strange FM wavelengths bridging thousands of miles and hundreds of years, where all involved are talking with each other and over each other in excitement, charged with the thrill of recognition of the evidence of their shared familial roots, an undeniable kinship rooted in bloodlines, rhythm, and melody.
