Just before the turn of the century, Zander Andreas, who had recently founded San Francisco’s Boom Boom Room with blues icon John Lee Hooker, took his passion and knowledge for promoting events from the Bay Area down to New Orleans for a Jazz Fest celebration that, at the time, was a rarity. Despite the city traditionally allowing few if any outside promoters to throw parties—especially during Jazz Fest—Andreas and Boom Boom Room Presents began what is now a 20-year tradition of bringing various musicians from California, New Orleans, New York and more together into unique lineups for incredible superjams, some of which have even turned into long-running groups.
Now that these late-night collaborations have become standard fare throughout the city during Jazz Fest, Andreas looks back on the history of his Boom Boom Room Presents, from the first NOLA shows to this year’s offerings, which wrapped up this past weekend and featured some of Andreas’ longtime bands like Dragon Smoke, Frequinox and Worship My Organ.
First, I am from San Francisco, born and raised here generationally. Actually on Fillmore Street, like six blocks up from the Boom Boom Room itself. I went to New Orleans with some friends when I was 16 years old to visit another friend of ours who had moved there. He was like, “Come down for Mardi Gras!” Of course, it was a rager and I loved it. Then, I went to Marquette University in Milwaukee. And when Mardi Gras hits, it’s earlier on and it’s cold as hell in Milwaukee in February, so I would jump in my friend’s 1973 Fleetwood Cadillac and we would roll down, blowing off our midterms. So, we barreled down there every year, and if it wasn’t that, it was for Jazz Fest.
In California I used to host parties—believe it or not, it wasn’t too difficult back then to rent houses and party boats as a 16-year-old kid. And of course, I used to make fake IDs back when it was really easy to do that in California. Then through college, I threw together these little festivals, one of them was called Mr. Jiggles Spring Jubilee, which was pretty much a psychedelic mushroom festival with a lot of local bands from our college and around Milwaukee that you can find in the park when it’s warm.
So anyway, all that stuff led up to when I created the Boom Boom Room after I met John Lee Hooker and we became friends. [Bringing him in at the end of the process] was an afterthought really, but it was a good thought. Boom Boom Room was primarily blues for all the legit cats—I don’t think I had a white guy in there on stage for the first two-and-a-half years. It was all these old [blues players], often not regarded but pulled out of retirement or from obscurity, like Smokey Wilson.
A couple years after I started the Boom Boom Room in ’97—which was my 21st year, so the legal age to drink—I came to this little funky old beat-up hotel on North Rampart [Street in New Orleans]. That’s when New Orleans was still New Orleans. I mean, New Orleans is always great, but it has changed a lot,. Back then, there was this place called the French Quarter Courtyard Hotel, not in the Quarter but on the outskirts on Rampart Street. It had probably 35 rooms that overlook the courtyard with a little pool and a 24-hour bar in it. You could get a drink any time you want—4 a.m., get a Bloody Mary, whatever you want.
So, I decided after staying there that I was going to throw some parties. In ’98 or ’99—I started doing shows in San Francisco at other venues, as Boom Boom Room Presents, in ’99—I was responsible for bringing out most of the New Orleans musicians [to California], almost all of them. They don’t really leave New Orleans, and they used to play in the same circuit, like a bubble. Except for bands like Harry Connick Jr., it was a difficult thing to get New Orleans musicians out of New Orleans. And I was responsible for getting all of them over the course of ’98, ’99, 2000. I started bringing out Walter “Wolfman” Washington, the Wild Magnolias, Kermit Ruffins. You name it, they’ve played there at the Boom Boom Room. Even The Meters got together, before they reunited. I would have George Porter and Zigaboo [Modeliste] there. I remember one night, I had Merl Saunders, who was a really close friend of mine.
New Orleans was sort of a closed community—it’s good ol’ boy network, in a way. Outsiders aren’t really welcome to participate—like, “Enjoy our culture, but as far as coming in and doing something, we already have people and clubs with stuff going on with our locals playing.” What I decided to do was throw a party [at that hotel] with a combination of New Orleans musicians and some West Coast musicians who were not known, like Will Bernard and other cats. I took over the whole hotel since it was only 35 rooms and I was able to get a good rate.
So that was my home base for about four or five years, probably just until Katrina or maybe longer. I put all these techno-beam lights in front of the courtyard balcony and I put in stage in there. After negotiating with the hotel, I set up a bar outside and had a caterer with red beans and rice and crawfish. I invited every musician that I knew for a private party during Jazz Fest. My first year, I did “Boom Boom Room Presents the Cali-Style Pool Party” featuring a couple bands that I brought out and some New Orleans musicians. It had an open bar and I had my door man from San Francisco, Tom, in the hallway. I had The Meters and Nevilles come, any musicians or any mangers who I thought would be in town as well as people from down there like club owners that I knew or wanted to know, and also friends and family. Probably like 150 people. I suppose it was a very successful party, and of course the music was something different from just your standard New Orleans stuff. It was New Orleans musicians playing for the first time with people from out of state.
I did that that year and had a great response, so I did it again the next year. And all of a sudden, by the next year, a couple of these club owners were like, “This is such a raging cool fucking idea and concept—we would have never known these players. I was wondering if you wanted to do some shows at our venues?” So, I did the Boom Boom Room Presents shows. The second year, I also had nighttime gigs, which was the first time ever that an outside promoter had done shows in New Orleans more than once. I had four or five shows that I set up. I did Jimmy’s, which was an old club in New Orleans, and then moved into the Dream Palace, which is now known as the Blue Nile. In those days, the Dream Palace was both upstairs and downstairs, like a house party, with DJs upstairs and bands downstairs. Those were pretty successful as far as people having something different. Meanwhile, I had already been in the process of putting together musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area, New York and New Orleans and created a couple different concoctions. I was the only outsider promoter down there doing these late-night parties, which were basically starting at 2 a.m. and going all night. That was a sort of novelty back then—most shows would be done by 2 or maybe 3 a.m.
I did this show in 2001 in San Francisco called the Harvest Moon Funk Jam. I flew up to New York and talked with several different people like Melvin Sparks, and I got ahold of Dr. Lonnie Smith and said I wanted to put together this big show. I was able to meet with Idris Muhammad, too. So we had Idris Muhammad, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Melvin Sparks and Babtunde Lea, and I decided I was going to put in this young kid on bass, Robert Mercurio from Galactic. Lonnie was like, “I don’t know if we need this bass; I’ll play the bass on the B3.” I told him, “Lonnie, here’s the thing—what’s the average age of your female fan base at the small gigs that you play in New York? Is it fair to say 50?” And he says, “Well yeah, I guess so.” And I was like, “Look, I’m going to put together this show at this warehouse in San Francisco. We’re going to get a lot of 21 and 22 year olds, and I am going to educate them.” On my fliers I had explanations of who these people were on the back. “You’re gonna get a lot of press from it, and it’s going to put you in the public eye in a burgeoning jamband scene which will embrace this. And they did! I have yet to release that—I have over 900 hours of multi-track recordings, which obviously I would need to do negotiations with these people in order to release them for sale.
Then all of a sudden I started doing 18-22 shows at Jazz Fest over the course of 10 days. I took over Dream Palace and then I worked at the Blue Nile. I believe I did a show at the d.b.a as well. Then I did shows at Tipitina’s—so many different venues going on all at once. It beat the hell out of my crew, but I had two or three crews with a production manager in each one coordinating while I was jumping around in a taxi from one place to the next all night. This was pre-Uber, mind you.
Then I started putting more great configurations [of musicians] together. I created Dragon Smoke at [New Orleans’s] Dragon’s Den, a very small place. Rob and Stanton [Moore] had already played together, but they didn’t know anything about these other musicians [Ivan Neville and Eric Lindell]. I also created a band called Frequinox [Moore, Mercurio, Bernard, Robert Walter and Donald Harrison]. Those guys were even from New Orleans and they didn’t know Donald Harrison, and they also didn’t know Will Bernard. None of these guys have ever played together before. Will had asked me, “Can you put together one of these projects you do and get me involved in it?”
From there, I continued doing these lingering shows which were really starting to take off and become really popular and people were like, “The Boom Boom Room does these great late-night shows!” Not only the regular shows from 9-2, but from 2-6. So they became wildly popular. If you’re a music head down in New Orleans, you can’t get enough of music. If it stops at a certain hour, you go, “Well, now what are we going to do?”
I was working with Adam Deitch when he was like 19, Will Blades, too. I was working with Joe Russo and Marco Benevento before they were the Duo. I had them come out from New York to play a Will Bernard West Coast show. I can tell how people can work together, what kind of versatility they possess, which is maybe not obvious to other musicians. Nobody knew to do that kind of stuff—Boom Boom Room Presents did it. Now, superjams are all over the place in New Orleans. At Jazz Fest, with rock-and-rollers and jazz players—the old guys were re-inspired by these young guys that were playing music based on what they created as pioneers of soul jazz and afro-jazz from the early ‘70s. Some really amazing people that were in obscurity in some sense.
Boom Boom Room Presents continued putting on shows. Frenchmen Street blew up while I was doing Blue Nile. I actually helped it get re-opened after Katrina, because they were going to sell it. I was working primarily there at the Blue Nile, but I would also do stuff in Dragon’s Den and shows at the Maple Leaf and some at Preservation Hall, which is a huge place and a great spot. But I had to bring in all my own sound and lighting. And from there, the Blue Nile kind of lit up and eclipsed a lot of other places.
It’s been going strong ever since. And now that it’s my 20th anniversary of Jazz Fest, I have it down to only eight shows. I thought, “I want to enjoy at least the second weekend a little bit. I want to actually relax and enjoy Jazz Fest.” It can beat you up, and you’ll never make it out to the fairgrounds. Night, day, night, day, night, day. So I dropped it down, anywhere between 8-15.
I brought MonoNeon down to New Orleans for the first time three years ago. I have a little knack for naming bands—Neon-Medeski got together, which is basically Worship My Organ without Marco but instead having Medeski and Daru Jones on the drums. Daru Jones, he’s into hip-hop and everything else, but he was a jazz drummer. He also has a band now which I am working with called DMD. the Vibes—that’s Doug Wimbish from Living Color and Marcus Machado on guitar and Daru Jones on drums, with a couple other cats in there. And that’s the next band to blow up; I love those guys. They should be put on your radar.
That’s the thing about musicians I work with—John Lee Hooker was my partner, and we’ve become good friends. Especially jazz musicians, but most musicians can be quirky because they get so much attention from people and have their own particular geniuses in their head with music. That’s where their creativity comes from, their own ingenuity. The idea was to take the best of the best from different generations of players, or even from same generations but from different musical styles that might crossover, and then put them together. Not just throwing big-name people together, because they weren’t big names, they were just great players who could create a whole new genre themselves. That has always been my idea. You know, new music can be created. New outlets and stretching out into different places all of a sudden creates new music and new genres.
At least to me, there’s nothing better than new music. All of a sudden, you put together people who go, “Yeah, let’s put some hip-hop beats and some driving soul jazz into some psychedelic rock.” That one little piece that I see in a particular musician that I know is going to work with another musician, it gets drawn out when they play together. They are going to find that commonality that I saw. My thing is putting together people not just to jam, but to put together an actual project. I’m trying to allow these guys to look beyond what their particular project is is that time and give them the inspiration to create something completely new that they may have not thought about. And that’s the kind of magic that had happened with Boom Boom Room Presents shows. The magic is in putting together these great players and having that one little piece that they share, that one little aspect that is probably not at the forefront of what they are playing in their own bands. But once they are together, it comes together in what I like to call pure magic. It really is. And then from there, they get more excited to continue with that project, and it becomes its own thing.
So, this year I am excited that it’s the 20th anniversary of the hallmark. Prior to me, there weren’t any outside promoters in New Orleans. It was sort of a mystery there. Now, there are promoters from everywhere. I sort of opened the door for that. I think about five years after that, more and more promoters started coming through. And then it got crazy just before Katrina. Promoters were coming in from all over the place trying to put on 100 shows and over-extending themselves. It’s not about just putting together events; it’s about making music. And that’s the difference from people who just want to put together 30 people on a stage like it’s the Last Waltz. A Boom Boom Room show is groupings and pairings of musicians from different bands who would think have been playing together forever. That’s all because they are professional, intuitive musicians who are so skilled and have so much imagination that they can just step up. They feel it; they listen to each other. If you slap together one big package because it looks like bells and whistles, then you are probably going to get a lot of egos who want to play over each other and are not giving enough space for the music to have real significance.
