Firecracker Jazz Band features explosive Dixieland (cont.)

Where this music differ from modern jazz is its reliance on syncopated rhythms. The sousaphone anchors things as the bass, while the pairs of banjo/piano and drums/horns work together to achieve an overall, collective melodic harmony. Where buffs of today’s jazz spend time gawking at single soloist, Firecracker shows only entice listeners to get in line and start stomping along.

“The rhythmic element is a joyous, jubilant kind of thing, and I think that the happy, danceable rhythms make the music so likeable,” says Widenhouse. “It’s not about the virtuosity of the players. It’s about the rhythm of the music, and the music as a living thing unto itself. As musicians, if we discipline ourselves and practice, the music will live it’s own life through us, and we become just a channel for a great body of American music.”

The people of Asheville and surrounding towns in Western North Carolina are certainly getting in line, packing the house during the band’s regular regimen of local gigs. The group plays Jack of the Wood on Saturday night.

The band has also become a town favorite for its crazy good-time antics, like parading from Thibodaux Jones on Biltmore Avenue over too Jack of the Wood on Patton last Mardi Gras. Just this past December at the Asheville Christmas Parade the group won best float, donning a Chinese New Year’s theme and throwing out 1,700 fortune cookies and 800 atomic fireballs to the crowd.

In thanks for its successful local reception the group has performed at many benefit functions, including the Drying out the Dreams concert to help flood victims and at a special show to raise money for the North Asheville Library.

After the band’s Saturday night show, the sextet will be back at the venue on Fat Tuesday, Feb. 8, to provide another old school Mardi Gras throw down. Is another parade in the works?

“I don’t know if we’ll do it again,” says Widenhouse. “But I think we need to do something.”
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