Carl LeBlanc, renowned guitarist and bajoist, up close and personal

22nd May 2017   ·   0 Comments

By Geraldine Wyckoff
Contributing Writer

Guitarist and banjoist Carl LeBlanc celebrates his 62nd birthday and 50 years in the music business on Saturday, May 26, 2017 uptown at Dos Jefes Cigar Bar. LeBlanc, a master musician who regularly plays the club, will lead a trio including bassist Julius Evans and vocalist Kathleen Moore, the niece of the noted Deacon John Moore, who is perhaps best known for her work in musical theater. LeBlanc also plans to set up a video camera for anyone who would like to share some memories about long-ago gigs, nightspots and the like.

Even in a city where musicians have historically been known to play in any number of genres, LeBlanc stands out.

“I’m the only person who’s recorded and toured with Sun Ra and the Preservation Hall Band – both ends of the jazz spectrum,” LeBlanc declares of playing in the avant-garde and traditional New Orleans jazz styles. In respect, he does note that the late great bassist Walter Payton did play with Sun Ra’s Arkestra at Jazz Fest one year and, of course, was a regular with the Hall band.

Throughout LeBlanc’s five-decade long career, the fretman has also performed and recorded with numerous other very interesting and varied musicians including pianists/vocalists Fats Domino and Eddie Bo. He’s also continually headed his own bands and recorded seven album as leader.

“Eddie Bo made me understand the New Orleans tradition a little more,” LeBlanc offers, adding that when he was coming up, he thought jazz was Dixieland music. “He could play a few styles himself. Eddie Bo could hoop and holler and make a good time.”

At age 10, seeing the Beatles on the “Ed Sullivan Show” sparked LeBlanc’s interest in playing the guitar. “I don’t know if the Beatles inspired me but I saw the girls going crazy and thought, “I can make girls scream with a guitar!” LeBlanc says with a laugh. Two years later, he’d be playing his first paying gig, subbing in a band called The Sonics at The Wonderful Boys Social & Pleasure Club on North Galvez Street playing soul sounds and the popular music of the day.

During his high school years, LeBlanc honed his craft playing in the school band and gigging regularly. He received a scholarship to attend New York’s prestigious Columbia University where he majored in music education. That was, however, until he heard saxophonist Kidd Jordan and his students from Southern University of New Orleans performing at a festival in the Desire neighborhood. “Kidd kept shouting, ‘Fire in Desire,’” LeBlanc remembers. “I want to go to that school!” he recalls thinking. He transferred to SUNO after two years at Columbia, a decision that undoubtedly changed his musical directions in several ways. Studying under the free jazz, creative direction of Jordan opened up new perspectives. Also moving back to his hometown where traditional jazz looms large eventually led him to embrace the roots of jazz in its and his birthplace.

LeBlanc’s connection with the legendary, visionary pianist/composer/arranger/bandleader Sun Ra, came through Jordan.

“Kidd Jordan played with the Sun Ra in 1955, the year I was born,” LeBlanc explains. “So when I graduated (from SUNO), Kidd hooked it up for me to play with Sun Ra at Jazz Fest. After that he (Sun Ra) asked me to come to Philly and I went there for three years and played and traveled with the Arkestra. Then I realized I wasn’t doing any Carl LeBlanc stuff, everything was Sun Ra stuff. That was kind of what he mandated. So I told him that and he told me to keep a suitcase packed. He would call me and say there are tickets for you and meet us in Amsterdam or whatever. So the last six years, that’s how I played. He was an amazing creature.”

“My biggest development with him was just looking at reality in a wider way and learning how to approach music in a more celestial way – that the music is bigger than all of us and is a direct link to the spiritual world.”

“Even though I’m a student of Kidd Jordan and an alumni of Sun Ra, I decided that the music is for the listener and in our society music has a function – there is certain music that you play at funerals, weddings, birthday parties,” LeBlanc says of the music he favors to perform now. “Avant-garde is a very small group who come and sit and listen. When people get off from a whole 40-hour work week and they come out on the weekend to relax, they don’t really want to think too hard. You want to play entertaining music. I like to see a response to the music, dancing or singing along. It’s not just for me.”

“Bob French was the one who really got me started {playing banjo and traditional jazz} because the older guys had been telling me, get a banjo and learn those songs,” LeBlanc explains. “You know, back in the early ‘70s, I’m playing Hendrix and stuff and I’m like I don’t want to play that old Uncle Tom music. Bob French finally got me into Preservation Hall and I got a banjo and started playing.”

However, because LeBlanc was sporting his “first crop of locks” – his first attempt at growing out dread locks – management at the noted St. Peter Street club, fired him saying that he “didn’t fit the image of Preservation Hall.” “It was like 20 years before I got back into Preservation Hall,” LeBlanc says with a laugh. He did record three albums with the PHB and traveled with the group extensively. He also directed the Preservation Hall Jr. Band that was invited to perform in Carnegie Hall.

As a guitarist, LeBlanc’s first influence was Jimi Hendrix and later he got into jazz greats like Wes Montgomery and George Benson which led him to Charlie Christian. “By that time I wasn’t even trying to play rock anymore.” He credits local guitarist/banjoist Don Vappie for making him take traditional music and the banjo more seriously.

“The banjo is a funny family of instruments,” explains LeBlanc, who plays the four-string, tenor banjo. “The slaves made them out of the hoops off of barrels so any size hoops they could find they’d just put skin and a stick on it. So there are banjos as small as a ukuleles called jokuleles and there’s one like a mandolin called a bangolin. It’s not a specific family like the violin, viola, the cello. Danny Barker played a six-string – on the street we call it a guitjo – and it’s tuned like a guitar whereas the four-string is tuned like a cello. The banjo is all over the map.”

LeBlanc, whose music has been featured in the television series “Treme,” on the Weather Channel and most recently in “NCIS: New Orleans,” hopes to pursue more such work in movies and commercials. “I like that mailbox money,” he exclaims.

“I feel blessed,” says LeBlanc of his 50-year musical career. “I never had a real job in my life and the guitar has brought me around the world several times.”

This article originally published in the May 22, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.