Just in time for Halloween, Preservation Hall debuts this beautiful animated video which includes a graveyard romp with Marie Laveau:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYGIeZDMyg&feature=player_embedded]
The video is part of a package from Preservation Hall Recordings featuring four small-group arrangements from the Preservation Hall Hot 4, the King Britt remix of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s “St. James Infirmary,” and three music videos. It’s available exclusively on iTunes — no hard-copy CD, just pure electronic distribution.
If you aren’t familiar with the classic St. James Infirmary, check out Preservation Hall’s MySpace profile and play it for free in the upper right of the page. It’ll help you appreciate what King Britt did to riff on the source material. (You will need to scroll down to the “album version” to hear the old school take, not the new reinterpretation.)
Then you can read more on two blogs about St. James Infirmary: http://iwentdowntostjamesinfirmary.blogspot.com/ and http://nonotes.wordpress.com/
If this video got you excited and you’d like to see the real-life Preservation Hall, check out their tour dates. If you happen to be in Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Slovenia or France, you can catch them in November. If not, some closer-to-home dates include:

I wrote a recent post about Preservation Hall and the path of reinvention its director Ben Jaffe is taking — check that out here.