Music tastes come and go over a lifetime. Although it’s safe to say at this point that Ernie Landes and Dixieland Jazz are hooked with one another for good.
Landes, who recently turned 90 and is as cool of a trombone-playing jazz cat as ever, remembers when the genre — traced back to the New Orleans melting pot of the early 20th century — first caught his ear. As a kid in Southern California he listened passionately to the weekly “Dixieland’s My Beat” radio program, which ran on KUOP for more than 25 years.
“Boy that was my kind of music,” Landes recently recalled. “As soon as I heard it. Every Saturday.”
