Al Broussard - New Orleans Piano: 711 Bourbon Street (1998)

Al Broussard (1906-2001 New Orleans) was a creole blues and jazz pianist, songwriter and singer.
As Broussard liked to say, he was born on Orleans Avenue in New Orleans in Orleans Parish. He began his career as a young boy playing solo piano at house parties, later moving on to perform at Storyville clubs such as the Big 25 and the Two Black Crows. "I could sing before I could play the piano," Broussard said last April, just before his big 95th birthday bash at the Tricou House. "What people don't realize is that we didn't have no radio or television. Somebody had to whistle a song for you or sing it."
Broussard headed his own orchestra in the mid-1920s, but he was best known for reigning from center stage, alone at a piano. Wearing his signature red-orange fedora with matching suspenders, the always-youthful Broussard offered -- as the title of his 1984 Rabadash album says -- The Music of a Lifetime at his regular Bourbon Street gig. Between a blend of ragtime, jazz, blues, stride and boogie-woogie numbers, he told stories, chatted with his admirers, and flirted with the women in the audience.
In the early 1940s, Broussard stepped away from the music business and opened a junkyard, continuing to play a piano that he kept amidst the scrap iron. He once remembered how piano legend Professor Longhair used to visit him there and play the old upright. Broussard returned to music by launching his long-running gig at the 711, now the Tricou House. ~by Geraldine Wyckoff