Ben Jaffe couldn’t quite remember the name of “that big record store” he visited the last time Preservation Hall Jazz Band visited Sacramento, rehearsing for the jazz ballet suite “Ma Maison,” performed at the Mondavi Center back in November.

He did remember that it was “right downtown,” and it occupied a large corner. Not hard to determine that we were discussing The Beat.

“When you walk into places like that, its like, ‘thank you, Lord!’” Jaffe emphatically proclaimed.

“You need human interaction - in society we’ve become more and more isolated,” he said, ruminating on the eternal feud between the comforting smell of a house of vinyl and the ever-increasing prominence of MP3s. “Even though you can have 10,000 friends, the internet promotes isolation - you need to have that human touch.

“That’s what Preservation Hall Jazz Band is, what we’re an example of.”

A proverbial calling card of New Orleans itself, the soul of Preservation Hall Jazz Band doesn’t just pre-date computers and the internet – it practically pre-dates electricity itself. That soul wasn’t even wobbled by the winds of one of the worst disasters in history.

“After (Hurricane) Katrina, it took a long time before we had power back in our city, but we had music before we had power; we had music before we even had water,” Jaffe recalled. “What struck me is how this couldn’t happen anywhere else. (Music) is so engrained in who we are that we’re sort of like the ultimate green city in a lot of ways. We all survived down there for so long without power, but we had our music.”

As much a history lesson as they are a dynamic performance ensemble, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band has been delivering slices of NOLA flavor around the country and around the world for the last half-century.

On the heels of their massive 50th anniversary celebration at Carnegie Hall in New York, Preservation Hall Jazz Band comes to Three Stages in Folsom (coincidentally lining up with the one-year anniversary of that venue’s opening) on Friday, February 3. Three Stages is located at 10 College Parkway (off East Bidwell on the Folsom Lake College campus) in Folsom. The show begins at 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $25-$49. Ticket information is available here.

Image by: Courtesy

Anyone who has been to New Orleans (and as a result has also probably been to Bourbon Street/French Quarter) probably knows that the ambience of Bourbon Street, while continually lively and unique, falls somewhere between Vegas, Disneyland, and a frat party that the cops should have busted up hours ago.

This reporter happens to much prefer Frenchmen Street. Musicians will roam the streets with trumpets in hand, jumping into the fray with whatever band happens to be playing at the club they mosey into. There is a pulse of pure concentrated, un-filtered and un-bejeweled passion for music raging through the streets of that town that is impossible to imagine anywhere else in the world.

To see Bourbon Street as it currently lives (especially after the city’s massive post-Katrina redevelopment), it can at times be hard for that very essence of the city to shine through, past the dense peppering of gift shops and street vendors, bushels of beads and Huge Ass Beers.

But that essence is as strong as ever (if not stronger), and it is headquartered on one of the busiest corners of Bourbon Street at the Preservation Hall, where its namesake Jazz Band makes its home (when they’re not on tour, that is).

There is no true brick and mortar home to jazz itself, but if there was "one place," Preservation Hall is where the musical history of New Orleans lives - and it is seemingly imperishable in the hands of the men and women who make music there.

“It’s a place where we actually get to entertain people in what is essentially our living room, and that is an amazing thing to do - to simply walk in without doing a sound check,” said Jaffe, PHJB creative director and son of band founders Allan and Sandra Jaffe. He became director virtually right out of college, a part of one of many unbroken bloodlines that still run through a band which has collaborated with everyone from Del McCoury to Lenny Kravitz to Mos Def.

An acoustic ensemble, Preservation Hall Jazz Band is able to bring the jazz history lesson (and the party) to virtually anywhere in the world, from Three Stages to the corner of 17th and J if they so desired.

“In New Orleans, we don’t overthink the word jazz - it applies more to sort of the way that we live and the way we experience music,” Jaffe said. “People have applied it to so many different genres of music - cool jazz, modern jazz, East Coast, West Coast - if jazz has done anything, it’s probably become too high-brow or too elitist, and it’s lost its connection to the common man.

“That’s something that I always focus on, the way it’s been preserved in New Orleans for over 100 years, and we still use it the same way. We still play jazz at our funerals and dance parties and carnival parades. We’re not regurgitating something that happened 100 years ago, we’re playing something we’re part of as a city. That’s just so unique to New Orleans.”