Nigel Hall performing at the Congo stage for the first Thursday of Jazz Fest 2014, May 1, 2014. (Photo by Dmitriy Pritykin, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
Nigel Hall, here performing at the Congo Square Stage at the 2014 New Orleans Jazz Fest, will have a record release show on Dec. 2, 2015 at Tipitina's. (Photo by Dmitriy Pritykin, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune archive)
Nigel Hall has spent the last decade or so backing some of the starriest names in the music business. Now, he is stepping into the foreground.
With the release of his first solo-led album - appropriately titled "Ladies & Gentlemen...Nigel Hall" on the Feel Music/Round Hill label - the Washington, D.C., native and current French Quarter resident has graduated from sideman to leadman. A sought-after studio keyboardist, his new album allows him to display his gifts as a singer, wrapped up in the funktastic sound that's always been his signature style.
You can catch Hall when he plays a record release show Dec. 2 at Tipitina's. Call it the New Orleans complement to similar roll-out shows in New York City and elsewhere, marking his emergence into the big-time while reasserting his allegiance to a classic slab of pop-soul-bluesy repertoire.
"I don't listen to any music made before 1940-ish, and don't go past 1983," Hall, 34, declared unabashedly during a recent interview. Actually, "unabashedly" doesn't quite cover his feelings on the subject. "Music is just such ---- now," he said, inserting a tersely expressive epithet, though a moment later he conceded that "there are some things coming out now that are really good."
Now, if this makes Hall come off as excessively dismissive - well, consider that up to now he's been conspicuous for his generous, if under-the-radar, musical partnerships. Before moving to New Orleans three years ago, he spent a chunk of time living in New York City - a place where expression doesn't quite keep up with expenses.
"I got really tired of New York," he said, adding that "I was over the whole image thing. There were just a lot of things that were annoying me. Part of it was this record sitting on the shelf for a little while. I said, 'I have a lot of friends in New Orleans; maybe I can go down and do something with myself. And I did."
When Hall says "a little while," he means five years' worth of percolating as songs and potential collaborators gradually came into creative focus.
He fully recognizes, the imperative to succeed as a leader. "It's my band, so the pressure is on me to show up."
Success, Hall acknowledged, stems from mutual respect, from "my being fans of them and also them being fans of me."
The goal, he said, was "to make a record that was soul music - the pop music of yesteryear. I wanted to do an album that did not represent what was out there today. I think in order to know where you're going, you have to know where you've been.
"I know you've heard that before," Hall said, adding "I don't think that many people, especially in today's music, give a nod to things that are real. Most people don't make records anymore with real instruments. It's all done by computer. Vocalists don't go into the studio and sing anymore; they have to put Auto-Tune on their voice. I think it's very important for us to hold on to the little bit of heritage we have left in music, because music is the only pure thing we have left."
Inside the studio, where Hall and producer Eric Krasno shaped "Ladies & Gentlemen," there was ample opportunity to push for spontaneity while maintaining a degree of control difficult to achieve in a live format. It's an environment that Hall, who's played with the likes of Jon Cleary, Lettuce, the Soul Rebels and Roosevelt Collier, calls his "amusement park."
"I'm more comfortable in a studio than I am in my own house sometimes," he said. Still, there is a definite, energizing vibe to engaging an audience - whether at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where he performed in 2014; or in a club environment like Tipitina's.
"You have to love it," Hall said of doing the live-concert thing. "If you've done it as much as I have, you can't not like something like that." Even though, he conceded, you've got to have the right temperament to keep sane.
"You have to be mentally wired to be able to stand in front of people you don't know every single night, and pour out the most intimate parts of your being."
Is there ever any rejection anxiety? "I mean, there's always that," Hall conceded. When it comes to listeners' reaction to any given performance, he admits to occasionally wondering, "do they really like it, or are they applauding because they felt as if they have to? But if you worry about that, you can't do what you're supposed to go up there and do in the first place. And that takes away from your initial goal, which is to go up and crush."
Beyond gig after gig, Hall is delighting in his recent marriage to Jamie Hall, keeping up with two sons (ages 14 and 16) from a previous relationship who live in Maine, and making a home in the cacophonous French Quarter ("I need noise to sleep," he insisted).
Hall was still glowing from participating, this past Friday, in the musical tribute to New Orleans musical-polymath-extraordinarire Allen Toussaint, who died on Nov. 10.
"It was the greatest thing for me," he said. "Because I was in the midst of anyone who ever invented music. I was sitting in the middle of Jon Cleary, Boz Scaggs, Trombone Shorty, Doctor John, Irma Thomas, Cyril Neville. Art Neville was behind me. I was in the middle of all these amazing people, and to be able to go and sing -- I was crying the whole time, especially with Irma Thomas playing 'Walk Around Heaven All Day Long.' I lost it. It was just waterworks the entire time for me. So to be a part of that, I was truly, truly honored."
[ Allen Toussaint: friends, fans and fellow stars join in a gentleman's memorial ]
Beyond such singular events, and throughout the hectic reality he's been embracing, Hall's intent on not becoming too wrapped up in over-planning his future. The performing existence, after all, is seldom neat and tidy.
"There is nothing concrete about my life other than my wife and my children," he said. "Being a musician, there's nothing concrete about this business - until it's actually done. Then it will be concrete. Until, then, you've just got to hope for the best."
Nigel Hall plays his record-release concert at Tipitina's, 501 Napoleon Ave., Dec. 2 at 9 p.m. (doors open at 8). Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 day of show. Call 504,895.8477, or go online at Tipitina's.