• TESTIMONY: Michael Leonhart
At first it was cool. I even had my little doggie Suzy Lattimore FedExed down so we could absorb the sound and the whole gris-gris vibe. Then on, like, Wednesday night, I woke up on the bathroom floor with a nasty headache – only, dig, it wasn’t my bathroom, but the freaking custodial lavatory where they keep the plungers and stuff. Apparently, I had somnambulated down the hall in a hysterical search for an authentic plunger for my trumpet, just like the one Skip copped for Jim Pugh.

At about seven the next morning, Jim and I both sprung awake with a simultaneous and overwhelming compulsion to find a good whorehouse to jam in. After a while we walked past this cool-looking place with a sign that said “Miss Ellie’s Sporting House” outside. A big, laughing whore was sitting on the stoop. She said that we could jam in the parlor all day and all night long if we went and fetched her two buckets of coal for the stove. She said she’d watch our instruments and the basket with Suzy Lattimore in it in the mean time.

• TESTIMONY: Jim Pugh
When we got back with the coal (coal is heavy!), we walked into this old-fashioned room and what do you know? Sitting at this upright piano in a crumpled top hat with a couple of good-looking young whores hanging all over him is none other then Pure Herringbone, i.e., Jeff Young - I kid you not. Only everyone’s calling him Professor Herringbone. And he’s playing this outrageous hurking stride shit and every once in a while dips into this canister of purple powder he calls Goofy Dust and throws a handful into the air. But our horns and Mike’s little dog are nowhere in sight.

• TESTIMONY: Jeff Young
On Thursday night, maybe 2 A.M., I wake up alone in this filthy, horrible room at Miss Ellie’s place with these rusty bedsprings sticking up in my back. I feel awful and my body is covered in some kind of purple, like, talcum powder. I go downstairs and ask one of the girls where I could find a doctor at this time of night. She finally gives me an address on St. Ann St. and says to ask for Marie Glapion the Eighth.

It turned out to be this weird gingerbread house at the end of the block with a wrap-around porch, wind-chimes a-ringing. This little white chick creaks open the door and for a second, with the kohl under the eyes and the dreads and the trinkets, I didn’t recognize her. And then I realize its Carolyn Leonhart! “I can’t believe it! You’re Marie Glapion the Eighth?” “Uh-uh”, she says, “I’m her assistant. Cindy Mizelle is Marie Glapion and, oui, monsieur, the doctor will see you now.”

• TESTIMONY: Carolyn Leonhart
Well, I’m sittin’ here, la la, waitin’ for my ya ya,
Ah-ummmmm, honey. And Marie say, C.L.? What you say we do a little spell on Mr. Donald and Mr. Walter and, how shall I put it, up the level of our weekly Do Re Mi, see what I’m sayin’? So I say, you right, you right, and we takes some eye of a newt and a black cat bone and some other stuff and a little hair from the chinny-chin-chins of each mans, and take the Band Photo ’03 and tear it into little pieces and a two dollar bill and throw them in too. I can’t discuss the exact words we said over the pot on account of it’s a big New Awlins secret.

• TESTIMONY: Cindy Mizelle
Wow. I had this horrible dream where I was in this room in a big house on St. Ann Street which I’d apparently rented the day before. Carolyn, Jeff Young and I were sitting around this huge pot of boiling soup which didn’t really smell very good. Only when I woke up I was really in the room and it wasn’t a dream at all! I woke Jeff up OK, but Carolyn woudn’t come out of it! She kept rambling on about gris-gris this and gris-gris that and about how “Erzuli was really gonna turn the heat up under Don and Wally’s badunkadunks” and things like that. We finally left her off at the emergency room and called her folks.

• TESTIMONY: Walt Weiskopf
So Roger and I hike down to where Congo Square was supposed to be and we’re amazed that it looks just the way you would imagine it did in, like, eighteen-hundred and whatever. And there’s all these enormous black guys playing the living bejeezus out of these African drums – I mean it was incredible! And the air was filled with this powdery stuff, like purple snow and the streets are purple too. We got our horns out and started jamming. Only I couldn’t get my fingers to play any of the usual Slonimsky patterns and everything came out sounding kind of like Albert Ayler. I have to admit it was kind of liberating.

The next thing I remember, I was in this sort of parade band, dressed in a red dinner jacket and a silvery top hat with sequins. We were all walking towards the cemetery, only sort of funny-like, one leg out, stop, the other leg out, stop, and playing this unbelievably slow blues. And Roger was right next to me doing the same thing, but, like, an octave down.

• TESTIMONY: Roger Rosenberg
I remember once Duke and I were in the Caddy driving to a job at some dance in Hammond, Louisiana, and I pull into this service station and tell the man to fill her up. And Duke is watching as he fills the tank. Knowing how I like a really large-bore mouth piece, Duke says, “Harry, I see you staring at that gas nozzle. Maybe you should ask the gentleman how much coin he would take to part with it”. Now, for just a minute, I thought that he was serious… and then we both started laughing our heads off. Ain’t that something?

• TESTIMONY: Keith Carlock
I was born and raised in Crunk City, Mississippi, July 12, 1903. In the summer of 1919, I went to New Orleans to find employment. For a time I sold my Uncle Bart’s great invention, 88 proof Universal Plum Tonic, out of a barbershop off Front Street. While Willie Creach the barber was doing cuts, I used to bang on the floor with a shaving brush and cup to entertain the customers, and soon I was drumming professionally on Fate Marable’s paddle boat, the “Saint Paul”. I did that for a while, but, on humid nights, there were so many of them giant black river leeches clinging to the drumhead, it would only make this kind of squishy noise when I hit it. It was plain disgusting.

So then I bought myself a V8 Packard and drove up to New York City where I got my own band together, Carlock’s Crunk City Rebels. Once we played opposite Erskine Hawkins at the Savoy for two weeks in ’33 and the job would have gone longer ‘cept that Hawkins’ bandboy stabbed our bass man in the neck with a pen knife.

After the second war, when the music got all bopped up and full of benzedrine, I quit the business and started managing this young fighter, Dwight Christophe. And, hell, y’all know how that ended up. And that’s about all she wrote.

• TESTIMONY: Jon Herington
The things that I used to do
Lord I won't do no more
The things that I used to do
Lord I won't do no more
I used to set and hold your hand, baby
Cried begging you not to go

I would search all night for you baby
Lord and my search would always end in vain
I would search all night for you baby
Lord and my search would always end in vain
But I knew all along, darling
That you was hid out with your other man

I'm going to send you back to your mother, baby
Lord and I'm going back to my family too
I'm going to send you back to your mother, baby
Lord and I'm going back to my family, too
Cause nothing I do that please you baby
Lord I just can't get along with you

• TESTIMONY: Freddie Washington
You know, it’s funny, but throughout this whole episode, I felt completely normal. The only extraordinary thing I can report is a marked improvement in my golf scores. Good music, great food, excellent golf course. And that’s about it.

Except, did anybody lose a little dog in a basket and a couple of brass instruments. Chris Littleton found them just sitting on the green at the 14th hole this morning. I’ve got the horns and the little feller in my room.