Lionel Ferbos

Lionel Ferbos
Ferbos at age 101, before going on stage to play a set with the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra in 2012.
Background information
Birth name	Lionel Charles Ferbos
Born	(1911-07-17)July 17, 1911 New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Died	July 19, 2014(2014-07-19) (aged 103) New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Genres	Jazz
Occupation(s)	Trumpeter
Instruments	Trumpet

Lionel Charles Ferbos (July 17, 1911 – July 19, 2014) was an American jazz trumpeter. He was from New Orleans, Louisiana.

At 103, Ferbos was the oldest jazz musician in New Orleans. A native New Orleanian whose career centered almost exclusively in the city, he appeared weekly at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe, a French Quarter club, where he led the Palm Court Jazz Band on Saturday nights.

During his long career, Ferbos worked with some of the giants of early traditional jazz, including Captain John Handy and Mamie Smith, and, in later years, with widely recognized contemporary revivals of the old style music like the original stage band of the off-Broadway hit One Mo’ Time. He played at all of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festivals.

Lionel Ferbos was born on July 17, 1911, in New Orleans, in the city’s Creole 7th Ward. He said he had asthma and his parents would not let him take up a wind instrument, but when he was 15 he saw Phil Spitalny's all-girl orchestra at the Orpheum and argued that he ought to be able to do anything a girl could do. So he got an old cornet at a pawn shop on Rampart Street and began lessons with Professor Paul Chaligny, an exacting Creole task-master who would not let him blow the horn until he knew how to read music and had mastered the rudiments of theory. After a year with Chaligny, Ferbos moved on to study with noted musicians Albert Snaer and Eugene Ware.

Ferbos' first professional music jobs were in the early 1930s with society jazz bands like the Starlight Serenaders and the Moonlight Serenaders, performing at well-known New Orleans venues like the Pythian Roof Garden, Pelican Club, San Jacinto Hall, Autocrat Club, Southern Yacht Club and the New Orleans Country Club. In 1932, he joined Captain Handy’s Louisiana Shakers and played the Astoria and toured the Gulf Coast. He later backed blues singer Mamie Smith while playing with the Fats Pichon Band. During the Depression, he worked as a laborer in New Orleans City Park for the Works Progress Administration, then played first trumpet in the WPA jazz band, of which he is the last surviving member. In the 1940s, he played on Lake Pontchartrain at the Happy Landing and Mama Lou’s, and in the '50s he worked with Harold Dejan at the Melody Inn, where he recorded with the “Mighty Four.” In the ‘60s he played with Herbert Leary’s Orchestra.