Apart from frequent work in popular music, Hinton maintained an active jazz career with dixieland, swing, and modern groups.
Allen began leading small groups in 1940, playing first swing, then, during a 1954 65 engagement at a New York nightclub, Dixieland.
Soon more people came for the music than the art, and thus was born the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the world's premiere Dixieland ambassadors.Dixieland did not in fact die; though like most jazz it became, at least outside New Orleans, "classicalised": played in concert halls rather than bars and clubs, to older (and whiter) audiences.
BACK in the early 1960s, Dixieland jazz was dying, even in New Orleans.
Neither Dixieland nor New Orleans is yet a corpse, of course, but nowhere else is quite as adept at wringing joy from tragedy.
Dixieland musicians, however, were not dead, just unemployed, and to give them a place to play an art dealer in the French Quarter of New Orleans invited some of them into his gallery, Preservation Hall, to draw in customers and play for tips.
The Soul Rebels Brass Band, a younger ensemble that incorporates funk, R&B and hip-hop into the Dixieland tradition, is now based in Houston.
This man of habits – planning his next movie, writing his next humour piece for The New Yorker and practicing the next Dixieland rag on the band's music set-list – continues to do his work and live in a way that makes him comfortable, or at least as comfortable as a deeply, honestly and intractably anxiety-ridden person can be.
After the war the couple moved to the U.S., and she became the pianist in his Dixieland band.
Dixieland continued to be essential to the musical life of New Orleans, particularly during Mardi Gras time, and its traditions were carried on in later years by such popular New Orleans natives as clarinetist Pete Fountain and trumpeter Al Hirt.
Their singing was initially influenced by the Dixieland style of the Boswell Sisters of New Orleans, but they soon expanded their repertoire to include a wide range of current song types.
