Illustration by Rhett Thiel

“A fat person dances different from a skinny person,” observes Richard Matthews. He pronounces this truism as one of the things he learned from his mentor, Matthew “Fat” Houston, the former grand marshal of the Olympia Brass Band. Matthews joined the band in the late 1960s when he reached 18 years of age. He had been hanging around Olympia since he was about 9, chasing after them, dancing and imitating them. Finally his stepfather, the late Milton Batiste Jr., who was the leader of the band at the time, assigned him the job of apprentice grand marshal. The band’s founding leader, Harold “Duke” DeJan, gave Matthews his new professional name of “King Richard.”

“Sometimes a person just sees something in you that no one else can see, and then you get tagged with that name for the rest of your life,” explains Matthews.

Fat Houston, not surprisingly, was not the skinny one, yet he wielded his gravitas with a certain grace. So he walked at the front of the band, while his apprentice, the wiry King Richard, took up the rear. The younger man recalls, “Ol’ Matt, he had arthritis all up his legs, and he walked with a cane, but he could still get out there and move … .” Here Matthews imitates a fat man dancing — the top half of his body moving in one direction while the bottom half moves in the opposite — without even lifting himself off the couch.

“He taught me to use what you have and don’t wish for what you don’t have,” concludes Matthews. He relates the history of Olympia, which is also more or less the history of his family, while several of his five children walk in and out of the house. None of his kids play an instrument, but his daughter Anneké, a freshman at UNO, writes up the contracts for the band. Matthews’ wife, Pamela, and his cousin Debra Williams (Milton Batiste’s niece) sit by the kitchen table while Debra’s son Julius dashes in and out of the conversation.

“Julius will be coming up in the band in the next few years,” says Debra, whose son plays in the youth band called Junior Olympians. Batiste started the group as a way to cultivate young talent and maintain the traditional music. Julius is 7 years old and plays the trombone, though he is only about as big as a trombone himself.

“See, we just keep bringing up these young kids into it,” Matthews says. “That way, the music will never die.”

Fat Houston is gone, as are many of the old members of the band. Henry “Booker T” Glass, David Lastie, Fred Kemp, Edmund Fouché, Kid Sheik Colar and, more recently, Milton Batiste Jr., are also gone. The principal leader of Olympia, 92-year-old Harold DeJan has retired from performing with the band due to ill health. (Batiste passed away two weeks ago at the age of 66.) The history of the Olympia Brass Band dates back to 1883 when it was formed by Fred Keppard and his brother. Harold DeJan began performing with those original members when he was 14 years old.

After military service during World War II broke up most of the brass bands, Harold DeJan reformed the band after the war, re-naming it DeJan’s Olympia Brass Band and is patriarch of the band to this day. Olympia’s late-19th century origins with the Keppard brothers makes it the oldest brass band in New Orleans, and probably the world as well. More than any other brass band, Olympia embodies a living musical ancestry. When the musicians in Olympia Brass Band perform, they’re walking with Fat Houston and the others resting on their shoulders.

“I started the band. I made the band. And I named the band,” Harold DeJan insists as he relates the story of the band’s debut under his direction at Preservation Hall. Then he describes wooing a young trumpet player named Milton “Bat” Batiste Jr. away from another band to lead Olympia. Under Bat’s leadership, the band began gigging out of town more and more, where New Orleans-style brass band music was a novelty. With Richard Matthews as the business manager, Olympia has continued developing an international reputation, playing in such far-flung events as the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy. DeJan tells the story of Olympia’s performance at a funeral in Wales, where they had previously performed: “There was this rich man there and when he heard us play, he said to his people, ‘Ooooooweeee! When I die I want those guys playing at my funeral.’” Sure enough, a few years later the man died, and Olympia got the gig.

Of course, Olympia still does its share of local weddings and funerals, and will make a hometown appearance this year at the both this weekend’s French Quarter Festival and the upcoming Jazz Fest. But the events that stand out in the band’s collective memory are the ones that happen far away from Bourbon Street. For example, the band played on Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal, the location of the holding cells where African people waited in chains before being handed over to the slave traders who shipped them to the Americas. One of the Olympians refers to that concert as “heart-rendering.” In another historic moment, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, the Olympia Brass Band was there, blowing the horns that heralded this opening between East and West Germany.

Olympia has always been known abroad and at home as a strongly traditionalist band, staying close to such classics as “When the Saints Come Marching In,” “A Closer Walk With Thee,” and “Lord, Lord, Lord You Sure Been Good to Me.” The band is so devoted to the standards that it doesn’t rehearse, and assembles before a gig if there’s a new song to learn, which is rare. One of the middle-age members of the band recalls a big struggle to add some R&B numbers to Olympia’s repertoire back when R&B was considered a radical new sound. But the contemporary trend of funk filtering through brass band music has not touched the Olympia Brass Band. DeJan remains the principal decision-maker of the band, and says he has no interest in funk. “Now I think highly of all those new bands,” he allows. “But they got to go a long way before they catch up with Olympia.”

Edgar Smith carries three nicknames along with the sousaphone he’s played with Olympia for the past 17 years. The 53-year-old is sometimes call “Box Head” for his hair, and “Doctor Death” for his other job, with the New Orleans Coroner’s Office. Smith is also called “Sarge” because he helps the younger musicians stay in line and respect tradition. That means clean language, clean uniforms and clean instruments. “It would behoove you to be on your best behavior when you’re in uniform,” says Smith. “Go to the job looking clean, and do not say or do anything that would make you look small.”

Bass drummer Tanio Hingle, who at 31 is one of the younger members of Olympia, started in Olympia’s junior band when he was 16 years old. While he’s also the leader of New Birth Brass Band, he bemoans those younger brass band musicians who forsake the older songs. “You might be playing all this funk,” he says, “but then if you get a request from the audience for ‘Lord, Lord, Lord You Sure Been Good to Me.’ And if you say no, you can’t play that, they’ll not respect you as a brass band.”