Honors for 3 jazz performers, 2 grew up in Sweden: Photos, Videos

Two New Orleans jazz performers who grew up in Sweden and one who grew up in New Orleans are being honored by the Preservation Hall Foundation.

The foundation plans to induct clarinetist Orange Kellin, multi-instrumentalist Lars Edegran and trombone player Lester Caliste as master practitioners on Wednesday.

The honor is for musicians who are at least 70 years old and have made outstanding contributions to the New Orleans community and its jazz heritage. It comes with a monthly stipend and benefits that include lawn maintenance and French Quarter parking for performances.

The ceremony originally was scheduled for Sept. 5, but was postponed because of Tropical Storm Gordon.

Caliste began playing trombone at age 11. Edwin Hampton, the band director at St. Augustine High School, recommended him for jobs. In 1966, the year after he graduated from high school, he began playing with Harold Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band. He played with that band at Preservation Hall on Mardi Gras 1968. He served in the Navy from 1969 to 1971, and worked for the U.S. Postal Service from 1973 until 2004. He played throughout, moving from night performances to studio jobs when the Postal Service switched him to evening hours.

He moved to McKinney, Texas, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but returned in 2009 to care for his mother.

Edegran and Kellin, who goes by Orange because Americans can’t pronounce Örjan, have known each other since they were teens in Stockholm. When both were 17, they founded a jazz band that gathered a fan club and played regionally, traveling by train.

They came separately to America and to New Orleans, where they got back together in the late 1960s, forming the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra to learn and perform the music popular before World War I. The New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra performed at the first Newport Jazz Festival, and many after that.

They also worked together on the vaudevillian revue “One Mo’ Time,” which became one of the longest-running off-Broadway shows ever. It also had a long run in London’s West End in the 1980s, and was revived in 2002 on Broadway.