About Band

The Florida Street Blowhards play hot jazz, the traditional early jazz of New Orleans! We are available for a variety of gigs including weddings, parades and funerals.
We're exploring the other Louisiana traditional folk music: trad jazz. There’s a lot of emphasis on Cajun music in the Bayou State but the Florida Street Blowhards is a group of Baton Rouge musicians play that “other” Louisiana music known as traditional jazz.
Bandleader Sam Irwin, a Melrose Place resident of Baton Rouge, has been exploring the music created by the jazz musicians of New Orleans.
“A lot of the great musicians who invented jazz were from New Orleans, like Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton,” Irwin said. “But others came from the small towns along the Mississippi River, like Kid Ory of LaPlace, Joe “King” Oliver of Donaldsonville, John Robichaux of Thibodaux, Illinois Jacquet of Broussard, and Clarence Williams of Plaquemine. Jelly Roll Morton actually took his name from his Mouton stepfather and anglicized it. If you read up on early jazz, you’ll find a lot of French, Cajun and Creole names sprinkled about so there’s a lot of French Louisiana in jazz.”
Irwin, a former music major at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette), is the author of “Louisiana Crawfish: A Succulent History of the Cajun Crustacean” and “It Happens In Louisiana: Peculiar Tales, Traditions and Recipes from the Bayou.” He picked his trumpet after a long layoff and started practicing after hearing trumpeter Nicholas Payton perform on Allan Toussaint’s album “The Bright Mississippi.”
“I heard Payton’s playing and it knocked me out,” Irwin said. “I wanted to play like that and I wanted to play that music. So I began practicing again and kept asking people if they wanted to play traditional jazz. Now we’ve got a band and we’re ready to perform.
“The band is a mixture of young and old players, several who live in Melrose Place like David Seymour and Terry Byars. David i