After 30 years, the song remains the same for Naden and his band

member spotlight

Name: Paul Naden

Company: About $$$ Program

Title: CEO

By Bill Sheridan
MACPA Electronic Communications Manager

What do you get when you cross a CPA with a lawyer?

If you didn't answer "trumpet man," you haven't met Paul Naden.

Since selling his interest in the Naden / Lean Group in 1997, Naden spends his days building his "About $$$ Program," which teaches people how to successfully structure their financial lives. But his free time belongs to his horn, his music and his band, the Fallstaff Five + 2 Dixieland Jazz Band.

"It simply has become part of my being," said Naden, 71. "When I play music, I'm totally lost in it."

He's been an MACPA member (license no. 1331) since 1956, but Naden's love of music goes back even farther — to 1944, when he received a trumpet for his bar mitzvah. He learned to play and joined his first band ("Oogie Abel and His Downbeats") soon after. Later, he found himself playing in the City College High School band and at University of Maryland fraternity parties. Work became a priority, though, and Naden’s trumpet soon started gathering dust.

Birth of a band

Two decades later, the music bug bit Naden again, and this time he couldn't ignore the itch. In 1972 he placed an ad in The Sun proclaiming, "Dixieland jazz for fun, not profit." Almost 20 musicians responded, and enough of them turned out to convert Naden's poolhouse on Fallstaff Road into a giant jazz jam session.

Every Wednesday night for the next two years, Naden & Co. would get together and knock out a few tunes. "Sometimes we'd have three tuba players, sometimes we'd have four banjo players, but it didn't matter," he said. "We were just having fun."

And the music? While "Dixieland" is part of the band's name, Naden describes the style as "Nawlins" — hard to explain, but instantly recognizable.

"Dixieland music is provocative, moving," Naden told The Northwest Star in a 1981 interview. "It involves people, but mainly it is happy music. For me, it is a healthy need."

Music for the masses

Not long after that first jam session in 1972, the offers started rolling in, one after another in a snowballing series. An official from Naden's neighborhood association asked the group to represent the neighborhood at the first Baltimore City Fair. Then, an organizer for the fair asked the band to play at a party for the fair's sponsors. At the party, a restaurant owner offered the band a steady Monday night gig at his restaurant. "We drew nice crowds — until Monday Night Football came around," Naden laughed.

The band took gigs wherever, whenever it could, until it found a temporary home at Baltimore's Cross Keys Inn. For five years, Naden and his bandmates packed the place every Thursday night, taking requests and promising patrons they would learn the songs they didn't know in time for the next week's performance.

In between, they found time for high-profile performances at such venues as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Oriole Park at Camden Yards (for a Johns Hopkins Children's Center fund-raiser), and various retirement homes and community gatherings. In 1976, the band played to a crowd of 10,000 when it returned to the Baltimore City Fair as the opening act for Benny Goodman. "Never would I have imagined anything like that," Naden said. "It was crazy."

Still going strong

The weekly gigs at the Cross Keys Inn are long gone, but the band still gets together for eight to 10 performances each year. It has even released a compact disc, Bolton Street Synagogue: Blues Volume One. The disc was recorded live on Oct. 30, 1997, during the largest, most successful fund-raiser the Baltimore synagogue has ever held.

And though the seven-instrument lineup changes periodically, three original members remain: Naden on trumpet, John Wessner on trombone and pianist Sig Seidenman, who played beside Naden in the '40s in the City College High School band and has barely left his side since.

It's enough to make one wonder: How long before Naden finally calls it quits?

"They'll probably bury me first," he said. "You know, in New Orleans they play this music at funerals."

Contact this Author: < William Sheridan > bill@macpa.org

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