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Lars Edegran, "Scandinavia’s gift to jazz," to be honored by Preservation Hall

Lars Edegran is an influential bandleader, pianist and banjo player whose work to preserve New Orleans jazz will be recognized this week by Preservation Hall.

This week, the Preservation Hall Foundation will honor three influential New Orleans musicians by inducting them into Preservation Hall's Legacy program.

One of them, Lars Edegran, is a musician from Sweden who made New Orleans music all his own.

“Lars is Scandinavia’s gift to jazz and New Orleans is quite fortunate to have him,” said author Jason Berry, who has chronicled the city’s music scene and jazz history for several decades.

Edegran, a jazz pianist, banjo player and guitarist, came to New Orleans from his native Sweden in 1965.

“When I first came here…I didn’t know anybody in the city. (Hurricane) Betsy hit right after I had been here about a week or two. My first work was playing in brass bands actually,” Edegran said.

As a devotee of New Orleans jazz, Edegran began performing with local musicians, many of whom had helped pioneer and then revive the art form in the 1950s and 1960s.

Edegran also later formed the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra (playing piano with the group) and has been a local bandleader and performer for decades, regularly appearing at the Palm Court Jazz Café on Decatur St. and elsewhere.

“One of the things that is so interesting about him is that he really carries a body of music in everything he does,” Berry said.

Edegran has performed around the world and in the 1970s went to New York as music director for Vernel Bagneris’ musical revue, “One Mo’ Time." It helped spread New Orleans jazz history worldwide.

“Lars is a hero for a lot of us in the organization and what he has done really is an extension of what Bill Russell did in 1950s to help start the Hall,” said Greg Lucas, executive director of the Preservation Hall Foundation.

In addition to Edegran, this week the group will also honor clarinetist Orange Kellin (another Swede who came to New Orleans to follow the music) and trombonist Lester Caliste. .

Launched in 2015, the Preservation Hall Foundation's Legacy Program has given over $150,000 in direct financial stipends to elder musicians and provides support for emergency health care, dental needs, parking, yard maintenance and bereavement services.

For his part, Edegran, 74, shows no sign of slowing down and continues to perform while also maintaining the large music catalog of GHB Records, re-issuing the work of traditional jazz artists in CD, download and vinyl form, which is popular not just locally but internationally.

“(It’s) historically important, it’s all recordings of lots of well-known jazz people, also some lesser known ones. So my job is to keep all this stuff in print,” Edegran said.

Berry said Edegran’s impact is hard to overstate. “He carries within him a sensibility of music that we call New Orleans-style, as it has evolved over a century or more,” Berry said.

The Preservation Hall Foundation event will take place on Wednesday from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at the Three Keys at the Ace Hotel, 600 Carondelet St.

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