New Orleans Arranger Wardell Quezergue Dead at 81

Wardell Quezergue joins Luther Kent performing on stage at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on May 3, 2009 in New Orleans.

Leon Morrison/Redferns

Wardell Quezergue, the highly regarded New Orleans bandleader and arranger whose credits include "Mr. Big Stuff," "Iko Iko," "Barefootin'" and other Crescent City classics, died today after a lengthy illness. He was 81.

Nicknamed the "Creole Beethoven," Quezergue was also noted for his work on Professor Longhair's "Big Chief," King Floyd's "Groove Me" (cut the same day as Jean Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff") and the Grammy-winning Dr. John album "Goin' Back to New Orleans" (1992). The arranger lost a lifetime of musical scores in the flooding of Hurricane Katrina.

After playing trumpet in Dave Bartholomew's band in the 1940s, Quezergue formed his own band the following decade. In 2000 he recorded "A Creole Mass," orchestral hymns based on his experience during the Korean War. Earlier this year he settled a royalty dispute over "It Ain't My Fault," a brass-band standard he co-wrote that has been sampled frequently.        

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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