Great stuff, Emil. Sounds like Dixieland to my ear. I know the Jazz purists have distinctions between Dixieland (white), New Orleans Jazz (black), Chicago style, St. Louis style, and suppose a bunch of others, but honestly they all build on and borrow from each other. You can't have Dixieland without New Orleans.
Right after 9/11 I was moseying down through the quarter in New Orleans, marveling at how empty it was - nobody was traveling yet - when I walked by Tipatinas, a place off Bourbon St, and heard a glorious noise. A small band was playing in a style I can only describe as a mix of rock-n-roll, zydeco, Cajun, Jazz, and probably a few others. Whatever it was, it worked. I stayed there all afternoon.
Then another time I was on a layover in Düsseldorf, actually we stay in Nuess, a small medieval town near Düsseldorf. Anyway, it was near Christmas and you know how the Germans are about Christmas. So a few of my coworkers and I were wandering around the festival huts, drinking these little mugs of hot wine, eating brats, and generally enjoying ourselves. One of the huts had an unusual band playing. Four guys in their 60s, with long, greasy, gray hair, and bad-Santa outfits were playing. They had a trombone, an alto sax, a snare drum and a tenor banjo, and they were playing standard Christmas songs interpreted in a Dixieland style. You wouldn't think it would work, but it did. Sort of. Anyway we had a great time.
At any rate, I get that same sense of nostalgia you mentioned when I listen to the songs of my youth. In fact I read somewhere that the music we grow up with in our teens and twenties leaves just that impression that you spoke of, which is unlucky for me since I grew up in the tackiest decade of known history - the 70s.
