Hurricane Hirt

"Nobody," says a fellow Bourbon Street trumpeter, "ever outblew Al." Even allowing for civic partisanship, the boast is not unreasonable. New Orleans Trumpeter Al ("The Monster") Hirt, 38, is a "center-lip" man who blows straight from the diaphragm and generates such a wind that trying to top him, testifies another associate, is like "blowing down the throat of a hurricane." In recent months, the hurricane has swirled through Las Vegas (The Dunes), Manhattan (Basin Street East) and the TV networks with an impact that has made Trumpeter Hirt one of the hottest properties in jazz.

Casual Kazoo. Last week, fresh off the road, Hirt was packing them in at the Pier 600 Club on Bourbon Street, where his success began. A huge (6 ft. 2 in., 300 lbs.), bush-bearded man, he stands on the bandstand, his trumpet like a toy kazoo in one hamlike hand. With his other hand, he sketches out a casual beat. Then he may break into a surprisingly agile buck and wing and lead his combo (trombone, clarinet, drums, bass, piano, trumpet) into a searing chorus of Down by the Riverside. Snarling, growling, shivering into a remarkably clean vibrato or soaring through long, liquid phrases, the trumpet slices through the group's sound like a blade.

His style, by Hirt's own definition, is "roving Dixieland." Programs that include numbers like Tin Roof Blues and South Rampart Street Parade are leavened with tricked-up standards--Lover Come Back To Me, All the Things You Are. But Dixieland or standard, the audience vibrates to everything Hirt & Co. produce--even, a critic remarked last week, if it is sometimes "a little hard to hear the trombone."

Jazzy Exterminator. Until recently, it was even harder for anyone outside New Orleans to hear Hirt--mainly because the responsibility of a wife and eight children kept him from hitting the road. Son of a New Orleans policeman, he was given a pawnshop trumpet when he was six, studied classical music through high school, entered the Cincinnati Conservatory on a scholarship. At Cincinnati he noticed less gifted students picking up $5 a night for appearances with dance bands. The money, Al decided, lay outside the long-haired classics, and with the aid of Harry James and Roy Eldridge records, he turned himself into a jazz musician. Still, he had to eke out a living as salesman for an exterminating company.

After a while, New Orleans musicians recognized Hirt as a "great trumpet," and when he organized his own small band in 1955, he began to build a local following. Last fall he was persuaded to try his luck out of town. This year Hirt expects to clear more than $200,000--a change from his lean eating days that astounds him (his fair-weather breakfast ration: a dozen eggs). "I'm really not doing anything different," says Al Hirt. But he also admits: "I've called off the elopement drills for my daughters."

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