Lionel Ferbos

Who is Lionel Ferbos?

Lionel Charles Ferbos is a New Orleans jazz trumpeter.

At 102, trumpeter Lionel Ferbos is the oldest jazz musician in New Orleans. A native New Orleanian whose career has remained almost exclusively in the city, he appears weekly at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe, a French Quarter club, where he leads the Palm Court Jazz Band on Saturday nights.

During his long career, Ferbos has worked with some of the giants of early traditional jazz, including Captain John Handy and Mamie Smith, and more recently with widely recognized contemporary revivals of the old style music like the original stage band of the off-Broadway hit “One Mo’ Time.” He has played at all of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festivals.

Lionel Ferbos was born July 17, 1911, in the city’s Creole 7th Ward. He said he had asthma and his parents wouldn’t let him take up a wind instrument, but when he was 15 he saw Phil Spitalny's all-girl orchestra at the Orpheum and argued that he ought to be able to do anything a girl could do. So he got an old cornet at a pawn shop on Rampart Street and began lessons with Professor Paul Chaligny, an exacting Creole task-master who would not let him blow the horn until he knew how to read music and had mastered the rudiments of theory. After a year with Chaligny, Ferbos moved on to study with noted musicians Albert Snaer and Eugene Ware.