Last May daytime pedestrians began to see a jazz quartet playing occasionally on the corner of North Cortez and Willis streets, making ‘happy music’ to help build the new street scene in what’s becoming known to locals as the NoCo District. The Titanic Orchestra is the brainchild of Steven Ayres and Steve Elliot, both better known for other instruments and other musical genres, and since October they’ve been holding forth every Thursday evening at The Fairweather Social Club.

Ayres sings and performs on banjo while Elliot plays clarinet and fiddle, with local jazz-scene veterans Paul Ruffner on tenor sax and Bill Lieske first on bass sax and now on alto, and Cal Greer on upright bass. They play what musicians call “trad” jazz and what the band calls “music of the Jazz Age,” roughly the generation from just before the first world war into the mid-1930s, and including material from the earlier ragtime generation. “It’s music that only the dead remember,” says Ayres, which makes it fresh for many, and it’s attracting a loyal following to the Fairweather.

“I have a lot of background in New Orleans music, and as soon as I heard the plan that would renovate the old Cattleman’s Bar and Grill into a Nola-style social club, I started working toward a regular gig there,” says Ayres, by just showing up and making street music for tips and grins. As the club came together he found that its owners were on the same page when bar manager Jess Poe approached the band about playing there, serving the Fairweather’s mission of giving locals a hometown club for socializing, listening and dancing. It was a perfect fit.

After gigging for over fifty years, thirty of those in Prescott, Ayres says he’d reached the point where the local bar scene was no fun, more about people watching screens than listening or even socializing. “We want to see people talking, laughing, dancing and getting off their phones,” he said. “It’s about building community — without community we’re doomed. It’s how we relate socially and how we get things done. Prescott sells itself as ‘Everybody’s Home Town,’ and we want to help make that true.”

“I want to bring back the love of the music for myself and the crowd,” he says. “We want to get back to when jazz was fun and about suspect morals. We want to be more accessible about dancing and carrying on.”

His decades on Prescott stages include stints with the Michael DeSantis Group, Big Daddy D and the Dynamites, the Jackson-Jones Jazz Trio/Quartet/Quintet, live radio with Brian LaChance and Danny Anderson’s cabaret shows, pit-orchestra work at PFAA, and years with the Yavapai College big band. He’s also also the Editor of 5enses.

He says for him, The Titanic Orchestra isn’t about making money or selling recordings, but rather about reestablishing Thursdays as Locals Night (“I remember it was a thing in the ‘90s,” he says) and building it out for both audiences and musicians. “Many locals avoid the weekend scene in the bars because of the tourist crowds and the drunks,” he said. “Thursdays are also good for musicians because it leaves them free to take other gigs on weekends.” Part of the design of the band is to be open to other musicians joining in the fun, another New Orleans tradition.

For Ayres jazz is definitely about fun. “For me jazz isn’t so much a genre as something you do to music,” he says, “jazzing it up,” turning standard tunes into dance music with rhythms based in the blues.

But having fun with music is also having fun with people. “It’s about being social as much as it is about being an artist, because it’s more sustainable with more people, and we have a bunch of good guys” to build that musician’s community around, he says.

In years past Prescott College alumnus Steve Elliott, known as one of the founders of the King Copper Jazz Band, has been more often seen playing Celtic and Appalachian fiddle. But he has deep roots in jazz from the 1920s and ‘30s as a collector of 78s and sheet music for many decades, and during the pandemic he picked up the clarinet.

Now Elliott says he’s focused on The Titanic Orchestra, where all the band’s members are dedicated to practicing hard to get better. “I’m the worst player in the band, which is a really good place to be because it means that I’m playing with really good musicians,” he said. “There’s way more than a hundred years of experience playing music in this band.”

“We have a lot of fun with it because it’s not the type of music you see every day in Prescott,” he says. “I like giving people experience with live traditional jazz. It works better when it’s up close and personal,” he said. “It’s great dance music.”