Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen was a fixture in Jackson Square.
The New Orleans native regularly played tuba for tips with a band in the French Quarter. Even though he toured the world, there was no place he would rather be.
“There are some musicians that don’t talk to me or think bad about me because I play out on the street,” Lacen told “Offbeat Magazine,” “but I care less about that…” He cared about his music spreading joy.
Born in 1950, Lacen wanted to play trumpet as a child growing up in the Treme neighborhood. Then his band director suggested he play tuba because of his size. “After that introduction, a memorial states, “the tuba became Mr. Lacen’s ticket to the world.”
“Lacen played with many of the city’s top parade ensembles (the Young Tuxedo, Olympia and (his) Chosen Few Brass Bands), and he showed the way to the tuba’s embrace of funkier, bluesier music,” a 2011 NPR blog post states.
According to jazz historian Michael White, one of Lacen’s “licks was a main ingredient in changing the direction of brass bands.”
“Tuba Fats,” 64 Parishes states, refers to “Lacen’s fat-bottomed, booming tuba melody” as well as a song built around his tuba riff. After Lacen died from a heart attack in 2004, he received an “outpouring of homages from various brass bands.”
“Tuba was a gentle giant,” the late Barbara Lacen-Keller, who married Lacen in 1980, said in a 2010 interview. “He was very compassionate, very soft at heart. He was a gift. He could hear a note and the rest was history.
“He was a giving and sharing person,” she added. “Inside, he always felt that he was the underdog. He always felt that he didn’t do enough. If he only knew how valuable he was – and loved.”
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.