Dan Telfer: When the A.V. Club travels, we always make time to visit pop culture landmarks. If something memorable happened in the world of film, TV, books, or music we want to go there. We’re not just tourists, we’re Pop Pilgrims. One of the most important spots in New Orleans music is easy to overlook. And when you're here in the French Quarter nothing really stands out unless it's lined with neon so Preservation Hall looks a lot like just another old building but when you’ve been producing some of the city’s most vibrant jazz for 50 years, you don’t really need to shout. Today I'm going to be talking with Lloyd Miller, the venue manager of Preservation Hall. Long before this actually was a music venue, it was a lot of other things. Can you tell us a little bit about what went on here before bands played? Lloyd Miller: Yeah, well the original building was built in 1817. Most recently, before it was Preservation Hall it was an art gallery run by a man by the name of Larry Bornstein. Larry Bornstein discovered that he could do a lot better if he stayed open later at night but he had to have something sort of going on in order to do so. So he found all these wonderful elder jazz musicians – some of them were playing around town, some of them hadn’t played in a long time, but it really started out playing with the first and second generation of jazz players ever. It went from being Associated Artists Gallery to being Preservation Hall in 1961 when Allan and Sandra Jaffe came down. And they really just happened into the store, into the scene of just people hanging out and this music being played bare bones, just about the music and the men playing it, fell in love with it, and that’s what they wanted to preserve – was that experience for people. Dan Telfer: What's the reason for there being so little renovation of the actual space? Lloyd Miller: It's the preservation of that experience, that walking into a room and just keeping it as much as the way that it was as possible. Everything’s going to move forward, everything always will but to have a haven where you can still come and experience the way it was – that’s pretty special. The preservation is not about the venue, we try to remain very active in the community of our musicians, especially the older ones because they're a treasure. They're the ones who have the knowledge that has been passed forward and we don’t want that line to stop – that’s what we have here, is we have this original format of an original American art form that can still be experienced on a nightly basis by anybody walking down the street and that’s pretty special. End.