Cheeery, Retro New Orleans, Dixieland and Swing Sounds From the Doggy Cats
The Doggy Cats got their start at legendary Red Hook watering hole Sunny’s Bar, and play the kind of music that the regulars who frequented the place during its Prohibition days listened to. Tetsuro Hoshii leads the sextet from behind the piano. His merry bandmates include trumpeter Aaron Bahr, saxophonist Zac Zinger, trombonist Christopher Palmer, bassist Michael Bates and drummer Rob Garcia. Their cheery, catchy debut album Daikon Pizza is streaming at Bandcamp.
Garcia kicks off the album’s opening number, Happy Dog with a nifty New Orleans shuffle, and from there the band build a lively, joyous, dixieland-flavored theme. Bourgeoisie Breakfast With Dogs is a ragtime strut with more of a lowdown feel. Howdy Cats! also has New Orleans flair, fleetingly lustrous horns and wry surf allusions from Garcia.
Fatty Catty is mostly a one-chord jam anchored by Hoshii’s insistent, syncopated lefthand, with droll low-register trombone and a tumbling drum solo. A somewhat more serious trombone solo and bluesy piano brighten up Old Clock, a midtempo swing song without words, The band get a little funkier with Dacadindan and its punchy solos around the horn.
Brass Hymn is just the horns doing what sounds like a paraphrase of Auld Lang Syne. The aptly titled, jubilantly swaying Happiest Cat has a sagacious conversation between sax and trombone. Then it’s time for trumpet and bass to do some playful jousting in Samba – that’s the name of the tune – which actually has a lot more Louisiana then Brazil in it. Hoshii’s emphatic stairstepping and scampering solo afterward take the song into much more modern territory.
Palmer’s wry muted lines rise over Hoshii’s stately gospel piano in the slow, 6/8 Sunset. The album’s most expansive track, Qui Rock is a detour into edgier postbop sounds, Hoshii’s stern, bluesy bassline variations holding it down as Zinger reaches for the sky; the terse interweave between bass and piano is an unexpectedly dynamic touch. The band stroll home to a Bourbon Street of the mind circa 1935 to close the album with Baila Biala Jambalaya. Spin this at your next houseparty if you want to keep everybody there.
A Rare Live Recording of Louis Armstrong at the Top of His Game in Europe
Today we celebrate 4/20 with the stoner king of jazz trumpet, Louis Armstrong. Satchmo was by all accounts a Snoop Dogg-class smoker who always carried the finest mezz. How stoned does he sound on the recently discovered Armstrong in Europe – streaming at Spotify – a live set recorded at the 1948 Nice International Jazz Festival,, leading a quintet with pianist Earl Hines, trombonist Jack Teagarden, bassist Arvell Shaw, drummer Sid Catlett and clarinetist Barney Bigard?
Not at all, actually. If anybody seems high, it’s the other guys in the band. After the intros – Hines noodling away behind them – the group racewalk through a brief couple of verses of the dixieland-flavored Muskrat Ramble. Armstrong and Teagarden then share sly vocals on the slow blues Rocking Chair, the trombonist’s blip of a solo followed by a flare of a trumpet coda from Satchmo.
The rest of the record is a lot like that. This is a boisterously entertaining party album in rustic mono sound that varies from track to track, up and down volumewise: audience applause is kept to a minimum for the most part. On the mic, Armstrong teases the rhythm but he is all business when he picks up his horn.
They follow with Rose Room, a briskly tiptoeing platform for spiraling, crystalline, drolly ostentatious clarinet accented by the bandleader. Royal Garden Blues has some neatly triangulated conversations between the horns, Hines adding vaudevillian flourishes.
Hines imbues Panama with ragtime sparkle alongside the animatedly intertwined horns. Armstrong’s strutting take of On the Sunny Side of the Street gets more winkingly genial as it goes along: the audience loves that. His ambered, straightforward playing on the gospel-infused Mahogany Hall is one of the high points of the show; the band mess with the audience via a series of false endings as they careen their way out.
The midtempo drag Black and Blue has a similar, circumspect soulfulness: “My only sin is in my skin” packs a nonchalant wallop. From there the band scamper through Them There Eyes and back away for a more wrly somber take of This Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.
They keep the Big Easy vibe going tightly with Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, then offer a nod to the crowd with Coquette, Hines and Teagarden taking centerstage. Guest chanteuse Velma Middleton takes over on a slightly more low-key Lover Come Back to Me; then, on Can Anyone Explain she has to summon the bandleader to the mic for a dirty joke that these Francophones completely miss.
Tin Roof Blues, the quietest song of the set, is ironically a lauching pad for the most compelling solos of the night. The group close counterintuitively with the slow, lushly nocturnal A Kiss to Build a Dream On. At the time this recording was made, jazz was the western world’s default dance and party music, to a large extent because of these guys onstage.
The Swingaroos Offer a Good Reason Not to Stay Home on the 17th
The good news about St. Patrick’s Day this year is that it’s on a Tuesday. Does that mean the amateurs won’t be celebrating it early this weekend, turning every bar from Hell’s Kitchen to Hell’s Gate into Hell itself? Probably not. But there will probably be fewer of them out this coming Tuesday the 17th, if you’re stir-crazy enough to go out that night. And if you end up at the big room at the Rockwood at around 10, you’ll get to see a really fun, original retro swing band, the Swingaroos. Does that mean the Rockwood folks expect lots of drunken dancing? Your guess is as good as anybody’s. More likely, it means the band is taking a gamble that they’ll be playing their irrepressibly cheery update on 30s and 40s sounds to a captive audience.
Their album All Aboard is streaming at Bandcamp. Pianist Assaf Gleizner’s stride stomp fuels the opening track, Steam Train, singer Kimberly Hawkey ably voicing a train whistle and then serving as emcee for jaunty solos by Dan Glaude on clarinet, Nat Ranson on trombone and then a scampering one from the piano.
Hawkey shows off her brassy and smoky sides on the high-spirited stroll A Walk in the Park, bassist Chris Conte adding a lively, tiptoeing solo. To the Beat! looks back to Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman. Then the band brings it down with Far Across the World, Hawkey’s expressive (and subtly droll) vocals anchored by Gleizner’s resonant chords and a balmy Glaude alto sax solo over drummer Mike Gordon’s misty brushwork
Grocery List is a funny Louis Jordan-style jump blues: “A ham, a clam, a leg of lamb, it’s just baloney,” Hawkey intones, having all kinds of fun with food innuendos – and a pretty fair impersonation of a kazoo solo. The band has just as much fun making a slowly strolling noir theme out of Brahms’ famous Hungarian Dance, with a tip of the hat to Duke Ellington. Nagasaki is the lone Roaring 20s cover here, done with a rapidfire, coy hokum blues flair.
The band follows that with the album’s best track, Shadow Man, with its Brecht-Weill style angst and Hawkey’s moody, world-weary, distantly Billie Holiday-inflected vocals. Gordon’s tapdancing drums take centerstage on the brisk I Can Take It. The album ends with a silly cover that’s infinitely better than the original, which will probably draw some chuckles from people in the crowd who were in grade school back in the 90s.
Montreal Jazz Festival 2011, Day One
The world’s most unpretentious jazz festival got off to an auspicious start yesterday. As with jazz festivals around the globe, the Montreal Jazz Festival encompasses many other styles of music as well. The local media raved about flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia’s performance last night, while word on the street was that tickets for the singer from that famous 70s metal band, and that has-been 80s funk guy, were hot. But as usual, the real action was in the smaller rooms. New York was well-represented: David Binney, pianist Dan Tepfer playing a duo with Lee Konitz, and Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog numbered among the literally hundreds of acts on the festival bill, which continues through July 4. And the habitants‘ groups proved just as interesting as the innumerable acts from out of town.
Our Saturday got off to an early start at one of the many makeshift beer tents with a smoking, genre-busting set by Montreal sextet Hot Pepper Dixieland (a spinoff of Le Dixieband, with a different drummer and clarinetist). Playing a mix of the well-known and the lesser-known, not just blissed-out dancefloor shuffles (although they did some of those too), they mixed in a hot 20s early swing vibe along with elements of ragtime. And they started out as brooding and minor-key as this kind of stuff gets before picking up the pace with a spiky, vividly rustic St. James Infirmary, a balmy My Blue Heaven and finally a surprisingly bracing, ominously minor-key tinged When the Saints Go Marching In.
Later in the afternoon, there was a “battle of the bands” on the esplanade, pairing off two marching units: Swing Tonique Jazz Band on the west side versus Streetnix on the east. Ostensibly a contest to see who could drown out the other, each entertained a separate crowd: volume-wise, the more New Orleans-flavored Swing Tonique had the upper hand versus Streetnix, who mined a more European vibe (including a bouncy, amped-up version of La Vie en Rose). Eventually, Streetnix launched into Caravan and resolutely stomped their way up to the middle of the plaza where Swing Tonique joined them, and then graciously gave their quieter compatriots a chance to cut loose. The entire crew closed with an energetic blues, with solos all around: by then, the crowd had completely encircled them, pretty much everyone sticking around despite the intermittent torrents of rain that would continue into the night.
Our original game plan was to catch jazz pianist John Roney next, but that was derailed by a pitcher of beer and some enormous mounds of fries over on Rue St.-Denis. Having watched Lorraine Muller a.k.a. the Fabulous Lolo – former frontwoman of popular Canadian ska bands the Kingpins and Lo & the Magnetics – play a tantalizing soundcheck earlier in the day, it was great to catch a full set of her band’s totally retro 60s ska and rocksteady. Two of our crew immediately suffered intense drummer envy: this guy had the one-drop down cold, and had a sneaky, rattling fill ready for wherever it was least expected. For that matter, the whole rhythm section, including bass, guitar, organ and piano, was pretty mighty, a solid launching pad for the band’s killer three-piece horn section, which Lolo joined a few times, playing baritone sax. They reinvented Hawaii 5-0 as a syncopated noir rocksteady theme and later on took a stab at the Steven Stills moldie oldie Love the One You’re With (did Ken Boothe or somebody from that era cover it, maybe?). Montreal reggae crooner Danny Rebel, a big hit with the crowd, duetted with Lolo on a straight-up ska tune and a balmy rocksteady ballad lowlit by the guitarist’s reverb-drenched twang. The rest of the set switched cleverly back and forth between bouncy and slinky. A band this good deserves a global following.
Last stop of the night was the Balmoral, a shi-shi bar around the corner where bassist Jean-Felix Mailloux was playing an intriguing set of original compositions in a duo with Guillaume Bourque on clarinet and bass clarinet. Mailloux’ background in gypsy jazz was obvious, but his influences extend to both klezmer and third stream sounds. One of the bass/bass clarinet numbers was a clinic in the kind of interesting things that can be done with a minor mode and a simple three-note descending progression; another paced along with moody tango ambience; another plaintively alluded to Erik Satie. Mailloux alternated between melody, pulse and pure rhythm, tapping out the beat on the body of the bass as Bourque circled with an intensity that ranged from murky to acerbic.
And despite the rain, the festival atmosphere was shockingly convivial (at least from a New Yorker’s perspective). A high school girl working security sheepishly asked one of us to open up a purse (cans, bottles and dogs are verboten) instead of giving us New York Central Park rent-a-pig attitude; beer vendors wandered throughout the crowd, as if at a hockey game. Although there was a tourist element, the occasional gaggle of fratboys or douchettes in tiaras and heels lingering on the fringes, this was overwhelmingly a laid-back, polyglot local crowd, not a lot of English being spoken other than the occasional song lyric. It’s hard to imagine a better way to kick off a vacation than this.
Roosevelt Dime Have Oldschool Fun with Vintage Americana
This one’s a lot of fun. Anchored by Andrew Green’s spiky banjo and Hardin Butcher’s soaring, smartly tuneful trumpet and cornet, Roosevelt Dime’s lineup is pretty unique today, although eighty years ago banjo-and-horns bands were pretty common. Their aptly titled new album Steamboat Soul sets set vintage 1960s-style soul or country songs to wry, clever arrangements that go back another forty years or so, sometimes with hokum blues or dixieland tinges. All this falls somewhere in between Preacher Boy, the 2 Man Gentlemen Band and the Wiyos. Weaving in and out of period vernacular and accent – “a pack of tobacco and a late night pay phone call,” and so on – they set a vibe that varies from laid-back to boisterous. All the songs here have the immediacy and warm interplay of a live album, Seth Paris’ clarinet and saxophones interweaving with the trumpet, pulsing along on the laid-back beat from Eben Pariser’s bass and Tony Montalbano’s drums.
The opening track, with its rapidfire lyrics, has an almost hip-hop feel, with a sweet clarinet solo: as long as the singer’s got his booze and Johnny Cash on the turntable, he’s content. The second cut, Where Did You Go kicks off with a semi-truck horn and ends with a siren: in between, it’s a swaying hokum blues that reaches for a sly Mississippi Sheiks vibe.The band motor through the fast banjo shuffle What a Shame as the kick drum boots it along, then chill out with the easy calypso vibe of Sway. Jubilee is a rousing second-line tribute to “the funkiest joint in town” and its hard-drinking house band. And Digging Song is absolutely brilliant, a spot-on swipe at trendoids with an oldtimey tune but contemporary references, as is the next track, Slow Your Roll, snidely referencing pretty much every Brooklyn neighborhood to suffer the blight of gentrification.
But it’s the soul songs here that really set them apart from the rest of the oldtimey crew. Wishing Well takes a Willie Mitchell-style Memphis shuffle back in time, a clever sendup of a golddigging girl (or one who wants to be a golddigger, anyway). Helpless has more of a ballad feel; the wistful Long Long Time reaches for the rafters with a lush, crescendoing string arrangement. The album winds up with Spikedriver, a biting update on an oldtimey railroad song. Fans of Americana music from across the decades have a lot to sink their teeth into here.
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