Tuba Skinny
‘Hot Town’
Tuba Skinny Music
Listening to Tuba Skinny, the remarkable eight-piece ensemble based atNew Orleans, one gets the general impression that in music, it now seems altogether possible that geography is starting to matter once more. In the early days of the music, there was a clear distinction between a band from, say, Kansas City, and one from Memphis.
As late as the 1950s, styles in jazz were geographically defined —West Coast Cool Jazz versus New York Hard Bop. But even as young musicians began to learn to play primarily from recordings — rather than emulating musicians in their own neighborhood — the area-based styles became increasingly irrelevant A few years ago I wrote in these pages, “it’s impossible to tell a saxophone player in Chicago from one in Helsinki or Tokyo.”
Tuba Skinny makes the point that such considerations matter again. The band specializes in the early jazz of the Crescent City, going through the ‘20s and early ‘30s, but is fundamentally different from New York bands. Even though Tuba Skinny plays much of the same repertoire, they don’t sound anything like Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks or, despite the title, The High Society New Orleans Band, both of whom appear regularly at Birdland.
This became apparent while listening to the band play “Variety Stomp” at the Suncoast Jazz Festival in November. (It’s also on their 2016 album “Blue Chime Stomp.”) I’ve heard Vince Giordano and his men play this 1927 Fletcher Henderson classic a thousand times. There’s no mistaking Mr. Giordano’s trademark breakneck tempo and high-tension energy. Tuba Skinny swings no less, but with a more relaxed beat; you can dance to one of their faster numbers — unless, like myself, you can’t dance at all — without breaking a sweat, or spilling a drop of your cocktail.
The New York bands are like a martini, dangerous when dry; Tuba Skinny is a cool, relaxing mint julep. Mr. Giordano’s music is like the A Train, careening down the track and transporting you the entire length of Central Park in mere moments. Tuba Skinny is that quaint old trolley plodding along towards Desire Street (the original streetcar named Desire); it will get there when it gets there — and who’s in such a hurry anyway?
Geography is also a matter of where you are rather than where you’re from: the High Society Band is co-led by British pianist Conal Fowlkes and trumpeter Simon Wettenhall from Australia; after playing here for decades, for all intents and purposes they now sound as New York as anybody. Tuba Skinny was essentially founded in 2009 by trumpeter (and occasional pianist) Shaye Cohn, whose family includes two quintessential New York jazzmen, the guitar virtuoso Joe Cohn and the late tenor saxophone giant and composer-arranger Al Cohn.
Since 2009, the group has released roughly 15 albums in 15 years — certainly making them one of the more prolific ensembles in contemporary music — including “Let’s Get Happy Together,” a 2021 collaboration with the blues, folk, and pop singer Maria Muldaur. Their CDs and LPs have a DIY quality, professionally recorded in the studios but with Ms. Cohn’s homespun-looking illustrations on the cover.
Their latest, “Hot Town,” opens with “Nobody’s Business.” This is a much repeated theme in early jazz and blues, with two famous similar-but-different templates. The best known is by Bessie Smith, later interpreted by Billie Holiday, and the other is by Mississippi John Hurt, later revamped by Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald. Tuba Skinny’s is based on a third version, recorded in Texas in 1934 by Bo Carter; the voice-and-solo guitar foundation has been expanded for the full-eight piece band.
The main feature is two vocal choruses by guitarist Greg Sherman, who may lack Carter’s precise articulation (the words are easier to understand on the 1934 recording) but sings with agreeable emotion and just the right spirit. There’s a solo by clarinetist Craig Flory, one of the few playing today who captures the florid, raspy tone of the so-called New Orleans “revival” players like George Lewis. Next comes a chase chorus between Ms. Cohn and trombonist Barnabus Jones. Before the coda, we are treated to a sequence of breaks for washboard virtuoso Robin Rapuzzi; as we saw at Suncoast (and you can see this video here), his solos are equal parts percussion and choreography.
“Hot Town” further includes a reading of “Sun Brimmers Blues” by the Memphis Jug Band from 1927, also sung enthusiastically by Mr. Sherman. And there’s “Jones Law Blues,” written by Count Basie for Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra in 1929, which is slower and less intense than as played by the Nighthawks, but has a certain joie de vivre all its own.
One good reason to focus on the late 1920s is the Pangea-like nature of it all, when jazz, blues (so-called “race music”), country (“hillbilly”), and sacred music freely interacted with pop and dance music. “Hot Town” includes a notably non-scentimental waltz, “Forever I’ll be Yours” and a proto Gospel number with a rather devilish attitude, “WhenThey Ring Them Golden Bells,” first recorded by Alfred G. Karnes at the legendary Bristol sessions in 1927. Conversely, their album with Maria Muldaur offers rare examples of Tuba Skinny performing popular songs from as late as Frank Loesser’s 1938 “I Go For That” and even the 1946 “Patience and Fortitude.”
But if the music of Ms. Cohn and her seven sidefolk teaches us anything, it is that genres and subgenres don’t necessarily matter, and neither do chronological periods or generations. The most important thing in jazz is location, location, location.
Tuba Skinny is playing every Saturday night this month (January 2026) at d.b.a, on Frenchman Street in New Orleans, in addition to which, they may frequently be heard, weather permitting, on the streets of the French Quarter.
WILL FRIEDWALD
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