July, 2025
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
ELECTRONIC EDITION: Now free to email subscribers and supported by tasteful, music-oriented advertising with a unique news-format approach.
A monthly guide to early rock, blues, country, folk, and traditional jazz in the Seattle area and beyond.
Editor and Publisher: Doug Bright
Web: httpwhheritagemusicreview_com
Email: subscribe@heritagemusicreview.com
Editor's Note: Links to the books and albums mentioned in this issue come from my participation in the Amazon Associates affiliate program, which enables me to earn commissions on the products I recommend when readers buy them through this website. The links represent my judgment of the most relevant and reasonably priced musical packages available. Heritage Music Review does not collect, store, or share confidential information generated by its readers' purchases. Enjoy!
CONTENTS—July, 2025
TUBA SKINNY: Passionately Preserving The Sound of Old New Orleans
WHAT's IN STORE: News From The Musical Marketplace
CHECKIN, OUT THE SOUNDS: July Music CALENDAR (next message)
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TUBA SKINNY: Passionately Preserving The Sound of Old New Orleans
By Doug Bright
If you've been reading this publication for a long time, you'll agree that my musical attitude might best be described as proudly curmudgeonesque. As both performer and journalist, I've made it my lifelong mission to preserve American roots music in its original forms, free of what I consider to be modern adulterations. That's why I was absolutely blown away by a chance Public Radio encounter with a young band from New Orleans called Tuba Skinny whose impassioned presentation took me right back to the mid-1920's when Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven
ensembles
were a hot commodity.
"I discovered Tuba Skinny in 2010 when a friend recommended a couple of their videos on YouTube," recalls Pops Coffee, a British musician and trad-jazz authority
literally "wrote the book" on the band. In his 2020 work
he continues, "Within a few weeks, after watching many more videos, I was convinced that Tuba Skinny was the best band playing traditional jazz anywhere in the world. I followed their progress closely and their music gave me enormous pleasure. When I visited New Orleans in April 2015, I finally got to hear the band in person. This book is an appreciation of their wonderful music, and it is especially an appreciation of Shaye Cohn, who is the band's unofficial musical director."
A Boston native, Cohn is the granddaughter of highly respected jazz saxophonist Al Cohn and daughter of guitarist Joe Cohn. Nevertheless, her childhood musical involvement seems to have been primarily in the European classical direction. "I have been told that, when she was nine years old, Shaye was a member of the New England Conservatory Children's Chorus and sang solo on stage," Coffee relates in his
book.
She trained rigorously on piano for twelve years, graduating from New York University and winning awards, but she found the discipline too restrictive and solitary, so she simply walked away. "I didn't think I'd be playing any other instruments ever again," she told an interviewer in 2015.
It's often been said that when one door closes, another opens, and for Shaye Cohn, that open door revealed itself when she first visited New Orleans and was drawn to a vibrant, informal, spontaneous culture that constituted a refreshing contrast to the rarefied air of the classical concert stage. By 2005 she had relocated and met the musicians with whom she would later form Tuba Skinny.
With Cohn on accordion, Virginia native Barnabus Jones on fiddle, Todd Burdick from Chicago on banjo, and Kiowa Wells on guitar, they played a mix of Cajun, old-time Appalachian, and Balkan music for tips in Jackson Square as The Dead Man Street Orchestra, but even at this early incarnation, the seeds of the future were being planted. Brass bands had always been a well-known institution in New Orleans, and Cohn and her friends were fascinated. When their informal arrangement dissolved in 2007, they joined a trad-jazz ensemble called Loose Marbles led by trumpeter Ben Polcer and clarinetist Michael Magro.
Cohn played piano at first, but when she discovered a flood-damaged trumpet in a dilapidated building where she was living, it caught her attention. "I had never played a wind instrument before and it just felt really powerful, so I got to play second trumpet with them," she once recalled.
By 2009 Cohn, Jones, Wells, and Burdick were purveying their newly developed hot-jazz sound on Royal Street, where upscale art galleries, antique shops, and restaurants offered a much more manageable busking environment than the crowded, drunken chaos of Bourbon Street. By this time Todd Burdick was playing sousaphone, and that turned out to be how the new band got its name. The late Anthony "Tuba Fats" Lacen had been a well-known busker for years, and one day when the slender Todd Burdick was seen bicycling down the street, a passer-by shouted out, "Hey, there goes Tuba Skinny!" When he related the incident to his cohorts, the name stuck.
"Everything seemed to happen so naturally with us," vocalist and bass drummer Erika Lewis told the New Orleans-based Offbeat magazine in 2018. "We really just wanted to keep playing together and were propelled by the energy of playing for crowds on the street."
Their fidelity to the sound of the music's originators made them a uniquely popular attraction in nightspots that catered to traditional jazz devotees. At the invitation of one of these fans, they flew to France, where they busked and played a local tavern in the coastal town of Meschers-sur-Giron. From there they conducted a bicycle tour along the coast, camping overnight to save money. They released their debut album that year, simply entitled TUBA SKINNY, and the albums and low-budget international touring have continued steadily since then. In fact, their 2013 album PYRAMID STRUT was recorded in Australia.
By the time their 2016 album
Blue Chime Stomp
emerged, two Seattlites had moved to town and joined the ranks: Clarinetist/saxophonist Craig Flory and drummer/washboardist Robin Rapuzzi. Flory had distinguished himself in traditional jazz circles more than a decade earlier in the Uptown Lowdown Jazz Band, The Yes Yes Boys led by singer and ukulele virtuoso Del Rey, and cornetist Dave Holo's Holotradband.
Rapuzzi had started out in high school drumming with punk-rock bands but later had taken up guitar, singing and writing songs that drew on everything from sea chanties to the balladry of Woody Guthrie. Seeking to expand his musical reach, he moved south and found a new calling with the washboard styles that had begun a hundred years earlier with jug bands in Memphis and Cajun dance music in rural Louisiana. He's been an integral part of Tuba Skinny since then.
Maria Muldaur's legendary career had begun way back in 1963 with New York's Even Dozen Jug Band and Jim Kweskin's more-famous jug band in Boston. When she discovered Tuba Skinny in 2018, the result turned out to be a truly magical meeting of the minds. While shopping at her favorite clothing store in Woodstock, New York, the vintage jazz coming through the speaker system grabbed her attention immediately.
"How cool that the local radio station is playing this kind of music!" she remarked. To her astonishment, she learned that what she was hearing wasn't an old 78RPM record from the Roaring Twenties, but a CD by a young New Orleans street band called Tuba Skinny. Since Tuba Skinny's Erika Lewis was a native of the area, the store proprietor was well aware of her and had followed her career in the Crescent City. "She had to show me the CD covers before I would believe her!" Muldaur told Sound Café writer Eric Alper in 2020.
"I immediately asked how I could get ahold of their CD's," she continued, "and when I returned to Woodstock a month later, she had five Tuba Skinny CD's for me, which have been in heavy rotation in my life ever since."
Consequently, Muldaur invited the band to collaborate with her for a show at 2020's International Folk Alliance conference. "It was an amazing show," Stony Plain Records founder Holger Pedersen told Alper in the Sound Café article. "We talked about a possible album, and I am delighted that it worked out."
The result, appropriately entitled
Let's Get Happy Together,
was released that May, probably giving Tuba Skinny the widest exposure it had yet enjoyed, but Muldaur's voice had lost much of its range and power by then, making the album less memorable than it might have been.
Meanwhile, Tuba Skinny's Erika Lewis, Muldaur's artistic heir-apparent, was having vocal troubles of her own. She was diagnosed that year with a thyroid condition, requiring surgery that risked damaging her vocal nerves and ending her career. Fortunately, the surgery was successful, and though she moved to Asheville, North Carolina, to concentrate on a solo career, she has continued to join Tuba Skinny for recording projects, tours, and festival appearances.
Through the modern miracle of Internet radio, I was fortunate enough to catch Tuba Skinny's April 27 show at New Orleans' annual Jazz and Heritage Festival from the comfort of home. WWOZ-FM ⠶⠺⠺⠺⠲⠺⠺⠕⠵⠲⠕⠗⠛⠶⠂ the city's official Jazz and Heritage station, streams the event live from the festival every year, gloriously living up to its motto, "If you can't live in ⠠⠝⠑⠺ Orleans, let New Orleans live in you."
The set began with "Messin' Around", an uptempo number gleaned from 1920s bandleader Doc Cooke. In Tuba Skinny fashion, it featured a front line of Shaye Cohn on cornet, Craig Flory on clarinet, and Barnabus Jones on trombone, anchored by a solid rhythm section consisting of guitarist Greg Sherman, Todd "Tuba Skinny" Burdick on sousaphone, banjoist Max Bien-Kahn, and Robin Rapuzzi, whose washboard solo drew a cheer from the audience at the Economy Hall tent, where trad-jazz acts tend to be featured.
The front-line soloists are all steeped in the old style, and their ensemble improvisation and harmony convey that wonderful, spontaneously organized anarchy that defines the original New Orleans jazz. The result is as rich and flavorful as good Creole gumbo.
The tempo then slowed with a relaxed rendition of "Little Coquette", a grand old pop standard that I learned at an early age from my parents' 78's of the original Ink Spots. True to form, bass drummer-vocalist Erika Lewis delivered it in a laid-back, down-home style worthy of the late great Billie Holiday and the aforementioned Maria Muldaur. Trombonist Barnabus Jones, whose excitingly edgy tone calls Turk Murphy to mind, delivered a spicy solo that took the instrument to the depth of its range.
Guitarist Greg Sherman then picked up the pace with one of many variations on the old theme "Nobody's Business", singing it with the kind of natural, bluesy, old-time grit that's hardly heard anymore. It appears on what seems to be the band's latest album, 2023's HOT TOWN. After an inspired banjo solo from Max Bien-Kahn, Rapuzzi's washboard break elicited a cheer even more enthusiastic than his previous ovation.
Tuba Skinny is a band that delights in crediting its sources, and Shaye Cohn opened
Jelly Roll Morton’s
"Cannonball Blues" with a hot cornet intro. From that point onward, though, her crew of preservationist jazzers took individual solos rather than adhering to Morton's emphasis on the ensemble sound. These "musicianers", to borrow an old New Orleans term, are not slavish copyists, but faithful devotees who breathe their own kind of life into the music without spoiling it with modern influences.
After stride piano pioneer
⠓⠕⠞ instrumental "Harlem Joys", which featured an especially dexterous clarinet solo from Craig Flory, Erika Lewis applied her signature jazz-blues style to lesser-known Roaring Twenties vocalist Georgia White's "I'm Blue and Lonesome", which appears on Tuba Skinny's 2016 album CHIME BLUES STOMP. It was followed by "Elrado Scuffle" from clarinetist
Jimmie Noone's
entirely reed-driven Apex Club Orchestra. Once again, Tuba Skinny matched Flory's sweet-toned, high-flying clarinet work with solos from cornetist Shaye Cohn and trombonist Barnabus Jones.
The tempo then slowed again with Erika Lewis and Greg Sherman trading lines on the vocal duet "Forever I'll Be Yours" gleaned from the husband-and-wife team who gained their rhythm-and-blues fame in the late Fifties as Tarheel Slim and Little Ann. Lewis and Sherman seem to take particular delight in this vintage duo, reviving another duet called "Security" to finish the program. Both duets appear on HOT TOWN.
In the meantime, Lewis treated us to a heartfelt revival of
Bessie Smith's
"Muddy Water". Before the the set was over, the band brought out two more snappy instrumentals: an original called "It Gets Easier" from banjoist Max Bien-Kahn and Duke Ellington's "Red Hot Band" graced by an impassioned solo from clarinetist Craig Flory that called my pioneering hero
Sidney Bechet
mind.
Even with its continued appearances at festivals and international concert tours, Tuba Skinny still busks on the streets of New Orleans and elsewhere. "It's important to every single person in the band that we keep playing on the street," Shaye Cohn once told Offbeat magazine. "If we stopped, something important about the band would be gone." To donate to the band or order CD's, visit www.tubaskinny.com.
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WHAT's IN STORE: News From The MUSICAL Marketplace
Find The Merle Haggard Story At Phinney Books
"There's the guy I'd love to be and the guy I am," country music legend Merle Haggard once confided to biographer Marc Eliot. "I'm somewhere in between, in deep water, swimming to the other shore." All the complexity of the circumstances and choices that shaped him are revealed with unflinching honesty in Eliot's recent book THE HAG: The Life, Times, and Work of Merle Haggard. Your copy is waiting for you at Phinney Books in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.
Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Avenue North
Web: www.phinneybooks.com
Phone: 206/297-2665
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Learn How To Take A Solo In any Jam At Dusty Strings
Have you ever wondered how your favorite artists created those memorable solos on your favorite albums? Ever wanted to join a jam session and be able to do something that makes sense? Dusty Strings Music Store and School in Seattle's Fremont district, long known for its array of fine stringed instruments and instructional workshops, is giving you a chance to learn how on any instrument in a workshop hosted by Portland guitarist Eric Skye on Saturday, July 26th at 11 AM. "We will use both a simple folk song, a blues, as well as a jazz standard to break down how we can use simple fat-free theory and our knowledge of the tune to come up with compelling lines that are threaded through the harmony and tethered to melody," he explains.
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
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Find 1964 Stratocaster At Emerald City Guitars
Emerald City Guitars in Seattle's Pioneer Square, well known for its fascinating selection of new and vintage acoustic and electric guitars, amps, and accessories, has recently acquired a 1964 Fender Stratocaster electric. "This incredible golden era 1964 Fender Stratocaster in factory Fiesta red is 100 percent stock and original. It is super clean and plays beautifully," the website proclaims.
Emerald City Guitars
83 South Washington Street
Phone: 206/382-0231
Web: www.emeraldcityguitars.com
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On The Newsstand: Heritage Music Review
The print edition of Heritage Music Review is available by subscription for $15 per year and on sale at the following Seattle newsstands and music venues:
FREMONT:
American Music: 4450 Fremont Avenue North
Dusty Strings Acoustic Music Shop: 3406 Fremont Avenue North
UNIVERSITY DISTRICT:
Bulldog News: 4208 University Way Northeast
GREENWOOD:
Phinney Books: 7405 Greenwood Avenue North
CAPITOL HILL:
Elliott Bay Book Company: 1521 10th Avenue
PIONEER SQUARE:
Emerald City Guitars: 83 South Washington Street
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For a free sample copy of the print edition, just reply to this message or, if this issue was forwarded to you, send your mailing address or email subscription request to subscribe@heritagemusicreview.com.
Forwarding of this Electronic Edition is strongly encouraged. If you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe, simply send your request to editor Doug Bright: subscribe@heritagemusicreview.com.
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