Swamp Donkeys? No, me neither. Goes to show the way things are changing when an unknown trad jazz band can get a million hits on YouTube by shackling their admittedly archaic and very uncritically acclaimed sound to a big TV drama hit and can put on a substantial tour the other side of the Atlantic based pretty much on hunch, the risk embracing nature of their promoters not to say the increased yet still modest and deeply unfashionable pulling power that exists certainly among most forward looking jazz fans towards trad jazz. 

Yet there has been a helpful revisionist trend (in that revisionism always corrects lazy notions of stuff we don’t really think about properly) brewing for a while and this phenomenon all follows in the wake of the Hot Sardines, ragtimers Postmodern Jukebox and on a homeground word-of-mouth scale in the absence of a big fanbase of the excellent Basin Street Brawlers against all odds plus the burgeoning Smitty’s scene the Brawlers’ brilliant trumpeter Pete Horsfall is also part of and not forgetting Pigfoot, the daddys of them all who induce a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in even the most ardent Modernist catching a slice of them live.

Stateside renewed interest in trad all goes back to the post-Katrina Treme effect (not so much Wynton’s doctrinaire posturings although he did do much back in the 1980s and 90s to instil an interest in Jelly Roll Morton), rippling out over here via satellite TV. But trad while not often generating much jazz media coverage has always been around. It’s not like Acker Bilk and his mates any more over here and irony loving millennials seem to be flocking to the new hotshots of the style a good deal. The vintage craze based around clothes and the Jazz Age has also upped trad’s appeal, a Gatsby side road feeding in to the main musical highway. SG  

Tour dates are all here via THE BAND WEBSITE