Special Guest: Davis "The Real Davis" Rogan!

Posted by Benson

As you know already, Tuba Skinny will be returning to the stage at this year’s 5^th Annual DGA Crawfish Boil.  But Tuba Skinny will not be performing alone!

This year the boil will feature a special guest performance by none other than Davis Rogan!

Much like Tuba Skinny, Davis Rogan is a quintessential New Orleans musician, but with a distinctly different flair.  Tuba Skinny connects its audience to the deep roots of traditional New Orleans music by recreating, reliving, and reimagining the sounds and styles that laid the foundation for the blues and jazz traditions that have come to define the city. 

Davis embodies the continual evolution of this rich musical culture and is in many ways an avatar on the bleeding edge of progressive New Orleans music.  He embodies the vibrancy our richly diverse musical heritage; one that has influenced artists around the world for more than a century.  New Orleans has always been, and remains today, a cultural borderland that defies categorization.  The city is a perennial frontier of shared experience; a meeting ground for the exchange of ideas in which meaning is negotiated rather than dictated.

Davis is at home on this frontier.  Like a coureur de bois of old, he is mediator, fluent in the diverse dialects of the New Orleans music scene; welcomed by all and yet truly at home in none.  He blazes his own trails with a mélange of styles that can only truly be described as uniquely New Orleanian.  Critic John Swenson once said that Davis’s “fevered ghjrjhjhjtumind seems to be turning over clever ideas almost faster than he can process them, channeling Brian Wilson, Al Kooper, Steely Dan, NRBQ and the Bonzo Dog Band alongside Fats Domino and Eddie Bo.”

Davis’s fluency with true New Orleans music led the producer of Treme, David Simon, to base the character Davis McAlary on him, which is why Davis is known today as “The Real Davis” as opposed to “The Cable Davis” played by Steve Zahn.

We are truly excited to have “The Real” Davis performing at the crawfish boil this year.  He will be our guide through the turbulent, ever-changing frontier of contemporary New Orleans music, and we could not have hoped for a better one.