Tuba Skinny: Live at Friends is on Its Way!

At long last the live recording of Tuba Skinny that was made at this year’s DGA Family and Friends Crawfish Boil is on its way!  We’ve put all of them in the mail, so keep an eye out.  If you don’t get one in by the end of next week, let us know and we’ll figure out what went wrong.

The packaging for this CD was hand designed by us and you will also find a special package insert with every CD.  It is VERY IMPORTANT for everyone to read this package insert.  Many of you were not able to attend this year’s crawfish boil and you haven’t been exposed to the full force of a live Tuba Skinny performance.  Make sure to read the instructions carefully and pay special attention to the warnings.  Misuse of the CD could have severe consequences and we don’t want to be held responsible for any injury, property damage, or death.

You’ll also notice that the CD doesn’t come with any lyrics or liner notes.  In order to keep the packaging manageable we weren’t able to include these with the CDs.  However, every Friday over the next several weeks we will be updating our blog with the lyrics and background information for the songs on the CD.  A lot of this is really cool stuff, so check it out.  It’s sometimes hard to make out all of the lyrics when you’re listening to the music, and there’s some really great (and sometimes racy) stuff in there that you don’t want to miss out on.

Without further ado, I’ll kick this whole thing off by telling ya’ll a bit about the band and how we got them involved with the crawfish boil.

Several years ago, while basking in the afterglow of a well run mock trial (drinking in a bar), several good friends (aka clients) from Boston suggested that we host an event celebrating our New Orleans roots.  Thus, the DGA Family and Friends Crawfish Boil was born. 

As anyone who has ever been to New Orleans well knows, one can’t toss a crawfish head without hitting a talented musician.  As New Orleans is known for good food, it is also known for good music.  The two are quite inseparable, and live performance is particularly important to the culture of the city.  New Orleans Jazz was always designed to be played live, and the style encourages interaction with the audience.  As you’ll see from listening to the CD, the music starts to get more lively and intense as the performance goes on.

We first saw Tuba Skinny perform at the Abita Springs Opry.  We’ve been a proud sponsor and season ticket holder of the Abita Springs Opry for some time now (there’s a show tomorrow night in fact).  The Opry is held at the town hall in Abita Springs and has a mission of preserving and presenting Louisiana "Roots" music. Its music is played primarily acoustically, in its original form.  The majority of the music that’s played there comes out of old-time Country, Bluegrass, and traditional Southern Gospel music, but also includes other forms of traditional Louisiana music such as Cajun, Zydeco, Irish, or other types that reflect the many different groups of people who are part of our diverse culture.  Naturally, Tuba Skinny fits right in at the Opry.

We first heard Tuba Skinny at the Opry in the fall of 2010.  They were introduced as a New Orleans street band and they looked the part - a little rough around the edges, instruments well worn, and homemade CDs for sale. But when the lights went down and the band started to play, the crowd started to pay attention.  Then, Erika, the lead vocalist, started belting out a song and we were all hooked.  There are not many standing ovations at the Opry, but Tuba Skinny got a big one.  We could have listened all night.  Doug decided that night that Tuba Skinny had to play the next DGA crawfish boil.

 

The members of the band have been playing together since meeting on the streets of New Orleans five years ago, and officially began playing as Tuba Skinny during the spring of 2009.  Like some of the city’s residents, they spend part of their time in New Orleans, and tend to travel abroad during the intense heat of the summer.

 

But who are these kids?  Although we’ve tried to find out, they don’t talk much about themselves.  Rumor has it that they aren’t all originally from New Orleans.  We think some of them might be from upstate New York, but it doesn’t really matter as their sound is pure New Orleans.

 

Tuba Skinny features the amazing vocals of Erika Lewis in the style of the late 1920 blues clubs in New Orleans, Chicago and New York.  Many of the songs they perform are, naturally, associated with some of the great female vocalists of the time.  Most of the songs on the CD are classics, played and replayed by many artists over the years as the musical tradition grew and spread around the country.

In the coming weeks we’ll discuss the background of the artists most closely associated with the songs and the lyrics.  We hope you will come away from this with a little better appreciation of our cultural roots as well as a craving for crawfish.  If you weren’t able to attend the boil this year, there’s always next year.  We hope to see you there.