Max Bien Kahn

Baby Green is the new album by San Francisco-born, New Orleans-based multi-instrumentalist Max Bien Kahn, who’s called the city home since 2011. He might be best known as the tenor banjo player in legendary nouveau trad jazz band Tuba Skinny, who he’s been playing with since 2012, but he’s collaborated with a host of local luminaries across the musical spectrum, playing with folks like Duff Thompson and Esther Rose, and on his fifth full-length solo record, he digs into his rock and roll roots and takes a left turn into hazy, shambling guitar pop. The result? A woozy document of life’s surprising cul-de-sacs and its beautiful possibilities. Recorded live by Ross Farbe at New Orleans’s Little Squeeze Studios over four days in the lead-up to Mardi Gras in 2024, with a band featuring Kunal Prakash (Silver Synthetic) and Ray Micarelli (Video Age), Gina Leslie, and Cameron Snyder, Baby Green is a feverish snapshot of all the things, great and small, that make a life, well, a LIFE. As of this writing, he’s released four full length albums and a handful of EPs, and his newest record, Baby Green, is his fifth full length. Currently 40 years old, Max is married to writer and poet Mik Grantham, with whom he’s recently collaborated on a beautiful baby girl. -Gabe Soria