The Hot Sardines

Hot jazz for the 21st century. Take a blustery brass lineup, layer it over a rhythm section led by a Fats Waller-style stride-piano virtuoso, and tie the whole thing together with a magnetic, one-of-the-boys frontwoman whose voice recalls another era, and you have the Hot Sardines, an NYC outfit (with a tap dancer) that’s been called "simply phenomenal" by Clive Davis in The London Times. The Sardine sound – a modern take on wartime Paris, Harlem and New Orleans – is steeped in the kind of music Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt and Waller used to make: Straight-up, foot-stomping jazz. Pianist-bandleader Evan “Bibs” Palazzo and Paris-born singer "Miz Elizabeth" Bougerol (who owe their collaboration to meeting via Craigslist) describe their band as “born in the 1920s, but raised in the ’00s,” reflecting a philosophy that hot jazz, dixieland and Tin Pan Alley tunes are all pop music, not historical artifact to be handled with kid gloves.