ABOUT

The Jim Morey Band is a 4 piece band playing original jazz flavored roots and funky music with one hand in Storyville, New Orleans and the other picking confetti out of Tom Wait's old hat. We will soothe your savage beast...

The Jim Morey Band makes music that transports you to another place and time.

A tired old riverboat paddles sluggishly down the Mississippi on a muggy summer night, carrying drooping ladies waving drooping fans, men with shirts unbuttoned and straw boater hats, the band playing muddy river jazz in a brass-soaked mosey, scattered couples swaying as closely as comfort allows.

A wagon rolls and creaks along a dusty, winding country road; the driver croons soulfully to the beat of the clip-clopping hooves; a group of roving, carefree musicians straggle behind him, plucking banjo and mandolin and acoustic bass, beating hand drums, shaking rattlers, harmonizing with the crooner and prancing to the wind blowing through trees.

Bodies shake and shimmy in a backwoods shack to manic Dixieland and swingin' jazz, maybe a jug band without a jug or vaudeville without slapstick, but at least one unicycle and a kazoo, washboard, slide whistle, vibraslap rattle, a rusty saw, all paired with jaunty banjo, upright bass, loose-limbed drumming, and the cavalier trumpet playing and bold singing of a man in a beat-up bowler hat.

Yes, the Jim Morey Band's music is pleasantly old-fashioned but manages to stay rooted in the present. Neo-ragtime, NOLA jazz by non-natives and with synths, country swing with tongue-in-cheekness, the Tom Waits style of stumblin' roots rock, kazoo- and slide whistle-driven ditties that wouldn't be out of place in Looney Tunes. (read  more)

Leilani Polk