Usually one visit to the city per weekend is enough. On Saturday, the trip to see The Merchant of Venice involved a drive to a part of town where parking is easy and an El stop is nearby, so we could ride the rest of the way to a neighborhood with far more difficult parking.
Not long ago, I found out that the Hot Sardines were going to be in town the same weekend — but on Sunday — so I decided that I wanted to see them, too. At least driving all the way was an option, since the band was playing at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square. We parked a half a block away.
The only reason I know about the Hot Sardines is YouTube. To be more exact, YouTube algorithms that suggest one thing and another. When it comes to music, that’s almost always very little outside a narrow range, but occasionally something unusual gets through. Probably listening to electroswing a few years ago made the bots suggest the Hot Sardines’ to-the-ceiling-lively version of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.”
They’re just as lively in person. Hot is fitting. Hot jazz and lots of it, in a roughly two-hour show with no intermission and two encores, with frontwoman Elizabeth Bougerol and bandleader Evan Palazzo each hopping their jive — peppy vocals and animated piano, respectively. Other band members jammed on trombone, trumpet, bass, tenor saxophone, clarinet and drums, sometimes including conga. Often enough each of them had solos in which to shine, and shine they did, every jack jazzman of them.
There was also a fellow on stage with no instruments. Sitting in a chair in his fancy duds and fine hat. (Of course, they all wore fancy duds — Bougerol in gold lame and Palazzo in powder blue.) As soon as the first number started, his feet started tapping, and you noticed the taps on his shoes. He was the band tap dancer. Did he ever move, sometimes just sitting down, but often on his feet, moving all over the stage, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap with arms and legs moving every which way, adding his distinctive rhythm to the band. Who thought of adding him? (A.C. Lincoln by name.) What an inspiration.
Some tunes were more familiar, some less, all good. Among others, the Hot Sardines played “Some of These Days,” a Sophie Tucker number, “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Lulu’s Back in Town” and “Caravan” (take note of A.C. Lincoln doing his thing in that last video). “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” was the first encore.
As we entered the theater, I noticed a few small signs here and there explaining that the show was partly sponsored by the European Union. Odd, I thought, then forgot about it.
About mid-way through, Bougerol, who had a pretty good between-song patter, mentioned it. “Seems like one of our sponsors is the European Union,” she said, making a gesture that told us, How strange.
“Must be because I’m a French national,” she said.
Listening to her speak or sing in perfectly idiomatic and unaccented English, you’d have no clue. Apparently she was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, but spent time in Ivory Coast and Canada while growing up — as well she might, since her grandfather was a Canadian jazzman named Bobby Gimby, who wrote a song I might have sung as a six-year-old had I lived in Ontario instead of Texas.
Bougerol did four or five of songs in French — just as jazzy as anything in English — but the only one whose title I know was “I Wanna Be Like You,” or whatever the French equivalent is. She said she knew it from watching the French version of Disney’s Jungle Book as a child.
The band lineup is a little different in this video, but the tune and lyrics are the same.
She also told the amusing story of how the band formed. Namely, the beginning of the musical collaboration between her and Palazzo, who met by answering the same Craigslist ad for a jazz jam. They discovered they both knew a relatively obscure Fats Waller song, “Feet’s Too Big,” and played it at the jam.
Then they played it for us in the audience.
Now that’s a fun song. Fats Waller’s recording of it is here.
