Tonight's concert at the newly-renovated Levitt Pavilion in Westport features the hot jazz group Hot Sardines. The band has performed recently at Lincoln Center and Joe's Pub in New York City, and Forbes calls them "one of the best jazz bands in NY today."
One their website the band describes itself as follows:
Take a blustery brass lineup, layer it over a rhythm section led by a stride-piano virtuoso in the Fats Waller vein, and tie the whole thing together with a one-of-the-boys frontwoman with a voice from another era, and you have the Hot Sardines. (We haven't even told you about the tap dancer yet.)
The Sardine sound – wartime Paris via New Orleans, or the other way around – is steeped in hot jazz, salty stride piano, and the kind of music Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt and Waller used to make: Straight-up, foot-stomping jazz. (Literally – the band includes a tap dancer whose feet count as two members of the rhythm section). They manage to invoke the sounds of a near-century ago and stay resolutely in step with the current age. And while their roots run deep into jazz, that most American of genres, they're intertwined with French influences via their frontwoman, who was born and raised in Paris (and writes songs in both languages).