Tuba Skinny

dixieland · jazz

Tuba Skinny is a New Orleans street band formed in 2009, playing early jazz, ragtime, blues, spirituals, jug band and string band material drawn largely from the 1920s and 1930s. Several members had played together in earlier New Orleans groups including the Dead Man Street Orchestra and Loose Marbles, and the band grew out of informal busking into a touring ensemble with a working repertoire of more than four hundred songs. Its arrangements favor collective ensemble playing over extended solos. Cornetist Shaye Cohn, who also plays piano, fiddle, accordion and banjo, acts as the group's orchestrator; she is the granddaughter of saxophonist Al Cohn, trained for twelve years as a classical pianist in Brookline, Massachusetts and studied at New York University before taking up a flood-damaged trumpet she found in New Orleans. The band also includes Barnabus Jones on trombone, banjo, fiddle, guitar and vocals, Todd Burdick on tuba and sousaphone, Craig Flory on clarinet and saxophone, Greg Sherman on guitar, harmonica and vocals, Max Bien-Kahn on resonator guitar and banjo, Jason Lawrence on banjo and guitar, Robin Rapuzzi on washboard and drums, and Erika Lewis on vocals and bass drum. Tuba Skinny has released more than a dozen albums since its self-titled 2009 debut, among them Rag Band (2012), Some Kind-a-Shake (2019) and Hot Town (2023), plus Magnolia Stroll, a collection of sixteen original compositions. The group has taken several OffBeat magazine awards for best traditional jazz album and received the Arhoolie Foundation's Arhoolie Award in 2022, and it has recorded a collaborative album with folk-blues singer Maria Muldaur. Much of its international audience came from fan-shot video circulated online rather than from label promotion. It appears at the Harvester Performance Center in Rocky Mount, Virginia.

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