Discovering a band that resonates with you is like the early days of a love affair, everything after is measured against that spark. You discover them on album A, album B feels like a revelation, and by album C you think maybe the spell has faded—until you meet someone for whom that same album C is the one that hooked them. My own last decade could be told through rediscoveries of bands I had lost track of, even while revisiting early albums often, only to find that they had grown over time right along with me and were producing material to rival, if not surpass, the big bang of their youth.
After several gushing reviews and nearly ten years of listening, I’ve been sitting on Frog and Henry’s most recent releases far too long. It’s not for lack of enthusiasm. Their early albums still hold sentimental weight; they were the soundtrack to a summer spent landscaping for extra cash in the before times, but the band has only deepened since then. This June marked their seventh album in eight years, following a 2023 release in part recorded in a more controlled setting than the hotel rooms that had typically served the purpose. Together, these new records feel like the mature statement of a project that began as a hot-dance revival and has evolved into something quietly revolutionary.
Frog & Henry remain a touring group, but they are, more than anything else, a recording band. The tone they create through vintage tape machines and period microphones isn’t an affectation; it’s an instrument. They’ve learned to play the microphone like others play the cornet. Their soundstage is the room itself, their balance decided not at a mixing console but by how far each player stands from that single mic. The result is a living stereo image in mono; you can hear space as surely as you hear swing. By some magic, they are able to recreate this tone live.
Frog & Henry (2023) gathers sessions from England, Italy, and Zurich. The Zurich dates feature Ewan Bleach and Laurin Habert on reeds, George Aschmann and Coleman Akin on violins, Joplin Parnell on piano, Ryan Baer on guitar, Maxwell Poulos on tenor banjo, and Dave Neigh on tuba. Some other sessions leave out one or another, while two tracks feature Colin Good on piano, and one session substitutes Jack Butler on tuba instead of Dave Neigh, while adding Joe Santoni on trumpet. The twelve tracks total a healthy forty minutes.
The album opens with “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,” the 1930 Joe Burke–Al Dubin number made famous by Joe Venuti’s orchestra. Their version was cut live to a Nagra III reel-to-reel in Zurich, a single Shure SM58 microphone suspended six feet high. The description on Bandcamp reads like a dance diagram: guitar here, banjo there, Ewan ducking under violins to sing, but what matters is how that intimacy translates. The track sounds as if the band were playing a mint record through my own Victrola.
More remarkable still is “Muñeca Sin Alma,” a Mexican waltz by Isaías Salmerón Pastenes, learned from a video of fiddler Juan Reynoso and re-imagined with four-part string harmony. It’s proof of how far their ear travels. I found a video of them performing this title in suits in a more formal, possibly classical, setting; by the end the crowd is clapping along as if part of the band, enthralled. On the album the title is followed by another highlight, “Irish Black Bottom,” reviving a 1920s novelty tune with trumpet and tuba. The performance is full of gleeful humor as well as beauty. “Love Found You for Me,” with pianist Colin Good, is a forgotten dance-band gem that sounds newly sincere in their hands, with playful interplay, especially from the strings. They describe themselves as a “Brass and String Band.” Based in Europe, these aren’t Appalachian strings but more like the dancing accompaniment you might have heard in a Manhattan lobster palace c. 1915.
While many of the artists we cover have a “timeless” sound, the period of that timelessness differs. Frog & Henry’s 2023 release might be the one I’d turn to when showing someone how a waltzing, cusp-of-jazz style gives the sense of the late teens or a sweeter band of the twenties, even if the song selections often come from the more robustly sweet 1930s, and the intense interplay between the musicians is truly of the jazz era. Ewan Bleach wrote the closer, “Living Room Stomp,” a rich tapestry of a tune that highlights the scale of musicianship in the band. He has written several originals for the band, or at the least the band has played several of his excellent originals.
Where 2023 sprawls like an archival set, Again! trims the fat. It’s their first album with an actual title, rather than a year or place name, and at just over twenty minutes it feels deliberate, almost curated. The European café sensibility that occasionally surfaced before now takes center stage. Violins and clarinets intertwine; sweetness replaces swagger. It isn’t jazz manouche so much as popular music with chamber grace, the sort of melodicism that would have filled a continental ballroom in 1935. The lineup includes many of the above musicians but on seven of eight tracks, Jack Butler replacing Dave Neigh on tuba.
The standout track, “Cottage in the Clouds,” comes from Bob Nolan of Sons of the Pioneers fame (1941). Frog & Henry turn this Western ballad into a dream sequence: double violins, three-part harmony, and Ewan Bleach somehow playing two clarinets at once. It’s equal parts experiment and time travel; it transports the tune itself back to Frog & Henry’s own timeless space.
My favorite of the two albums, being a simple man, is “Coffee in the Morning.” It feels like the heart of Again!, unhurried, charmingly domestic, and perfectly captured by their low-tech setup. The song’s 1930s optimism, is where the vocal numbers truly excell for Frog and Henry. You can hear the grin behind the horns. It’s the sort of music I hear on Bryan Wright’s Shellac Stack immediately before heading to eBay. My all time favorite of theirs is Al Bowlly’s “In My Little Red Book”; no one else is playing tunes like that today.
“Peor Es Nada,” from a 1932 Mexican trio recording, brings their largest ensemble yet, eight musicians surrounding that solitary mic in Zurich, and the resulting lushness justifies the exclamation point in the album’s title. It’s one of two Spanish tunes on the album, so in 2023–24 they must have been exploring that deep vein. A succession of Spanish dances has swept the States, and presumably Europe, since the dawn of recorded music, if not before, and peppered the Jazz Age.
Across both albums you hear the same unpretentious mission: to restore the recorded past not by imitating it but by re-entering it. They aren’t after scratchy nostalgia; they’re showing how that earlier recording logic still holds. This is music that remembers how to feel rather than simply emote, played skillfully with earnestness and appreciation.
If you want to know what traditional jazz can still become, explore Frog and Henry. For under $100 you can own their complete digital works, seven albums that trace their growth while also reflecting a remarkably consistent aural mission. Tex Wyndham said in a column that the Black Eagles were unique enough to start a distinct jazz style of their own, only lacking the imitators needed to bridge it from a personal style to a genre style. Frog and Henry are that kind of singular. They sound like nothing after 1940, and not quite like anything before it. If our music has a future, I believe it must carry a bit of Frog and Henry’s humanity. They deserve a much bigger audience.
Joe Bebco is the Associate Editor of The Syncopated Times and Webmaster of SyncopatedTimes.com
