Anne Linders won’t take credit for revitalizing the traditional jazz scenes in the two towns she has called home this past decade. Was it just coincidence that after she arrived in St Louis in 2016, and after she moved to Boston in 2020, hot jazz bands started “popping up all over the place”? Or did she add some serious heat to fan the hot jazz flames in each city? The answer to that question lies in a closer examination of this young band leader, her musical journey (one that includes a pivotal excursion on a sailboat down the Mississippi River), and the evolution of her band, Annie and the Fur Trappers.
A Solid Background: Big Band and Modern Jazz
Anyone who doubts the value of a quality public school music program need only to picture a class of fifth graders, lining up to try out the various instruments available for them to take lessons, and then imagine what it takes to hold the interest of a ten year old long enough to push through the inevitable squeaks and squawks so that they begin to feel like a musician. This author recalls the sounds coming from his brass instrument of choice and his subsequent short-lived foray into band music, said ephemerality due not only to cringing parents but to a minimally supported music program where playing a band or orchestral instrument was an exception not the norm. Not so with the music instruction in the St Louis suburb of Maryland Heights, Missouri, where Anne selected the trumpet, simply because, “I could make the best sound on that one”. By middle school she was playing in a big band. “I took my first improvised solo in seventh grade”, Annie told me. She was in two big bands in high school, playing trumpet in the top band and trombone in another.
Annie said that her high school band instructor, trombonist Denny McFarland, made the school bands sound hip. “He taught me how to play in the pocket”, recalled Annie, “which is something really hard to teach.” At the time, Annie’s school bands were playing off Basie charts, and her attention was on Basie, Miles Davis, and other more contemporary composers and players.
Annie majored in music and music education at University of Missouri at Columbia. Her jazz journey at “Mizzou” skewed toward the modern. She listened to Mingus, and described the university’s big band as playing off “some really out there charts”. She learned how to play in mixed meters (a skill which she still utilizes in a “genre-bending” sextet called the Velvet Dirtmunchers). The Mizzou big band recorded with some well-known professionals, including vibraphonist Mike Mainieri and trombonist Robin Eubanks. (Links to those recordings are here: Hidden Agenda, Tunnel Vision, Vertigo)
At the university, she knew she was destined to become a professional musician, and even considered dropping out to start playing for pay. At her parent’s insistence, she stayed and got her degree, which provided her with a music teaching certificate. In hindsight, Anne says that sticking with the music education program was an asset because, like many other professional musicians, she still teaches in order to supplement her income from performance.
Delta Bound, and a Journey Back in Musical Time
After graduating, Annie first moved to Texas. She played in Kaboma!, what she describes as a “multi-genre” band, playing cumbia, jam band music and “other really weird stuff”. (A link to Kabomia! Recording: Spring Loaded) As she was planning a return to St Louis, she went on a journey that put her musical journey on a new tack, one in which, she recounts, “I found the music”.
“A couple of friends of mine were sailing down the Mississippi River and I kind of jumped on their ship with my trumpet. My friend Ali Dineen brought an accordion on the sailboat and taught me the tune ‘Delta Bound’. That tune, other songs we played on the trip, and that trip itself brought me back to trad jazz.”
(photo courtesy Annie and the Fur Trappers; via Facebook)
Back to St. Louis
“When I moved back to St Louis I joined a brass band called the Saint Boogie Brass Band.” Anne recalls. “They were playing New Orleans brass band tradition. The tuba player and a couple of other band members were from New Orleans, and they had come up after Katrina.” Anne reported that playing with Saint Boogie influenced her “over-arching musical spectrum”, because the NOLA brass band style is connected to trad jazz, but also “its own thing”. They taught me a lot about how to play the music and the feel of that New Orleans brass band style. And that, of course, contributes to what I’m doing now.”
Anne sought out traditional jazz bands in the area. The most prominent band at the time was (and still is) Miss Jubilee. She started playing with them occasionally, and frequented the shows of a newer band called the Gaslight Squares. She found both these bands inspirational, but soon realized that subbing in established bands wasn’t going to give her enough playing time. “If I wanted to be booked more often I had to start my own band.”
Anne’s vision was to start a band similar to Tuba Skinny, and she started to assemble some musicians to mirror their instrumentation. A friend recommended a trombonist, someone else suggested a washboard player, and soon she had most of the players she was looking for. She had trouble finding a banjo player, but convinced TJ Müller, the bandleader of Gaslight Squares, to play banjo in her band until she could find her permanent banjo player, Bryan Cool. “I gathered everyone together, and it kind of clicked”, she said. Soon, the availability of stellar players, and the reality that to have a six to eight piece band demanded some flexibility because of the difficulty of coordinating schedules, she augmented her intended instrumentation by adding a saxophonist and eventually a pianist.
“I’m in St Louis, I had just graduated, starting the band, and I’m teaching music in elementary schools in two different really tough school districts. It was the beginning of what I would describe as the rebirth of traditional jazz in St Louis. There was a big dance scene there. We had Miss Jubilee, the Gaslight Squares, and then all of a sudden all these other trad bands started popping up. My band has its first residency, at a bar called San Loo on Monday nights. We had a group of older folks show up each week bringing a whole picnic of food into the bar in those very early days. When we first started we were playing a lot of gigs for little to no money. We slowly started to build up a presence, and then started getting other residencies. We had one at Yaqui’s on Cherokee, which quickly became a hub of traditional jazz. They had bands every night of the week and a real piano! We also had a residency at the Thaxton Speakeasy in downtown St Louis. It was a real speakeasy: you had to go through a sketchy alleyway, knock on a door and tell them a password to get in. Our gigs there were late-night, so we had a younger, different crowd.”
The name of her band – Annie and the Fur Trappers – was the product of some after-hours brainstorming with her housemates. “I lived in this big old house in St Louis – they called it the Humphrey House because it was on Humphrey Street. It was me and a lot of young professionals, four or five people. They sometimes had parties. I’m starting this band and don’t really have a name yet. And then a friend just came up with ‘Annie and the Fur Trappers’. It kind of stuck. It was a nod to the founders of St Louis – more like fur traders than fur trappers, And there is sexual innuendo as well – so you have those two things working together.”
The band’s first album, Delta Bound, was a professionally recorded but fully home-produced homage to the trip that helped steer Annie toward traditional jazz. Annie recalls how band members, for pizza and beer, formed an assembly line to burn CD’s, hand-print CD jackets from a linocut she had made, and stuff in liner notes. She found that process arduous enough that she squirreled away enough funds so that “never again” would she have to have the band put the CD packets together. By the time her second recording, Musket Ramble, was ready for production, she had enough money set aside to have CD’s and vinyl produced professionally.
The Soft Center
If Annie’s tale were a sandwich cookie with St Louis on the bottom and Boston on the top, the soft center would be what happened in 2020.
Everything for Annie and the Fur Trappers had started to ramp up, so much so that Annie was able to quit her teaching job in 2018. The band started to tour, playing dances around the country. The first printing of Muskrat Ramble sold out, and a second printing was in the works.
Finally, she was able to support herself by playing music.
Then the pandemic hit, and everything collapsed. But not completely.
Through gumption and creativity, Annie and the St. Louis traditional jazz community hobbled along. Annie applied for grants and any money that was available, but more immediately, she started to livestream solo performances from her porch, playing guitar, which at least kept her playing (and, she admits, helped her guitar playing improve!). Yaqui’s held regular outdoor block parties so that Annie’s band and other bands in their regular rotation could continue to play to audiences scattered about in lawn chairs at the prescribed safe distance from each other.
The Road to Boston
As Annie is telling me her tale, I’m thinking: “Here she is, describing a vibrant traditional jazz scene in St Louis, and a musical community determined to “keep going” during the pandemic. Why would she pick up and move?”
As the song goes, “It must be love”.
Annie met and fell in love with Bailey while in St Louis, and then Riley was accepted to a Phd program at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, right outside of Boston. “My career had somewhat shut down anyway, so I thought, ‘what better time to move?’” So Annie and her girlfriend packed up and moved to Medford. Annie, the only northern transplant from the original Annie and the Fur Trappers, had to reestablish herself and her band.
When Annie first arrived, she sold bikes on-line to make ends meet, and joined JP Honk – an activist street band across town in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. This helped her “keep her chops up” and gave her an outdoor, and thus “pandemic-safe” opportunity to play and connect with other musicians. In this band, she met Matt Morin, a clarinetist who showed her around the trad jazz scene in Boston. “After I started getting gigs of my own, the drive to Jamaica Plan started to feel longer and longer.”
Luckily for Annie, the New England iteration of the pandemic shutdown left a lot of traditional jazz musicians looking for work. She met guitar-banjo player Dave McMillan, a veteran of the Riverboat Jazz Band, clarinetist Craig Ball from the White Heat Swing Orchestra, and bassist Matthew Berlin, playing on the street in Harvard Square with an ad-hoc band called the Dixie Cookbook. “I started to sit in with them, and then began to get calls to play with them on the street. I was searching for musicians, and I thought ‘this is great!’ . She soon met clarinetist John Clark (band leader of the Wolverine Jazz Band) and Dan Gabel (a professor of music and leader of numerous big bands). She met drummer and washboard player Rob Rudin through Matthew Berlin. “Lucky for me that a lot of talented, dedicated musicians weren’t busy with their own bands because of the pandemic. That’s why they were playing with me.”
Some of these musicians became the original members of the reconstituted Annie and the Fur Trappers.
“I knew if I was putting together a band I’d have to pay them. So I did a couple of things to get the band going. I had some extra money in my band fund (from St Louis), so I would pay them to come over and do a livestream concert on my back porch, hopefully covering my costs through on-line donations. I had several thousand followers on social media by then.”
Annie made her third recording, Remember the Charleston, with her reassembled Fur Trappers in the midst of the pandemic. She recalls that the sound engineer was strict about wearing masks and how many people could be in the studio at once, which made the recording process a challenge.
Post-Pandemic Boston: Trad Jazz Bands Popping Up All Over
When the pandemic started to wind down and things started to open up again, Annie credits an innovative City of Boston program for helping to resuscitate traditional jazz in the area. BID – the Boston Improvement District – had a list of 40 or so trad jazz musicians. “They were paying people to stroll around in quartets in the heart of the Downtown business district. That provided a regular gig for these musicians that helped sustain them for a couple of years. It functioned somewhat like a school of trad jazz.
St Louis had been more blues focused. There, I met and played with blues musicians like Bob Case, who had been playing for decades, and younger musicians like Ethan Leinwand of the Bottle Snakes. Blues and jug band standards made their way into the trad jazz repertoire. Here, in Boston, I learned even more songs – I really expanded my traditional jazz repertoire.”
Her participation in the BID program introduced her to a lot of musicians, and out of it emerged several new traditional jazz groups. Josiah Reibstein, who was the director of the BID program, went on to assemble his band the Hub Tones. Another band, The Smack Dabs, popped up around the same time. Of course, Boston attracts young world-class musicians through the Berklee College of Music, and some of them linger after graduation. ColeScott Rubin started a band with Berklee classmates called The Garden of Joy, and began performing as The Rubin brothers with his brother A.J. John Lindsay started an early jazz big band.
And Annie’s founding of a traditional jazz festival didn’t hurt the post-pandemic recovery.
Sometime in 2023, she was biking past a small park in Medford on the Mystic River on a route she travelled with some frequency, past the appealing little music shell that acts as its centerpiece, and thought, not for the first time, “I really should see how much it would cost to rent that place.” Finally, she detoured to the town hall, and discovered that it was just a matter of filling out an application and paying the whopping sum of $40. That was the start of the Medford Jazz Festival. Annie assembled a lineup of eight bands who performed over two days on a blazing hot weekend in August of that year. The musicians in these bands, all friends of Annie who she had played with since moving to Boston, agreed to pay for tips. The lineup included veteran bands like the Wolverine Jazz Band, and bands that assembled themselves just for the festival. Support from a non-profit partner, the Labyrinth Choir, and grant monies provided money to pay bands in the festival’s second year, while keeping the outdoor festival free to the public. In recognition of the wider impact of the festival, it has now been rebranded as the Bay Sate Hot Jazz Festival, or BASH Festival, and will be held on August 23 and 24 this year.
In general, Annie says that the live music scene in Boston has been challenging. Many Boston venues closed during the pandemic. Unlike in St Louis, where restaurants and bars paid bands well and most often did the promotion for performances, Annie found that in Boston performers had to pay venues to play, or guarantee a minimum from cover charges at the door. “It’s tough to make a living. There aren’t too many places that say “come play for this amount”. It creates more work for the band leader, as we are tasked with paying for posters, advertising and booking. You stand to lose money here. There are certain venues where I almost always lose money, but the exposure provided at these gigs make the loss worth it in the long run.”
Four years later, the reconstituted Annie and the Fur Trappers are finding themselves very busy indeed. “The swing dance scene is huge here, and the dancers are really supportive. It has become a niche for our band. The fact that Boston is close to other New England cities means we can drive around and play a lot more gigs.”. They now have a monthly residency at The Burren, a bar in the “hip” Davis Square area of Somerville, MA. And although the band’s tuba-less, bass-cemented Northern iteration has created a feel that perhaps strayed a bit from Annie’s original vision, the band’s unique take on traditional jazz is in high demand.
Annie and her band are still recording. Raucous Bacchus, a Mardis Gras-themed EP was released in February. It’s only available as a download with a purchase of a bottle of hot sauce specially created for the band by @barfhaus in Alabama. She appears on a soon-to-be-released recording with Jim Kweskin and Matthew Berlin called Doing Things Right. A Halloween EP is in the works.
The Leader of the Band
“One of the things I wanted to do as a band leader was to have musicians who knew the music. I was tired of teaching people the music: I wanted them to just know it. That’s why I ended up with who I’m playing with now. They do their homework, and a lot of them just know the songs. They are seasoned players – who made it easy for me to be a band leader.”
But leading a band is not without its challenges, especially if the leader is the only woman, and the youngest in the band.
“Anytime anyone messed something up I’d get emails: ‘Hey, you should really look at this.’ If there was a mistake in the lyrics, or they had an opinion about the feel of a song, they’d point it out. I never got that from my band members in St Louis. They were just happy to play! Finally I said, ‘You have to stop sending me these critical emails, it’s making it not fun’. So I pretty much put an end to it. I still get some, though! Seriously, as the leader it’s ultimately my choice and the band has to follow what I say. And that’s the cool thing: a lot of these guys already have their own bands. If they don’t like my decisions, they can play the piece as they like it in their own bands.”
She has also had to adapt to the communication preferences of her older bandmates. “I had a whole system of letting band members know the details of upcoming gigs using private chats on social media, but the band flat out refused to comply with it. It was really frustrating, but I had to shift to using email.”
Final Thoughts
So, did Annie happen to be in the right places at the right time? Or did her actions as a musician, festival organizer, teacher, and band leader help catalyze and fuel her trad jazz communities? Maybe the growing number of musicians she plays with and her expanding fan base of watchers, listeners, and dancers can answer that question as the future for Annie and the Fur Trappers unfolds.
Visit author, artist, and musician Michael Buonaiuto online at thejugnut.com
