Over her 50-plus-year career, Maria Muldaur has worked with dozens of musical giants and geniuses, from Ry Cooder to Duke Robillard to Jerry Garcia. She has recorded with gospel greats the Chambers Brothers and sacred steel stars the Campbell Brothers.
Over the years, she has celebrated the music of New Orleans alongside musicians such as Dr. John, Duke Heitger, Tom Fischer, David Torkanowsky and Art and Charles Neville. And now she’s collaborating with the great Shaye Cohn and Tuba Skinny.
But how did she hook up with this devil-may-care Big Easy street band?
Well, a couple years ago, as she was shopping at her favorite clothing boutique in Woodstock, N.Y., Maria found herself mesmerized by the vintage jazz emanating from the store’s speakers.
“I thought, how cool is that the local radio station was playing this kind of music,” she remembers. The shop owner corrected her. It wasn’t the radio. The store was playing CDs by Tuba Skinny. A few of these young musicians originally hailed from the Woodstock area, the retailer explained. They now lived in New Orleans where they performed on the streets as well as at clubs and festivals there.
“Having studied, enjoyed and immersed myself in early blues, jazz and jug band music of the 1920s and ’30s all my musical life, I found it almost impossible to believe we were not listening to some classic old 78s from the e
