My bassist-tubist friend Brian Nalepka put me wise to the quintet Miss Maybell and the Jazz Age Artistes and suggested they’d be a good fit at the Tri-State Jazz Society. Brian is part of the group’s rhythm section. Actually, I had heard of this band but had not seen them in person until I hired them at TSJS a little over a year ago. But knowing their lineup I knew I didn’t need an audition before offering them a gig. Brian was right; the group was a big hit, and I’m planning to re-book them in the next year or two. The leader, Miss Maybell (Lauren Sansaricq) plays banjo, guitar, a customized washboard, and sings. And her voice is perfect for the type of music they play. Her husband Charlie Judkins is on piano, Dan Levinson handles the reeds, and Andy Stein is on violin. Brian sometimes joins Lauren on vocals.
I have subsequently seen Lauren and Charlie as a duo at the West Coast Ragtime Festival in November and at the Yocum Institute for the Arts in West Lawn (Reading), PA a short time later. They were scheduled to play at the Central Pennsylvania Ragtime and American Music Festival in September, 2023, but just days before they both tested positive for Covid. I caught the quintet again right after Christmas at the Zinc Bar in Manhattan, one of the places in the city where they play on a somewhat regular basis.
This band occupies a specialized niche—obscure American popular music from the late 1800s through the 1920s. When they discover a number that’s never been recorded they work from the original sheet music. I felt the group could use some additional exposure, hence this interview with Lauren and Charlie.
Bill Hoffman: When and how did each of you discover the music you perform?
Charlie Judkins: Growing up in Brooklyn, my father was (and still is!) a collector of early jazz records who ran a Cajun restaurant with a jukebox featuring mostly records of various styles of New Orleans music. He took me to live jazz events regularly when I was young (such as performances at the Armstrong house in Corona and Lionel Hampton’s funeral) and also introduced me to Scott Joplin via the soundtrack to The Sting, as well as New York style hot jazz via the soundtracks to the Betty Boop and other 1930s cartoons he showed me.
Lauren Sansaricq: My grandmother on my mother’s side grew up in Hell’s Kitchen in a tenement house, and loved to play piano and sing old Tin Pan Alley songs. I never met my grandmother, unfortunately, but her taste in music influenced my mother and we always had great old music around the house. I also got exposed to early jazz from my music teacher Mr. Glatt at Hawthorne Valley School in Ghent, NY.
BH: How did you meet, and when?
LS: I first met Charlie at a jazz jam session in Brooklyn in the Fall of 2018. We immediately bonded over our mutual interest in old songs, Ragtime and Tin Pan Alley music. We started playing gigs together soon after that. And the rest is history!
BH: What are your musical backgrounds, or where did you learn your respective instruments?
CJ: My great-grandfather was a professional accordionist in Sicily in the 1930s, but other than him really no one in my family played music. Around age five, I wanted to learn saxophone but my mother told me I’d have to study piano for a few years before they’d consider buying me one. It wound up being a trick: they never bought me a sax and just kept me on piano all through my childhood! I never went to music school but studied privately with various jazz pianists, most significantly with Terry Waldo starting around 2008. For the past six years, I’ve been studying classical piano technique with Jeff Goldstein, a protege of the late virtuoso pianist David Saperton.
LS: I always loved to sing! Luckily, I went to Hawthorne Valley, a Waldorf school, which had a rich arts program. There, students were taught old folk songs, classical and Baroque music, and even Gregorian chants. I still continue to study with an amazing opera singer Amy Maples every week! I find this very helpful…
In terms of the instruments I play, I only learned to play them (in my rudimentary way) out of necessity to fill out the sound in the band.
BH: When you did form the Jazz Age Artistes, and what led you to decide what instrumentation to have?
LS: Our band was basically formed in 2018, around the time Charlie and I first met. We find that violin and reed instruments lend themselves favorably to Ragtime music. Andy Stein and Dan Levinson are our favorite violin and reed players to work with, and we’ve learned so much from having them in our band the past few years. Also we find Brian Nalepka to be a beloved collaborator, not just because of his great sound on the bass and tuba, but also for the wonderful harmony singing he does with me.
CJ: We are big fans of the vocal quartets of the ragtime era, and of Ragtime singer duos such as Campbell and Burr, and Collins and Harlan.
BH: Any future plans our readers should know about?
LS: We have a lot of exciting events on the horizon, such as our performance at Birdland on May 16th. Hopefully our latest album, which we recorded for Rivermont Records, will be available around that time.
Right now, we are working on our following record, which will be an album of unrecorded songs from the Ragtime and early Jazz era. We are avid sheet music collectors, and are constantly finding beautiful pieces in our collection that are obscure songs that have never been recorded to this day.
CJ: Artistically, we feel this is a wonderful opportunity to interpret these songs in a vintage style, while making them our own. We find that when you learn a song from a specific recording by a certain singer, it’s easy to fall back on imitation, whereas learning a song directly from the original sheet music, with no recordings to reference, can be a uniquely satisfying experience.
BH: Thank you both for the interview. I hope it’s put you on the radar of many future fans!
For information on upcoming shows and more, please visit www.missmaybell.com.
Bill Hoffman is a travel writer, an avid jazz fan and a supporter of musicians keeping traditional jazz alive in performance. He is the concert booker for the Tri-State Jazz Society in greater Philadelphia. Bill lives in Lancaster, PA. He is the author of Going Dutch: A Visitors Guide to the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, Unique and Unusual Places in the Mid-Atlantic Region, and The New York Bicycle Touring Guide. Bill lives in Lancaster, PA.
