Secret Six Jazz Band • Fireworks

The Secret Six Jazz Band, led by the ever-steady upright bassist John Joyce, returns with a sixth album in under four years. Fireworks is a sparkling follow-up to their highly praised Centennial Tribute to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Released last October, Fireworks returns to their roots, instead of Centennials’ focus on one set of early jazz recordings, it takes inspiration from music in the Crescent City right up through the revival, with nads to Joe Marsla in the ’40s and Paul Barbarin in the ’60s.

Following a template dating back to Joyce’s albums with the Smoking Time Jazz Club, the track information includes not just the composer credit but the band’s favorite classic cut of the title, often a major influence on their presentation of that title on the album. For example, track two says “Marie (I. Berlin) Louis Armstrong & the Mills Bros. (1940).” In their version, the boys in the band back washboardist Defne “Dizzy” Incirlioglu’s vocal with Mills Brothers-style harmony, but their instrumental interplay adds hotter, livelier action than the 1940 Decca record.

Vocals feature about every other track, with no one singing more than once, and everyone who does, so enchantingly, you wish they had. After hearing no vocals on the last album, this is a welcome return to form. The earlier Secret Six records had vocals on two thirds of tracks, and while they aren’t strictly needed for a good jazz jam, can sometimes even get in the way, done right they add and extra complexity. For example, Joyce’s vocal on “Mr. Jelly Lord” seems to fire up the whole band, even extending that heat into the next track, “London Cafe Blues,” and setting up an extended plateau of greatness towards the center of the album that continues with “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise.” Indeed, after a few solid openers, including heaters like “New Orleans Stomp,” “Mr. Jelly Lord” is the point where the album catches a groove that carries you through to the final notes.

An all-star New Orleans lineup led by John Joyce includes Zach Lange and Nathan Wolman trading trumpet lines, Craig Flory and Jory Woodis on clarinet, Haruka Kikuchi delivering robust Ory style trombone, Hunter Burgamy driving the rhythm on banjo, and Defne “Dizzy” Incirlioglu adding percussive sparkle on washboard. The only change from Centennial is the addition of Jory Woodis as a second clarinet, and Burgamy’s move from guitar to banjo, which James McClaskey held on the previous album. Woodis has been on three of the five previous releases, and the overall lineup is pretty stable considering how many pots New Orleans working musicians tend to have on the stove.

One band original, Zach Lange’s “Trumpet Slop Rag,” feels like it could’ve been plucked from the Halfway House dance hall in New Orleans around 1925, the polyphony giving both trumpets a chance to show off. Slop it is not. Other great tracks that highlight the skills of the band, and bring out the greatness of the source material, are “Working Man Blues,” “Reaching for the Moon,” and “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight.” For that last, the favorite version listed is not from 1923, or even 1963, but by the New Orleans Jazz Vipers in 2008! Those early post-Katrina years are now part of history.

While a quote from Wolman on the bandcamp page had me thinking this might be a Louis-centric album, and many titles do have an association with him, it is instead a Secret Six album, one of now a half dozen of them that would all make any top 40 list of 2020s New Orleans traditional jazz albums. All of these musicians were already among New Orlean’s best when the band formed, but with Fireworks, it feels like their unique voice is crystallizing. As a group they just keep getting better. All six records can be had for $67 on their Bandcamp page. Hours of top-tier trad jazz recorded during the post-Covid years, the Crescent City marches on.

Fireworks
Secret Six Jazz Band
secretsixjazzband.bandcamp.com