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Tuba Skinny is an American street band based in New Orleans, Louisiana, known for their performances of early jazz, ragtime, and blues music of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to many pre-revival and revival traditional bands, the ensemble seeks to imitate the sound of jazz in the days before became widely available. The band's instrumentation includes cornet, clarinet, trombone, tuba, tenor banjo, guitar, frottoir, and vocals. As a busking, the group has performed on city streets and musical festivals around the world, including Mexico, Sweden, Australia, Italy, France, Switzerland, and Spain.
Coalescing in 2009 after many years in different New Orleans street bands, Tuba Skinny quickly gained a strong following on YouTube, where hundreds of fan-recorded videos attracted substantial viewership in multiple languages. Although the band does not maintain an official YouTube channel, its street performances are widely shared by fans. Critics describe the band's fan base as possessing a "lighthearted, fun, flapper vibe," a reflection of the Jazz Age time period evoked by their music.
Over the next decade and a half after their formation, Tuba Skinny grew in popularity, releasing over a dozen albums, globally touring, and attracting high-profile fans such as R. Crumb, Amanda Palmer, and Neil Gaiman. Their albums have garnered several awards, and publications such as OffBeat and The Syncopated Times rank them among the leading traditional jazz bands active today. Despite international acclaim and paid appearances at jazz festivals, Tuba Skinny continues to perform on the streets of New Orleans and elsewhere in order to maintain their intimate connection with audiences.
None of the band is native to the city. Orchestrator and cornetist, Shaye Cohn, hails from Boston. She is the granddaughter of jazz saxophonist Al Cohn. Trombonist Barnabus Jones is a . Todd Burdick, the eponymous tuba of Tuba Skinny who also plays the banjo and guitar, is a Chicagoan. Guitarist Max Bien-Kahn is from San Francisco. Vocalist and bass drummer, Erika Lewis, is from New York's Hudson River Valley and resides in Tennessee. Clarinetist Craig Flory and frottoirist Robin Rapuzzi are both from Seattle.
During this period, Burdick played the banjo, Cohn played the accordion, Jones played the fiddle, and Kiowa Wells played the guitar. Alynda Segarra, the future band leader of Hurray for the Riff Raff, played the mini-washboard. Their tramp band played Cajun music, Gypsy style, and Balkan music, as well as Old-time music in the style of the Avett Brothers, Uncle Earl, and Old Crow Medicine Show. A surviving 2005 recording of their Balkan music of "You Are My Sunshine" exemplifies the band's inchoate style during this period.
At the time, publications described the band as a motley collection of New Orleans street people belonging to "a subculture of Freighthopping, outdoor-living ." Its members were known to "Tramp, look for Dumpster diving, indulge themselves with excessive drinking and drugs and play great music." The band often undertook Freighthopping as far away as the East Coast and West Coast. In February 2007, a photo-essay by James Heil chronicling the hardscrabble Vagrancy band titled The Ballad of the Hobo appeared in Time magazine.
While playing with the Dead Man Street Orchestra, the seeds for a brass band began to germinate in the minds of Cohn, Jones, and others. "We had this talk one day when we were with Dead Man Street Orchestra," recalled Barnabus Jones, "I remember Shaye said, 'Wouldn't it be great if one day we had a brass band?'" When the Dead Man Street Orchestra dissolved, Cohn, Jones, Burdick, Wells, Segarra, and other instrumentalists joined the Loose Marbles, another busking ensemble led by trumpeter Ben Polcer and clarinetist Michael Magro.
Cohn initially played jazz piano with the Loose Marbles, reflecting her training as a classical pianist. After training for twelve years in classical piano, she "burned out" due to "many, many hours practicing in a tiny rehearsal room going over the same four measures again and again." One day in New Orleans, while residing in a dilapidated building strewn with an assortment of abandoned instruments, Cohn salvaged a flood-damaged "swamp trumpet" and became a devotee of the horn. "Barnabus Jones and I were trying to figure out scales on the trumpet together, and it was just so fun. I just got really hooked," Cohn recalled. "I had never played a wind instrument before and it just felt really powerful, so I got to play second trumpet with the, sometimes they'd invite me to play with them."
Todd Burdick, the band's tuba player, likewise began his musical journey on other instruments. He played punk rock and experimental music as a percussionist, and he learned to play the banjo, guitar, and other instruments by busking with the ensemble. "It was like learning from the ground up with them," Burdick stated. Over time, as various street musicians rolled in and out of the Loose Marbles, new ensembles formed such as Alyenda Seguerra's Hurray for the Riff Raff, Meschiya Lake's Little Big Horns and—eventually—Tuba Skinny.
The band acquired their name by happenstance due to a sarcastic remark from a passerby. Whenever the band's slender sousaphone player, Todd Burdick, cycled with his instrument down a street in Faubourg Marigny, a random heckler shouted: "Hey, look, it's Tuba Skinny!" This sarcastic remark referenced Anthony Lacen, a Jackson Square musician and local folk hero who fought for the rights of street musicians and died in 2004. Burdick recounted this strange recurrent event to his fellow bandmates. The band decided to run with the name and christened themselves, "Tuba Skinny." Other than the name, the band has neither official ties to Tuba Fats nor named themselves in his honor.
Tuba Skinny soon became a popular ensemble in the traditional jazz haunts of New Orleans due to their historical fidelity to the raucous 1920s jazz, an era often overlooked in the city's music scene at the time. Unlike revival or pre-revival bands, they sought to imitate the sound of jazz in the days before became widely available. They initially drew upon the Loose Marbles' repertoire but, as time passed, they began resurrecting forgotten tunes. This included works by "Louis Armstrong's Hot 5 and Hot 7, Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers, Bunk Johnson, George Lewis, Jim Robinson, the Mississippi Sheiks, Sam Morgan's Jazz Band, Johnny Dodds and Baby Dodds, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, the Memphis Jug Band, King Oliver, Bessie Smith" and others.
After recording their first eponymous album, Tuba Skinny began globally touring in Summer 2009 when they flew to France. An acquaintance invited the band to the coastal town of Meschers-sur-Gironde, in the southwestern region of the country, where they played music in the streets and at . They purchased used bicycles in Meschers and embarked on a bicycle tour visiting the along the southwest coast of France down to Spain. They camped overnight to reduce expenses.
While touring the globe, the band continued their busking tradition. They busked in Hobart, Tasmania, where they recorded their fifth album Pyramid Strut in 2013, and in Town square throughout mainland Europe such as France, Italy, and Spain. Their least pleasant experience occurred while busking at a flea market in San Severo, Italy, where not a single passerby stopped to listen. The band also busked across the United States. To do so, they squeezed their eight members, primary instruments, secondary instruments, and several pets—including Barnabus' pet dog Tupelo—into a six-seat van.
Over the next several years, Tuba Skinny released further albums containing more than a hundred tracks, and several members released albums in other genres. In September 2016, Erika Lewis and Shaye Cohn released a Country music Waiting For Stars for their other band, The Lonesome Doves. Described as "original country from Chattanooga by way of New Orleans," the album consisted entirely of songs composed by Lewis. On the album, both Cohn and Lewis sang vocals, with Lewis playing the guitar and Cohn playing the fiddle.
In April 2019, the peripatetic band released their tenth album Some Kind-a-Shake recorded at The Living Room Studio in New Orleans and featuring nine instrumentalists. In addition to traditional jazz and blues songs, the album featured two original compositions, "Some Kind-a-Shake" by Cohn, and "Berlin Rag" by clarinetist Ewan Bleach. The jazz-centric publication The Syncopated Times declared that the band's "tenth album, as unbelievable as this will sound, is their best." The publication observed that Tuba Skinny's "method is to rehearse on the street, fine tune in performance, and nail it in the studio." Critics praised the album's throwback emphasis on an ensemble sound rather than solos.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the band's videos became popular among international viewers. In November 2020, The New York Times profiled an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, Simon Gronowski, enduring the quarantine in Belgium. He mentioned his desire to play with the band. As an 11-year-old boy, Gronowski jumped off a Holocaust trains headed to Auschwitz where his mother and sister perished. Seeking a hopeful outlook towards life, Gronowski embraced hot jazz as an art form that inspires happiness and brings people together. Several months later, the band arranged for a virtual collaboration with Gronowski accompanying them on piano.
In more recent years, the band garnered more official recognition. In 2022, the Jazz Foundation of America presented the band on a weekly basis at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. That same year, the ensemble won an Arhoolie Award, a citation given to American bands that "document, preserve, present, and disseminate authentic traditional and regional vernacular music." The Arhoolie Foundation cited the New Orleans-based band "as one of the most exciting traditional jazz groups playing today. Mixing well-known standards with original compositions and outstanding interpretations of rhythm and blues, Tuba Skinny has crowds moving wherever they play." Despite their international acclaim and paid appearances at jazz festivals, the band continues to perform on city streets worldwide in order to maintain their intimate connection with audiences.
The band's repertoire tends to favor singers and composers such as Victoria Spivey, Jelly Roll Morton, Lucille Bogan, Memphis Minnie, Jabbo Smith, Jimmie Rodgers, Georgia White, Skip James, Merline Johnson, Ma Rainey, Hattie Hart, Blind Blake and Clara Smith. Some of the bands whose material Tuba Skinny interpreted in its own manner are the Memphis Jug Band, the Dixieland Jug Blowers and the Mississippi Mud Steppers.
While hailed as outstanding performers of traditional jazz, Tuba Skinny have not restricted their selection of material to the traditional repertoire as they refuse to be circumscribed by rigid genres. Although the ensemble began playing predominantly early jazz, they transitioned over the years towards a more eclectic mix of string band music, jug band music, country blues, and ragtime. They briefly incorporated folk-country songs and New Orleans rhythm and blues into their performances before returning to their early jazz roots.
| + !Year !Category !Work nominated !Result !Ref. | ||||
| 2018 | Best Traditional Jazz Album | Nigel's Dream | ||
| 2019 | Best Traditional Jazz Album | Some Kind-A-Shake | ||
| 2021-22 | Best Traditional Jazz Album | Let's Get Happy Together (with Maria Muldaur) | ||
| 2023 | Best Traditional Jazz Album | Hot Town |
Part-time members include:
Former part-time members include:
Tuba Skinny also appears in:
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