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Our email address: crustyjazz@gmail.com
Crustacea Jazz Band has retired from active shows.
Below
There is
A
Brief Video Created in 2019
Displaying
Crustacea Jazz Band's Players
& Some of Their Performances
Crustacea Jazz Band played danceable and swinging tunes in the New Orleans jazz style, tunes popular between about 1900 and 1935 whose melodies are often still familiar.
San Luis Obispo audiences liked and responded to this music first because it is upbeat, happy, humorous and romantic; and second because the creative act is happening right in front of the audience: Right Here, Right NOW!
In this “old fashioned” Jazz, the players improvise and develop variations around a familiar melody line and unique variations result.
Over a hundred years ago this “small band improvised jazz style” originated in New Orleans. Throughout the twentieth century this music worked its way up the rivers to Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago, and was spread by great players to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and to all the towns in between.
Crustacea’s repertoire showcased this original music, this "Music of America," as well as rags and gospel music, blues and early pop tunes--all played in the New Orleans jazz style.
There are bands playing this legacy
of music all over the United States, as well as in England, Holland, France,
Japan and elsewhere. "What matters is not the receptacle in which
we keep our heritage but the desire we feel to take it out and enjoy it."
A Brief Video:
Crustacea Jazz Band's Players
& Some of Their Performances
This picture and video present the players who were in the band as it was in the fall of 2019. Over time some players leave and new players come into the band. They all shared the band's love of playing this traditional jazz that is the unique music of America.
Here are a few recordings of
the band.
Listen by clicking on the title.
1. Bei Mir Bist Du Schon
2. Midnight in Moscow
3. Shim-me-sha-wabble
4. Si tu vois ma mere
5. The Fish Vendor
Our last performance was for a 70th Wedding Anniversary at the Madonna Inn in November 2023. Not a bad way to end our 14 year career.
A Short History of the Band
We were essentially a local jazz band playing the early music of America. Since 2009 we performed at over 400 celebrations, parties, benefits, and weddings.
As our band has become known we have played birthday parties (among others, the 50th, 80th, 90th, 99th, and in July 2016 we played a 100th birthday party), anniversaries (several 50th, one 70th), ten wedding parties, and several winery shows and benefits.
We were a familiar band to the residents at Casa de Flores and Bayside Care Center and at The Villages and at The Manse.
Since 2011 we played multiple times for the SLO Tweed Ride (fun folks with old-fashioned bicycles and dress--look them up!).
We also played multiple times for both the Strawberry Festival and the Cayucos Senior's Luncheons. The Santa Maria Model A Ford Car Club hired us because we play the music that was popular in the era of the early automobiles.
Our
players all live in San Luis Obispo County.
*******
I was entertained by this brief observation about the pleasures of jazz. The thoughts are those of an aristocratic Count who is required by a Russian revolutionary tribunal to live the rest of his life inside the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. It's a charming novel.
"On the platform in the opposite corner of the bar, the jazz ensemble was playing a perky little tune. Admittedly, when the Count had first encountered jazz, he hadn’t much of an affinity for it. He had been raised to appreciate music of sentiment and nuance, music that rewarded patience and attention with crescendos and diminuendos, allegros and adagios artfully arranged over four whole movements—not a fistful of notes crammed higgledy-piggledy into thirty measures.
And yet . . .
And yet, the art form had grown on him. Like the American correspondents, jazz seemed a naturally gregarious force—one that was a little unruly and prone to say the first thing that popped into its head, but generally of good humor and friendly intent. In addition, it seemed decidedly unconcerned with where it had been or where it was going—exhibiting somehow simultaneously the confidence of the master and the inexperience of the apprentice. Was there any wonder that such an art had failed to originate in Europe?"
Towles, Amor. A Gentleman in Moscow