Artist:      Maria Muldaur with Tuba Skinn

Album:     Let’s Get Happy Together

Label:     Stony Plain

Release Date:     5.7.2021

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Of all the places across this great country known for unique and exhilarating music, none have the vast riches of the Pelican State. Rollicking blues, spicy and swampy Cajun and zydeco, and raw rock ‘n’ roll—every note cheerful and rambunctious. And nothing beats jazz from its New Orleans birthplace. It’s like fertilizer for the soul, especially when a gifted lady stands front and center, testifying. Happiness just happens, no matter the tone.

Perhaps still best known for her wistful 1973 hit “Midnight at the Oasis,” Maria Muldaur began her career as a 21 year-old in a jug band. She’s cut 43 albums in a variety of roots music styles since, several of them steeped in the sounds of Louisiana. Her 2007 album Naughty Bawdy & Blue, and 2018’s Don’t You Feel My Leg: The Naughty, Bawdy Blues of Blue Lu Barker, feature true-to-form interpretations of vintage jazz and blues. Muldaur astutely researches her music, and it shows. Let’s Get Happy Together is her most authentic presentation in this particular vein by virtue of its songs, and definitely because of Tuba Skinny.

The seeds of what would become Tuba Skinny were sown in 2003. Musicians who’d landed in New Orleans from all corners of America with the sole purpose of playing depression-era jazz, blues, ragtime, and spirituals, found each other, and started playing in the streets. They’re eight pieces strong here (coronet, tuba, trombone, 6-string banjo, clarinet, guitar, and washboard), and world-renowned. Muldaur heard one of their albums a few years back and was so riveted, she sought them out. For this, their first recorded collaboration, they went deep, choosing a set of excellent, eccentric 1920’s and 30’s-era tunes.

Arthur Sizemore’s “I Like You Best of All” sets the album to swinging. Horns toot through dips and slides that are smooth as silk in tempo, yet seem fragile, like burnt parchment. But they’re not. Muldaur’s natural grit and singular sassiness ground them solidly. Her voice, at age 77, remains the ideal instrument to convey this music. “Be Your Natural Self” skips along in vaudeville style, the band staying true to Frankie Jaxon’s lively rendition. Jaxon sang it sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman. Muldaur honors the sentiments expressed in the song with an encouraging performance in a surprising lilt, while Todd Burdick’s tuba provides the most profound of the audacious accents in it.

Zeroing in on any one of these players in any particular song is recommended. The individual parts certainly equal the sum, each succinctly but intensely expressing emotion as if a member of a troupe of actors on a stage in a skit. Irving Berlin’s “He Ain’t Got Rhythm,” played in the style of Billy Holiday’s version with Benny Goodman, may be the best example of that. In “Delta Bound,” notable for Ivy Anderson with the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s version, they beckon the blues, Muldaur “dreaming” with determination of getting back to Louisiana. “Swing You Sinners,” cut by the obscure Valaida Snow, offers sage advice for escaping predicaments many of us feel trapped in right now.

Therein lies one of the most important aspects of this album. These twelve pearls of cultural antiquity and striking melody ring with total relevance.

—Tom Clarke