about

Yamomanem  came together a couple of weeks after  Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.   I watched on TV as news trickled out of Nola, Some of the first words my oldest son ever spoke were "superdome broken" as he watched us glued to the TV looking for some sign of something or someone familiar, destroyed or intact, dead or alive.  Through a fresh perspective of Katrina; it occurred to me that there may not be much secondline, that maybe people would be so spread out into the country and maybe New Orleans wouldnt come back.  I recruited all the people I knew in the DC scene who did New Orleans music. Henning Hoehne helped a lot on clarinet playing monster leads.Brian Priebe with his west coast Style Dixie land chops and Megan on tenor orbiting the trad heavies with dreams of carribean sonny rollins. Brian Alpert is our main drummer - he likes to swing all kinds of ways,  and we are honored to have fellow New Orleans expats John Lowrie and Leon Alexander sit with us on secondlines and larger gigs.  We recently picked up the inimitable Joe Brotherton on trumpet- he's a DC bopster- but he's got gravel in his gut and can spit and growl good as gumbo.

 What we end up with is a repetoire rooted in the 20s and 30s  hot jazz styles. Some carribean creole stuff and we use electric guitars, funky congas. and like to play the secondline beats of the street too. Not really a brass band, not really a dixieland band. we like old new orleans music at the root of it all- but that tree has lots of branches. and we'll go out on a limb if we feel like it- besides happily for all of us- New Orleans is back and rolling, so we dont need to preserve anything - just spread it around to the button down. 

 Monty, Tuba.