Welcome to Crescent City Discs
Welcome to our site. We are proud of the fact that we pay one of the highest returns to musicians for their cds. Our artists receive 87% of your purchase price, so when you buy a cd here, you are making a direct impact on the ongoing struggle to rebuild our city. Thanks for visiting, check out the audio players, the videos, and let us know what we can do to improve the experience for you.

New Orleans Jazz Vipers tore the roof off the suckah at DC Lindy Exchange
The New Orleans Jazz Vipers ripped it up with 2 shows for the DC Lindy Exchange in Glen Echo MD, on April 4th and 5th, including a great "Battle of the Bands" with Blue Crescent. Contact us for more info on how you could have the Vipers at your next swing/lindy dance party.

That CD was "Guano + Nitrates" from the Valparaiso Men's Chorus, featuring the Tin Men. It's an album of traditional shanties. But it is very different from other albums of traditional shanties. It is sung as if by a pub full of drunken rowdies … sung the way sailors would have sung, with no holds barred, cursing and swearing like … well … drunken sailors. The lyrics are often lewd, sometimes indecipherably (you may not know what they are saying exactly, but you can tell it is lewd).

There is a drunken lurchingness to the music, played with instruments usually not associated with shanties — sousaphone, trombone, washboard, and viola, along with guitar, accordion, and others, played Nawlins style. Their sound and rhythms just reek of boozy Bourbon Street. Appropriately the boisterous "Drunken Sailor" starts off. Other pieces are likewise high energy, but there's also the slow "I'm so drunk I can
hardly stand" sound in pieces like "So Early in the Morning", and the soft, serenading waltz sound in "Spanish Ladies".

There are odd juxtapositions. In "Blow the Man Down", done in staggering waltz-time, the sousaphone takes over for a sweet musical interlude between the rather raunchy verses. The sousaphone also gets front and center for an interlude in "All For Me Grog". It gets lost and off track with the melody however, almost causing a riot to break out, until it finally gets back on track.

In the liner notes, we are told "it was decided to assemble a large group of men for the purpose of making a recording of sea shanties … the
Mermaid Lounge was chosen as the site, due to it's proximity to recording equipment and alcohol. … Sometime around midnight we ran out of tape and liquor." The results are something quite unusual, quite
debauched, and quite a blast to sing along to. The sound is energetic, and loads of fun.

We welcome Olga to Crescent City Discs
Hailing from San Francisco of Austrian parentage, Olga is among the vanguard of new blues artists combining innovation with a deep sense of roots. Though listening to her soulful voice you'd swear no other soil but the Deep South's could have reared this woman, her hardy carnivorous appetite attests to the Austrian blood coursing through her veins!

"I've always connected with the blues," she explains, "especially classic and country blues." She learned early on the healing it brings, although initially the music's power held her at bay. "I was afraid of the emotions that listening to the blues brought out of me. I was afraid to feel them but once I let go of that, I discovered something that was comforting, soothing, and appealing to me on all kinds of levels!"

Olga now calls Memphis and New Orleans "homes". In addition to her extensive gigs producing local and nationally syndicated radio shows, she participated in Martin Scorcese's documentary on the blues with Jessie Mae, North Mississippi Allstars, T Model Ford, Otha Turner, Corey Harris and John Spencer Blues Explosion.

Linnzi Zaorski - Hot Wax and Whiskey
Independent
By David Lee Simmons / Offbeat

On this, her third release, retro torch singer Linnzi Zaorski appears to have realized if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Her ’30s-drenched vocals, all thin, vibrato and nasal, have become a fixture in the Frenchmen Street music scene that birthed such neo/trad-jazz ensembles as the New Orleans Jazz Vipers and Vavavoom. Three albums in, Zaorski’s familiar vocals have become even more familiar, and it’s a tough call on whether she should seek fresher ground because she’s so capable of doing what she does.

There’s a curious, methodical way in which Zaorski sings—like a comic playing a joke “straight”—that feels both fabricated and charming all at once. Sometimes she’ll swing that vibrato all the way through a phrase, and then she’ll almost flatten a lyric for effect, as a punctuation mark. Catching her live, you’re guaranteed a wardrobe straight out of Trashy Diva and a gardenia to nod to Billie Holiday and her sisters. Has it become all too predictable? Her song choices certainly have become that, but again, they may be predictable, but they’re thoroughly enjoyable, and there’s a “Hot Club” vibe every song out—particularly with “This Can’t Be Love,” in which the guitar and clarinet get ample solo workouts.

“Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” and “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” have been done a million times over, and Zaorski seems neither intimidated nor inspired to add much new to the proceedings. (Indeed, they’re as much a showcase for the band as they are for her squeaky vocals.) But considering how much the latter has been played for dramatic post-Katrina effect, maybe the safe, more familiar path is a more daring one.

Zaorski isn’t the first songbird to dwell sweetly in the past; powerhouse older sisters Debbie Davis, Ingrid Lucia and Julia La Shae got there years ago, and are a bit more nuanced in their excavations. But Zaorski just keeps coming, gardenia in curled blond locks, songbook under arm, and keeps delivering the goods. These days, it’s a comforting notion.

Review:

New Orleans Jazz Vipers
Hope You're Comin' Back
Dan Willging (Dirty Linen, December '07 / January '08 Issue #133)

With the wretched aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans lost a lot of its invaluable cultural resources as flocks of musicians, chefs, artists, and writers sought refuge in other cities. It's a frightening situation because those remaining realize that civic culture is the city's biggest asset and one that's paramount in the modern reconstruction era. So bully for the Jazz Vipers, who address that sentiment on the beautiful, breezy title track, "I hope You're Comin' Back to New Orleans." The song, destined to become a modern-day classic of the post-Katrina era, extols the virtues of New Orleanian life (where people still say hello) and concludes with the end-all line: "There's just nothing more than New Or-l-e-a-n-s."

While that's an unusually positive outlook to a nightmarish chapter of American history, the Jazz Vipers just happen to be an unusual swing group. They're configured differently than other ensembles of their ilk in that they don't rely on a massive drum kit to support the impeccably played trumpets, saxes, and clarinet. Instead, their rhythmic pulse comes solely from chugging guitarist John Rodli and bassist Robert Snow, who steadily outline the complex chord progressions. Fiddler Neti Vaan rounds out the Vipers distinctive sound that's one part Parisian Hot Club and one part New Orleans trad jazz.

Through hops, bops, honks, chirps, wails, swoons, and croons, the Vipers manage to keep the fun meter pegged into the red. They sing about body-slamming whales for line ("I Would do Anything for You"), the latest madcap dance craze ("Zonky"), and instilling rhythm within your lowest appendages
("Get Rhythm in Your Feet"). "Bread and Gravy" is particularly amusing, with guest vocalist Miss Sophie Lee belting about how grand life is with nothing to worry about. In between verses, the Vipers get their jam thing on, playing wonderful extended solos that are consistently grooving. A real zoot suit hoot, this one.