The Busted Jug Band at The Spire Center For Performing Arts

High Energy Music From the 20's and 30's
website: http://www.thebustedjugband.com

The Busted Jug Band's show is an hilarious romp through time featuring group vocals, swinging rhythms and novel instrumentation. Played by five men in top hats, derbies and garish suits; inspired by Black American music of the early 20th Century; the group features novel instruments -- often homemade, such as washboard, washtub bass, rhythm bones, banjo-ukuleles, bicycle horns, modified kazoos and – yes – rubber chickens. The BJB plays music of classic jugsters like the Memphis Jug Band, plus a mix of obscure swing, blues and novelty music. The Busted Jug Band have produced entertaining “silent music videos” for songs featured on their debut, eponymous album. They even have their own comic book (!) featuring band members “Smiling Pee-Wee Hernando,” “Early Bird,” “Kayola O’La,” “Lefty Boom-Boom” and “Rude Boy,” as well the anthropomorphized “Phil the Jug.” (In this way, the band stayed active during the pandemic, if only in the second dimension!)...

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High Energy Music From the 20's and 30's
website: http://www.thebustedjugband.com

The Busted Jug Band's show is an hilarious romp through time featuring group vocals, swinging rhythms and novel instrumentation. Played by five men in top hats, derbies and garish suits; inspired by Black American music of the early 20th Century; the group features novel instruments -- often homemade, such as washboard, washtub bass, rhythm bones, banjo-ukuleles, bicycle horns, modified kazoos and – yes – rubber chickens. The BJB plays music of classic jugsters like the Memphis Jug Band, plus a mix of obscure swing, blues and novelty music. The Busted Jug Band have produced entertaining “silent music videos” for songs featured on their debut, eponymous album. They even have their own comic book (!) featuring band members “Smiling Pee-Wee Hernando,” “Early Bird,” “Kayola O’La,” “Lefty Boom-Boom” and “Rude Boy,” as well the anthropomorphized “Phil the Jug.” (In this way, the band stayed active during the pandemic, if only in the second dimension!)

During the Jazz Age of the early 20th Century, musicians who couldn't afford trumpets, tubas and drums replaced them with homemade instruments, such as kazoo, washboard and jug. Thus the Jug Band sound, sometimes called “poor man's Jazz”, was born. This was revived in the 1960s with groups like Jim Kweskin's Jug Band. The Busted Jug Band pushes the Jug idiom beyond its historical confines. Homemade instruments are modified with modern techniques for maximum impact. Inspiration has come from the likes of Spike Jones & His City Slickers and Hoosier Hotshots. Vaudevillian sight gags, jokes and colorful stage attire round out the show and fun reigns supreme.

What started as a weekly session at a local pub turned into a costumed, vaudevillian-style act when the band was invited to perform at a nearby Steampunk festival. Along the way, the band has performed at area performing arts centers, schools, municipal festivals and nursing homes (for which they received Club Passim's Iguana Grant).

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