Most groups happen through musical affinities first born in college, late night jam sessions or rhythmic recruitment. The Hot Sardines came together in 2011, when their two founding members found each other through an ad on Craigslist. Evan Palazzo and Elizabeth Bougerol merged New York and Paris, and with their bandmates, lit up wild underground parties in Brooklyn, developing their craft in a studio above a noodle shop in Times Square. In the summer, when most were basking, they were busking, amidst the spidery performance network of the New York subway system. The determination bore fruit. They became a huge success, reimagining jazz from the ‘20s through the ‘50s, with an occasional nod to the ‘80s, along with a look to Elizabeth’s French homeland. Their new recording, C’est la Vie, is a bilingual affair of vintage jazz standards and originals. Elizabeth and Evan recently chatted about the new recording, and about their upcoming September performances—at Birdland in New York (September 12-16) and at the Morristown Jazz & Blues Festival in New Jersey (September 23).
Listen to our conversation, above.
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Interview transcript:
Gary Walker: We're talking about Craigslist and a jam session that took place in Times Square, above a noodle shop. Talk about how that all came together. What was the attraction, the impetus and just how it all started for you guys?
Evan Palazzo: Hot jazz in New York City in the mid or early aughts was not happening like it is now. The two of us hadn't met, but we were both looking to find ways to start making this music. I grew up loving and playing this music and there were a few spots but when it came time to try and find other music musicians who we could sort of get together with, my wife put an ad on Craigslist. At the same time, Elizabeth put another ad on Craigslist and we both sent everything out for an open jam at a studio above a noodle shop in Times Square. I was across the street at the wrong address trying to find it on a cold wintry day. I turn over my shoulder and there is Elizabeth Bougerol also going to the wrong address because it was very confusing. We sort of figured out how to find it and we did eventually. We found it and had a great jam, and Elizabeth and I immediately clicked. We knew the same songs. She had a great natural voice that you can't learn. We melded pretty quickly and then started getting together casually for fun in my apartment, playing tunes, while we kept our jobs.
Elizabeth Bougerol: We didn't keep our jobs for fun. I just want to specify that necessary evil. We were both doing other things. Evan was a working actor and I was a travel guide editor doing content for the web. Both of us had always loved this music and played it on our own. In Evan's case, he'd been playing it a little bit here and there, but not much outside of his apartment.
I'd barely sung outside of my shower, but I'd been steeped in this music that I really loved that my granddad introduced me for my whole life. I just gravitated towards it. When Evan and I met, his playing was what I heard in my head when I was thinking about these songs that I loved. He had such an old- world quality to his playing and we just started geeking out about all this music. We started playing, making these fledgling arrangements and adding musicians to individual arrangements. We would add people because we wanted to hear the songs a certain way going to open mics. It was the best kind of snowballing we could have never planned.
The focus of this music goes back a hundred years. You're talking about Duke Ellington and Fats Waller and someone that's very close to you, Elizabeth. That would be Django Reinhardt, because you grew up in Paris, where Django played and enamored audiences.
Elizabeth Bougerol: Deep down, I loved it. One of the things that really clicked when Evan and I met that I'm French. I grew up in France and Evan is American and he grew up here in the States. So much of the Franco-American love story has been through music and through jazz in particular. The French love jazz—it’s pop music. It was pop music while I was growing up and it still is pop music now. It's not like a niche thing over on the side. It's well and truly pop music. It was so exciting to be able to be able to dig into these tunes.
You do indeed dig in with the new recording that's just come out which has been out of a little over a week. It's appropriately titled, C'est la Vie. It focuses on some originals that you do and also some tunes that you might think that you know but they turn them inside out. They take a tune like “Moon River” and they take it to church. Wasn’t that one of the tunes that was also used in the film?
Evan Palazzo: Well, that's a funny story in and of itself. And the short answer is no. It started out being used in the film and other tracks from this album are in the film. It was a wonderful experience making Confess Fletch. It turned out they couldn't get the rights from the estate to use “Moon River” in the way they wanted to. So it was, it was a bit of a disappointment, but we had made the arrangement for Greg Mottola, the wonderful director of Confess Fletch. We figured well, we have this arrangement. We kind of really liked it so let's put it on the album which was coming about that time as well.
Elizabeth Bougerol: It was really exciting. Greg Mottola, the director who's directed some of my favorite movies, like Adventureland, and the Day Trippers approached us. As it turned out, he was a fan of the band and he was working on this new. project, Confess Fletch with Jon Hamm and John Slattery, and he was wondering if we could make some music for it.
Several of the tunes that are on C'est la Vie are ones that we created for Confess Fletch, and ultimately a couple of the tunes wound up in the film. It was a fantastic experience. We also got to go and play some of that music live for the cameras for one of the scenes. We're the band at the Clambake in Cohasset, Massachusetts. It was really fun to do that. It was also just fun to dip our toe further into the soundtrack world. When we were conceptualizing this recording during the pandemic, we and so many musicians were a little hamstrung by the inability to get in a room and play together. We decided to lean into that and really use the constraints and make it a more intimate sound than we typically play live.
When Evan and I first started talking about it, we said, “Well, let's imagine it as a soundtrack for a movie that doesn't exist, so that was sort of the guiding principle. That's why we think of C'est la Vie, it's the log line in a jazz soundtrack.
The versatility of the group is just amazing. When you talk about Fats Waller and Duke Ellington as well as some of the music that we think we know, the way they approach the music. I'm thinking, for example, of the title track, “C'est la Vie.” The keyboards are just amazing on that tune and there's also some strings that are done electronically. But it all works out great.
Evan Palazzo: The sound came about like all great breakthroughs by just trying things and taking what we had handy and mixing it in a way that provides an atmosphere. Since a lot of it was recorded remotely as we were in the pandemic, we were hoping to create an atmosphere and a sort of jazz soundtrack idea, like Elizabeth was saying. I'm glad it speaks to you because that is exactly what we were thinking—put instruments together you might not normally hear and see if we can still make this style of music. Even though “C'est la Vie” is an original, Elizabeth and I wrote it in that era of classic American French pop music.
What's the key to any kind of jazz setting? It's improvisation. And many times I've actually seen you guys live in performance and there's hand signals going on because we don't know what's going to happen in the moment. But yet, when it does happen in the moment, it's something that is truly jazzable, remarkable, and entertaining. You guys focus on music when this art form was popular. It wasn't as heady as it can become. It was a good time and people were encouraged to come and have a good time with that music. You talked about trying things. I have to tell you, I actually tried french fries and champagne one night and it came out pretty good.
Elizabeth Bougerol: It's delicious, right? Scientifically, the little sourness and the bubbles and the salt and the grease, it works.
Now, for those of you that are familiar, it's one of the recordings that they have out, French Fries and Champagne. On that recording is a tune called “Sweet Pea” and it comes back on this new recording, the duet with Elizabeth and Bob Parins for “La Vie en Rose.”
Elizabeth Bougerol: “La Vie en Rose.” Something that we'd been receiving requests for a long time, which I understand because it's one of the great French songs. I was hesitating because it's so iconic, “La Vie en Rose.” You have the Edith Piaf version and you have the Louis Armstrong version who are both titans. In my mind, I was never going to touch that. But when we were touring coming out of the pandemic and I was newly pregnant, I was thinking about lullabies.
We kind of all got together one day and it was like, “Well, what if we just stripped it down?” We just stripped it way, way down because I hadn't heard it as a lullaby. That's where eventually it wound up. It wound up being Bob Parins on guitar and vocals and me. We nailed down most of the arrangement in one hotel room on tour in Telluride, Colorado. Then we recorded it in another hotel room in California. He's one of my favorite people to sing with he's because he’s got a voice and a sensibility that feels like it could be from the thirties, but it's also so modern and I love how it came out.
It came out wonderful. By the way, the guitar intro on that piece is just gorgeous.
Elizabeth Bougerol: I agree with you. He has the gift of finding the heart in a song.
Evan Palazzo: Also, I have to give him even more credit because we love him so much. He figured out a way to alter the chords just a little bit from the traditional chords of “La Vie en Rose” with some beautiful diminished accents in there— for the geeks out there writing down the chords.
I think it really made the harmonies and the song have a slightly different feel than those classics, which Elizabeth mentioned by Piaf and then Louis. Bob Parins, who also wrote “Sweet Pea” on French Fries and Champagne, is one of our favorite people to collaborate with. We were lucky to get him.
Life out on the road. Sold out shows everywhere you go. It's just fantastic. And coming up for folks in our area, Birdland from September the 12th through September the 16th. And then folks in Morristown, New Jersey know of the annual jazz and blues festival. They're going to be part of that on the 23rd of September. Which is the birth date of John Coltrane, but also of Albert Ammons. There may be a nod there, but all that craziness of life out on the road. This recording has such a comfortability to it, a comfortableness that you just want to sit and relax. I'm thinking of one of the tunes, “Let's Go, Let's Get Away to the Ocean.”
Elizabeth Bougerol: There is no greater potion for love, right? Indeed. I mean, have you ever heard a song that sounds more like it could be written by people who are cooped up in tiny New York City apartments? We wrote that one a few years ago. Evan wrote the music, I wrote the lyrics and yeah, it's about getting out of town. It's about that feeling that life is going to start somewhere else and not your fourth-floor walk- up in Brooklyn. We were excited to create a new version of that.
Evan Palazzo: I'll say too, on that tune, I'd written the music first. Every tune comes out differently. Mostly we either write the tune ourselves and each write our own, or we collaborate on literally everything or most things. There's no “Then we figure how do we divide it.”
This was the traditional way where I wrote the music and then Elizabeth sat with that rather difficult melody to come up with words to. I was just blown away that she could just do verse after verse. It was one of those tunes that came together in stages. When she presented the lyrics, it really lifted it to that level it needed to be recorded. That's our second crack at it, but I think we got a slightly more, as you said, laid back tempo and feel. It really came together on that one with Paul Brandenburg on trumpet, who was one of our bandmates and a great musician.
You can send a message. You don't have to get up in somebody's face and scream and yell. The message can be very subtle, even when it's the end of a love affair. Your treatment of “I Wish You Love” on this new recording, C'est la Vie, is one of those examples. It's the end of a relationship, but yet there's a comfortability. For instance, Rosemary Clooney turned John Pizzarelli onto a tune called “I'm All Right Now” and it's that same kind of feeling: I'm all right now.
Evan Palazzo: I think the cool thing is that we decided to tackle the verse. Not many people who play that song play the verse, though Keely Smith does a fantastic version with the verse if people are interested.
Elizabeth Bougerol: One of the things I love about that tune which came about as Evan and I were talking a lot about doing some more French material on this record. A lot of these tunes exist in versions in English and in versions in French. This is one that was originally written in French, and I was thinking, “Well, I could go either way, they're both fantastic versions, they're both fantastic lyrics.”
The French lyric, Que reste t il de nos amours -What is left of our love, is much more depressing. But it has much more melancholy to it because it's reflecting “What is left of our loves? We had all these things. Where did it all go? How could it be here one day and gone the next but I wish you love.” One of the things that I really love about those lyrics by Albert Beach is there is hope. There is hope for both the idea that there could be life beyond a love affair and that you could go on and enjoy things, even if your heart's a little broken. I wish you shelter from the storm, a cozy fire to keep you warm. I mean, there are very few ex- boyfriends to whom I would wish a cozy fire.
That's a bonfire with them in the middle, right?
Elizabeth Bougerol: That's right.
Evan Palazzo: The French do emphasize the tragicness of things. I realized that there's more of a bittersweetness to the English lyrics as opposed to the tragedy of how the French love to celebrate their sadness, which is wonderful.
One of the ways is when the light dims on hope, you look at that other person and I think of this too – “Meet Me at the Bottom of the Bottle.” Now, where did that come from?
Elizabeth Bougerol: I wrote that. It's actually the first tune I wrote, if you don't count ditties that you write in grade school. It was originally called “Meet Me at the Bottom of the Bottle.” It’s a barfly's lament. I was inspired by the great drinking songs to write “Meet Me at the Bottom of the Bottle.’ I'm thinking of “One for my Baby,” the Frank Sinatra version, specifically.
I know there are other versions, but for me, that is definitive. I'm thinking of June Christy and “Something Cool.” Another fantastic drinking song. For me, these are songs that have such a story in them. We've all been at a bar and seen someone who's there by themselves. Maybe they're not by themselves. They’re checking their phone or reading a book or whatever. Maybe they're by themselves staring into middle distance.
I always think, “What's the story there? Why is this person there at this moment, engaging with the bartender or looking down? What are they drinking?” Each one of those people for me is a short story. This song was a way of writing one of those stories in my mind.
But it could just be a way of life. I think of the mantra that I learned from Tom Waits, who says, “I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” Fats Waller is also the focus on this recording as has been “Your Feet's Too Big” on other recordings that The Hot Sardines have done. Also, the Fats Waller “Swing of the Hip.” It's not really his tune, but it swings like Fats Waller.
Evan Palazzo: Thank you. That's high praise. I wrote that one myself for this album and it flowed out of me. Honestly, I can't remember what was going on, but a friend of ours, a great author, Bob Batchelor was starting up his podcast, which is about a prohibition era gangster—the Bourbon King. He wanted some music for the podcast and I had this tune and he listened to it and liked it.
When Elizabeth heard it, she said we should put it on the album. We have this one piano instrumental track. I listened to a lot of Fats Waller's piano compositions. Not all are performed by him and his band. I enjoyed it and I want to do more of that.
As Elizabeth alluded to wanting know more about someone's life, a person that was known as the Mayor of Harlem, Fats Waller. You're also working on a special about his life. Talk about that.
Evan Palazzo: We're developing a show that we hope to tour around, as a separate entity to The Hot Sardines. and it's called Play It Again, Fats Waller. While there have been other luminary productions like Ain't Misbehavin’ which really do the full out, what was it like to be at the rent party in Harlem with Fats and his boys playing beautiful music and dancing?
We were going to set this more high-tech with a multimedia presentation and imagery behind the songs with the band on stage. Then Elizabeth came up with a great idea based on a story of how to set it.
Elizabeth Bougerol:. Our show that we're writing now is set over the course of that night when Fats is kidnapped to play at Al Capone's birthday party. We use that as the backdrop to tell a bit of a deeper story about Fats because everyone thinks they know him.
First of all, not enough people know him. Second of all, a lot of people only know him as this joyful bon vivant life of the party. But there's more of a story there. We both nerded out, reading more deeply and there was some bittersweet perspectives he had about what he wished he had done musically and maybe didn't accomplish or parts of him that he felt didn't get taken seriously enough.
What we're hoping to do is give more of a glimpse into Fats, his life, his struggles, while at the same time, absolutely celebrate this man. He was the Mayor of Harlem and was the embodiment of a time when jazz was popular, when it was entertaining, when it was a good time. No one embodies the idea of a good time in jazz more than Fats.
That’s one of the projects we're excited to peck away at, and hopefully it'll see the light of day soon.
Evan Palazzo: There's a sadness there with Fats that we think is important. You get it in compositions such as “I've Got a Feeling I'm Fallen” and I can think of a few others such as “Black and Blue.” His mother passed away when he was a young man of 20 years old and I've read that he never really got over that. But he was a genuinely happy person. He wasn't pretending and he certainly knew how to drink and party which killed him, unfortunately. But, there's this duality to him. We hope to tap into it through the music and fun banter.
Elizabeth Bougerol: We also hope to highlight some phenomenal performers whom we've gotten the opportunity to bring into the touring band of the Sardines. People like DeWitt Fleming, Jr. who's a phenomenal tap dancer, singer and drummer and some of our ensemble of players. We always have 900 things going on, including the next album, this Fats Waller show, including, including…. It's all on burners. The stovetop is large.
Absolutely. Got six burners instead of four. I love that you focus on that duality in life, the yin and the yang that everybody has and to show it in the world of music and some of the makers of this music. The downside gives us hope for the bright side, anticipation is much more powerful than denial. That's what brings people to music, like what The Hot Sardines make, that's what it's all about. It's a respite. “Let's get to the ocean. There is no greater potion.” People love hearing you quote that line.
Elizabeth Bougerol: I'm near the ocean right now. And there is no greater potion. It's real.
Evan Palazzo: But you're so right. People need to get out and have fun and that's our goal, to bring these feelings to the audience. As you mentioned, we're entertaining, which some hardcore jazz guys don't give us accolades for. But we do focus on the music first and foremost, but we're presenting it for the people that come to hear it as opposed to, what we like to play in our living room, if we're alone. Getting that mood in the room, we find people hunger for it, even if they don't know it because the emotions that we tap into with these greatest songs ever written in my opinion, Gershwin and the like is a joy. It's joyousness. That can be the blues, but it's still got that full out passionate joy or a big Dixieland horn line. Also New Orleans. That's what we're all about, bringing that out to the audience.
Also bringing it together as well. Both George Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton were very popular at the same time. They might have been a mutual admiration society. If you listen very closely, you might hear little elements of one in the other, I think.
Evan Palazzo: So true and they hung out in Harlem together a lot with Fats Waller and the stride guys trying to teach George how to play stride. There are great stories about that. And you're absolutely right. A lot of cross pollination was going on in that great era.
On these recordings that you guys make is cross pollination. I like that.
Elizabeth Bougerol: One of the things that was really interesting is when we were figuring out how we were going to make music, when everyone was at home, quarantined, we had always talked about how one of the parts of what's in the DNA of this music that people love is the feeling of connection. You couldn't ask for a more disconnected time than at the beginning and the first year of the pandemic. Thinking about ways of feeling connected and feeling like we were in the same room and making music as if we were in the same room together, which is the joy, was a puzzle to solve.
That was the puzzle to crack. But I remember reading at the beginning of the pandemic, rereading that great Pete Hamill book, Why Sinatra Matters. He has this great quote, that I'm probably going to misquote, but he says that Sinatra's ballads were about loneliness and his up-tempo tunes are about the release from loneliness.
To me it just puts a tidy bow on the idea that so much of this is about connection and so much of getting back into the swing of hearing live music post pandemic is because we've all just been lonely. We've all just been in our rooms and it's such a joy to be able to being able to hear live music again. We found different ways of connecting in the pandemic and different ways of not feeling lonely and part of it is through music.
Evan Palazzo: We get to do what we love for a living. We’d do it if it wasn't our living, but I feel like if you don't do what you love, you're not going to really commit fully. I can say one thing without tooting our horn—The Hot Sardines commit fully to what we're doing and we really give it everything we've got. As a group that ends up just like New Orleans music, the sum is greater than the parts as a result. And that's what we hope we can get every single show to happen.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
