Program: The Hot Sardines

The Hot Sardines
Saturday, March 04, 2023 - The Berklee Performance Center

Elizabeth Bougerol - Vocals/Washboard
Evan Palazzo - Piano
David Berger - Drums
Adam Kubota - Bass
Ben Golder-Novick - Reeds
DeWitt Fleming - Tap Dancer
Paul Brandenburg - Trumpet
J. Walter Hawkes - Trombone
Gwen Eyster - Tour manager  

The Hot Sardines effortlessly channel New York speakeasies, Parisian cabarets, and New Orleans jazz halls to transform songs from past eras into music for the 21st century.   Over the last few years, the Hot Sardines have emerged from the Brooklyn neo-speakeasies where they got their start to make a global name for themselves playing hot jazz as it was in the era when live music was king, bridging generations and captivating 21st century audiences. 

The group, led by front woman Elizabeth Bougerol and piano player Evan Palazzo, has been described as “potent and assured” (New York Times) and “simply phenomenal” (Times of London), notching more than a year on the Billboard jazz chart and 25 million streams on Spotify (over 90 countries). They’ve guested on Later… With Jools Holland, NPR’s Weekend Edition, CBS Saturday Morning, NPR’s Soundcheck, and Live at WFUV and appeared at major jazz festivals including Newport, Montreal, Toronto, London, and Blue Note in Japan in addition to sold-out shows at more than 400 venues worldwide. They’ve performed their Boston Pops–debuted symphony show with orchestras throughout North America.

Their three major albums have landed on best-of lists in the jazz press (DownBeat, JazzTimes) and also crossed over to the mainstream, with Rolling Stone noting that “100-year-old jazz standards get reborn” in the hands of the Hot Sardines.

In 2016, the Hot Sardines released French Fries & Champagne  for Universal Music Classics. Following a one-of-a-kind live performance at the Dolce & Gabbana spring-summer 2017 fashion show in Milan as well as a hometown gig at NYC’s Central Park SummerStage, the band was also featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and on the influential New York radio station WFUV. As a result, the album soared to #1 on both iTunes and the Amazon jazz chart and debuted at #5 on Billboard’s jazz traditional chart (right behind Frank Sinatra and Allen Toussaint). Additional first-week chart placements include #6 on Billboard’s jazz current chart and rounding out the top 20 of the coveted Billboard Heatseekers chart. The album marks the band’s second #1 debut on the iTunes jazz chart.  

The Hot Sardines followed up with, Welcome Home, Bon Voyage, released in April 2019. Produced by Eli Wolf (Robert Glasper, Elvis Costello and the Roots), Welcome Home, Bon Voyage  captures the Hot Sardines performing live in two landmark rooms from their career: a hometown set at the renowned Joe’s Pub in New York City, the first venue to really give the Sardines a home, and the acoustically magnificent Koerner Hall in Toronto at the Royal Conservatory of Music, one of the first major halls the Sardines had sold out.  

With the footlights dark in 2020, Elizabeth Bougerol and Evan Palazzo stayed home and took stock. “We called our 2019 album Welcome Home, Bon Voyage because, for the last five years, we were literally always getting on a plane. We were so lucky to have that success, and we were finally able to reflect on it,” says Bougerol. Adds Palazzo, “So we said, What do we want to do now? It turned out we really wanted to write and record more music.” The pair started brainstorming via Zoom, and unable to gather their usual little big band into a studio, they focused on a stripped-down sound to record remotely, calling on quarantining collaborators from Los Angeles to Beijing, using very 21st-century technology to record songs written nearly 100 years ago. 

The result is the album C’est la Vie, a bilingual affair whose title track—a Bossa nova original in French—is a timely ode to fully living each moment, even when you don’t know what the next will bring. 

Unable to travel to her native France, Bougerol spent time rediscovering early French recordings, so the collection also includes the 1938 gypsy-jazz breezer “J’attendrai” (Dino Olivieri, Louis Poterat), the dark Django Reinhardt ballad “Si Tu Savais” (Georges Ulmer), and “I Wish You Love,” the 1942 standard by Charles Trenet and Léo Chauliac, with English lyrics by Albert Beach. 

A gospel-inflected “Moon River” came about when Bougerol and Palazzo were tapped by director Greg Mottola to contribute music to the Miramax release Confess, Fletch, starring Jon Hamm and John Slattery (in which the band also makes an appearance); new songs created for the project include the original “Adieu l’Amour,” a foray into the sounds of film noir. And “La Vie en Rose” shows up as a hushed duet with Bob Parins, with whom Bougerol sang his original “Sweet Pea,” a breakout hit from the Sardines album French Fries + Champagne.  

With live music roaring back, the pair are not just planning a return to touring but are producing an original show about Fats Waller, the larger-than-life driver of the Harlem Renaissance, coming in 2023. 

“These are times that need live music. And I don’t know of anything that brings people together like the joy of hearing traditional jazz live,” says Bougerol. “Everything in our DNA is about connecting with the audience. That’s where we feel most at home,” she continues. “That’s where jazz lives,” adds Palazzo, “in the playing, in sharing that experience, in coming together to create a moment that won’t happen again.”