The Hot Sardines

The Hot Sardines are a New York-based jazz band led by Paris-born singer Elizabeth Bougerol and bandleader/pianist Evan Palazzo. The band’s music is unabashedly Hot Jazz, hearkening back to the days when jazz and popular music were one and the same, and when each musician had a chance to shine. The band was first born when Bougerol and Palazzo met at a Manhattan jam session. She asked if he knew the Fats Waller song “Lulu’s Back in Town,” and on a beat-up upright piano, he launched into the song right on the spot. That first meeting between Bougerol and Palazzo was in 2007 and the trajectory of the band mirrors the same evolution of traditional jazz. As a genre that started out with shouts and homemade instruments in the gin joints of New Orleans and ended up, just a few decades later, backed with a full orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The Hot Sardines started out playing in speakeasies and underground parties in Brooklyn, to then festival crowds of and later playing at Boston Symphony Hall backed by the Boston Pops. As an eight-piece ensemble, the Hot Sardines perform both original compositions both in English and French and adaptions of jazz greats from the first half of the 20th century. With a combination of foot-stomping jazz and historical storytelling, audiences are swept up in the excitement of the musical performance and enthralled in the Bougerol’s sharing of the artists behind the music accounts.