Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

Saturday, March 10, 8:00 pm

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy swings in to The Plaza del Sol Performance Hall at California State University, Northridge, featuring new selections from the release of Save My Soul, their latest album, called a love letter to the music of New Orleans.

“I’ve always loved the music that came from there,” bandleader Scotty Morris says, “from Louis Armstrong’s early brass band stuff with King Oliver all the way through Fats Domino and up to the Dirty Dozen Marching Band. On our earlier albums I’ve hinted at how important this music is to me, but this is the first one where I’ve gone completely full-blast with it.”

It was a trip to New Orleans that gave the band the inspiration for Save My Soul. “We were booked to play a private event there in 2002,” Morris remembers. “Coincidentally, it happened at the same time as Jazz Fest. I went out, saw all these artists play, and suddenly the idea for Save My Soul came to me in a rush. I started writing like crazy. First thing, I went to the piano and came up with this “Professor Longhair/Fats Domino groove.” When I played it for the band, they loved it. Then I started writing this Louis Armstrong kind of thing, and they dug that too. Suddenly I caught fire, and within a couple of weeks I had pretty much finished everything.”

“When I was a kid, I was really into that crazy, anything-can-happen vibe of New Orleans,” Morris continues. “And when I discovered punk at twelve or thirteen, it felt like exactly the same thing to me. I never really thought that early jazz and punk were that different. This made me really impatient with the ‘blueprint’ in any kind of music; rather than get hung up on seeing how many substitutions I can make for this or that chord, I’m always about creating the vibe that every single song needs.”

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy has done more than any other band to fuel the swing revival of the ‘90s, due largely to the group’s appearance in the 1996 film Swingers. The combo has approached their fifth album with more gusto and verve than ever, infusing their old-school jive and greasy horns with a New Orleans sensibility and panache and, in the process, created their strongest album yet. Although their songs sound like they were lifted right out of the Zoot-suited ‘40s, the band writes all their own material, taking swing into a raw and modern direction.

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy now carries on the tradition of the legendary big bands and orchestras by touring non-stop, performing over 100 concerts each year around the world. Like the Glen Miller Orchestra, Benny Goodman, and the Count Basie Big Band, BBVD sell out shows to audiences of all ages in cities as far flung as Honolulu, Hawaii, St. Petersburg, Florida, even making an appearance at last summer’s Pori Festival in Finland. Cal State Northridge welcomes BBVD back home to their local turf, returning to their California roots for this night of fun, nostalgia and SWING!