The Candy Shop Boys Release The Long-shelved Sugarfoot Stomp

On October 30, BYNK Records (Because You Never Know) releases Sugarfoot Stomp, the debut album by The Candy Shop Boys, the quintet of violinist Scott Tixier, tenor saxophonist Matt Parker, pianist Jesse Elder, bassist Kenball Zwerin, and drummer Arthur Vint, featuring vocalist Sophia Urista. Recorded over two January nights at Tedesco Studios in 2013, the album's twenty-one tracks run from 1920s hot jazz and Cotton Club material to reinventions of The Doors, The Beatles, and Prince, played as one songbook. Twelve tracks appeared on a limited CD at the time; the complete sessions, newly remixed and remastered, have never before been on major streaming services.

The band stopped performing as a whole unit around 2017, and the record sat on a hard drive for thirteen years.

The title track, “Sugar Foot Stomp," was first known as “Dippermouth Blues" in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in 1923, and was renamed when Fletcher Henderson made it a national hit in 1925; a “sugar foot" was a flattering name for a dancer, which makes it the perfect opener for a band that worked so closely with dancers. From 2009 to about 2017 the band played New York's burlesque rooms, where performers chose their songs each night, always from the band's own list. “We all brought material to the band, and the dancers all chose from that songbook," says Parker. “Jesse Elder did most of the arrangements. He was spectacular at capturing our sound."

That songbook is a century of songs that said what couldn't be said, decoded in Dr. Reggie Quinerly's liner notes. “Kicking the Gong Around," by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler and most famous as Cab Calloway's 1931 Cotton Club showpiece, hides opium in its title. “When I Get Low I Get High," written by Marion Sunshine and recorded by Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb in 1936, barely bothers with code. “The Candy Man," written by trumpeter Herb Morand for Rosetta Howard and the Harlem Hamfats in 1938, is dealer and double entendre in one. On the other side of the ledger sit “Come Together," the song Urista later sang to turn the chairs on NBC's The Voice ("So much raw talent, and technical nuance that makes her singing unbelievable," says Parker), and “Isfahan," the Ellington and Strayhorn ballad that is the album's still center.

Parker's own favorite is “Black and Tan Fantasy," Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley's elegy for the integrated nightclubs, closing on Chopin's funeral march. “It was one of my favorite songs to perform," he says. “I always felt like the band brought a very powerful dynamic, and then Scott and I would ride over the top of this kind of hurricane of sound that the rhythm section would create."

Urista fronts ten of the twenty-one tracks. “Sophia would grab an audience immediately and not let them go until she was ready to walk off the stage," says Parker. “We played with her for years before The Voice, and we all could see how far she would go. Live performing is its own art form, hard to quantify, and Sophia is one in a million." Around her: Tixier, with six Grammy certificates and session credits from Stevie Wonder to Beyoncé; Elder, four-time ASCAP award winner and eight years the music director of Postmodern Jukebox; Zwerin, who studied in Havana with Lázaro Machado of the Cachao family; and Vint, of Boardwalk Empire and The Knick, now behind Tucson's Century Room.

The Candy Shop Boys began in 2009 as Melody Sweets and The Candy Shop Boys, recorded with Sweets in 2011, and performed at the 2011 Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekender in Las Vegas. Duane Park was home base; the band held a weekly gig at the Rum House in Times Square for about eight years and played the Slipper Room and the Manderley Bar at Sleep No More. For years they were also Murray Hill's band. “We did countless shows backing up Murray Hill, Mr. Show Business himself," says Parker. “He's unbelievably quick, and we were able to fly behind him and stop on a dime as a band. That was a huge part of what the band was." Hill went on to play Fred Rococo on HBO's Somebody Somewhere, and his memoir, Showbiz! My Life as a Middle-Aged Man, came out in October from Gallery Books. In 2014 the band was heard and seen in the film John Wick, and their “Evil Man Blues" landed on the Official Motion Picture Soundtrack. With Urista, the band toured nationally for Dos Equis' Bazaar Noir; listeners have Shazamed the band 46,200 times and counting.

Sugarfoot Stomp is out now on all major streaming services. The album is available here, streams and downloads at Bandcamp, and the band's full story lives at thecandyshopboys.com.