Late to the Party is the title of The Fried Seven’s first album, and the name is a joke with a true core. The seven musicians arrived about a century too late for the party that King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong had launched in the 1920s. That they are still joining in could also be heard in America in 2024: Rivermont Records released the recordings, made in 2023 with historic analogue equipment.
The musicians met at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. They come from Spain, Italy and the Netherlands and discovered their shared love of Early Jazz there. Gradually they worked their way through the classics, and a band emerged from the repertoire. The name echoes Armstrong’s Hot Seven, and if anything is getting fried here, it is the heat in their interplay.
The instrumentation is classic yet richly coloured. Pablo Castillo leads on cornet, while Matteo Paggi adds counter-lines and glissandi on trombone. Two woodwind players stand in the frontline: Martí Mitjavila on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Pepijn Mouwen on alto saxophone and clarinet. Mouwen writes the band’s arrangements, and with two reed players they can build ensemble passages just as Ellington and the dance bands of that era loved them. Cem Karayalçin alternates between banjo and guitar, Simon Osuna plays double bass, and Carlos Ayuso is on drums.
What stands out is the discipline beneath the fire. The tempos are right, the entries come together, and the rhythm section drives things forward without hurry. Over that, the soloists improvise freely, and the stomps get just the bite that made them so popular in the 1920s.
On the album, just as in many concerts, Laura Dooge sings; with Vondelier she has her own combo for Dutch-language jazz. Her great love is the Great American Songbook, and with The Fried Seven she brings the repertoire of the 1920s to life.
The band won the jury prize of the Karel van Eerd Music Award and has played at the Grachtenfestival in Amsterdam, the Breda Jazz Festival, Jazz in Duketown and the Enkhuizen Jazz Festival. Young as the musicians are, their album reveals a band that takes the music of 1927 seriously and still has fun with it.
