INTERVIEW: Nightcrawlers, recent Grammy winners, have built a musical ‘Atmosphere’ … and now a following
Image courtesy of New Orleans Nightcrawlers / Provided with permission.
The New Orleans Nightcrawlers are a hard-working brass band out of the Crescent City who have been gigging around town for more than a quarter of a century. They have earned credibility and respect from music lovers in NOLA, and now their brass attack is gaining much-due national recognition. This past week, the nine-person group earned its first Grammy Award. They were recognized in the Best Regional Roots Music Album category for their 2020 release Atmosphere.
The band consists of Kevin Clark, Barney Floyd, Tanio Hingle, Kerry “Fatman” Hunter, Craig Klein, Miles Lyons, Jason Mingledorff, Matt Perrine and Brent Rose. They each play a brass or percussion instrument, and when they’re not recording and rocking with the Nightcrawlers, they can be found in other high-profile outfits like the New Birth Brass Band, Bonerama, Youngblood Brass Band and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.
“The Nightcrawlers have been around for 26 years, and this is our sixth release,” Klein said in a recent interview before their Grammy win. “So it takes a few years for things to kind of bubble. It’s been 11 years since we’ve put out a new record, and it was time. It was past time. Matt Perrine, the sousaphone player, he started the ball rolling. ‘Let’s do a record,’ [he said]. He actually took the reins as producer and produced it all.”
The nonet took their time with Atmosphere, trying to get it right and harken back to the early days of the Nightcrawlers. Klein said they met at somebody’s house and hung out, trying to recharge their batteries, improv music, mess around with the instruments and eat some good food. Perrine had the idea to get back to the basics.
“So when we started rehearsing for the record, we brought food,” Klein said. “We’d stop and take a break, and eat and drink, and just hang for a bit, and go back and play some more, and then come back and eat a little bit more, and that always just makes a happier vibe — the atmosphere. So we did the same thing when we went to the studio.”
They weren’t ordering takeout food. They were each bringing home-cooked meals to the studio, making the recording efforts more of a relaxed party atmosphere. There was no rush, just relaxation and good vibes. Then, from this setting, the music followed suit, and they achieved what they were after: a “natural” sound.
“We never think about winners or anything,” the trombonist said. “Grammy was not even on the radar. We just thought, we’ll put it out in New Orleans in April. We have French Quarter Festival, [which] leads right into Jazz Fest, when a lot of people come to New Orleans. And a lot of the bands in New Orleans, local bands, put records out at that time because people are going to buy them, so we knew we should put this record out. … It definitely felt right when we did it. The music came out right. When I do a record, sometimes it’s hard to go back. A lot of times I don’t really feel like listening to that recording again, but this record was different. Like, I still put it on and listen to it. Yeah, it definitely felt right.”
The members of the band have been together so long that they know one another very well. They have been playing together for decades at this point. Klein called his fellow bandmates some of the “top-call musicians” in the business, and when they get in the same room, they often say to themselves they need to play more concerts and record more albums together.
“When we’re together, we’re old friends, and that comes out in the music,” he said. “New Orleans is definitely the music capital of the world, as far as live gigs go. We have a good amount of studios here with some really good quality studios, but we’re different than L.A. and New York and Nashville. They have more infrastructure. Sometimes things can be taken for granted, but the Nightcrawlers, I don’t know, we’ve never taken it for granted because we didn’t perform a whole lot. We didn’t oversaturate. We undersaturated, so I feel like when we perform we’re definitely appreciated. And people want to experience that because we’re not sure when we’re going to do that again.”
Now with a Grammy Award, there’s probably a good chance they’ll be building this “atmosphere” over and over again.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The New Orleans Nightcrawlers’ new album is called Atmosphere. Click here for more information.
