Hot Sardines Old School Jazz to Clemson

The Hot Sardines set up shop at the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts at 8 p.m. Sept. 4.

This is also a Student Rush the Box Office event, which is free for Clemson students who arrive one hour early with their CUID card and while seats remain. Otherwise, tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for students.

Take a blustery brass lineup, layer it over a rhythm section led by a stride-piano virtuoso in the Fats Waller vein and tie the whole thing together with a one-of-the-boys frontwoman with a voice from another era and you have the Hot Sardines.

The ensemble’s sound – wartime Paris via New Orleans or the other way around – is steeped in hot jazz, salty stride piano and the kind of music Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt and Fats Waller used to make: straight-up, foot-stomping jazz. (Literally. The band includes a tap dancer whose feet count as part of of the rhythm section.)

The band was born when frontwoman Elizabeth Bougerol met piano player Evan “Bibs” Palazzo at a jam session they found on Craigslist. Above a noodle shop on Manhattan’s 49th Street, they discovered a mutual love for songs from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.

Tickets and information are available at www.clemson.edu/Brooks or by calling the box office at 864-656-7787 from 1 to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday.