Ellis Dyson & the Shambles at Mercury Lounge

At age 18 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Ellis Dyson started listening to jazz swing and Appalachian folk music. Inspired by the unique banjo picking of Kentucky coal miner Roscoe Holcomb, Dyson began playing old-time banjo. Dyson found a like-minded college student when he met saxophonist and clarinet player Danny Abrams, and in 2013 the duo began playing as a saxophone and banjo duo. Now working as a quintet, Ellis Dyson & the Shambles continues to play old-time Americana music. The band currently consists of Dyson, Abrams, acoustic guitarist Eli Wittmann, bassist Butler Knowles, and trombonist Danny Grewen. On April 5, 2019, the quintet released its third album, Greetings from Shambylvania, a musical collection featuring whimsical vignettes from the fictional town of Shambylvania.

Ellis Dyson & the Shambles brought to Mercury Lounge tonight a musical sound that relatively few 21st century musicians explore. With a tremendous debt to Prohibition Era music, these five ardent students of swing, ragtime, dixieland, jump blues, gypsy jazz, and other old-time foot-stomping sounds took the audience for a lively trip to a bygone period of party music. Mixing new songs and cover songs. the band preserved a nearly lost form of American music and also added to its canon. Using almost all acoustic instrumentation, the band took front-porch music to hootin' and hollerin' levels. Using the structures of early New Orleans jazz to Piedmont murder ballads, the lyrics advanced the tradition of storytelling through songwriting, painting colorful characters, situations, and panoramas through agile musicianship and showmanship.  Ellis Dyson & the Shambles is a band on a mission to preserve early forms of American music, and more than likely will gather a growing legion of admirers to further this enterprise.