Join us on June 10, 2023 from noon to 3:00 p.m. for an afternoon of picnicking, dancing, and relaxing on the lawn at Durham’s Orchard Park, with live music by your hosts, the Mint Julep Jazz Band. Inspired by the Jazz Age Lawn Party in New York and similar events in Boston and Richmond, this began as a socially distanced event in 2021 to great success following a long pandemic winter. Now an annual event, the Orchard Park Jazz Picnic draws jazz fans, vintage enthusiasts, regional swing dancers, and passersby who decide to derail that dog walk and join the fun.
This event is free and open to the public. We will have a virtual and physical tip jar for the band – if you’d like to tip in advance, you can Venmo to @Laura-Windley or PayPal to caab241@hotmail.com.
In the event of inclement weather, all updates will be posted in the Facebook event. If we have to cancel, this event will be rescheduled for a later date.
Thanks so much to Alexandrea Lassiter of Copper Key Photo for the incredible photos from last year!
We were pleasantly surprised to find our vinyl records were delivered this week, as we weren’t expecting them until May. You can pick up a copy on our Bandcamp page or message us in advance if you’d like to purchase an LP at one of our shows. Thanks again to our Kickstarter backers who made this dream a reality!
CDs! We have them! If you would like a physical copy of our new album Watch the Birdie, you can order one from our Bandcamp page, in all its glory. We splurged for the eco case and we have actual liner notes for you to read about the making of this album. Shout out to CIH Studios for the incredible album artwork, it’s thematic perfection.
It’s finally here! After much pandemic and the regular trials and tribulations of creating a studio album, Watch the Birdie takes flight today, Halloween 2022. We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it. Available wherever you get your digital music – if you’d like for the most money to go to the band, we encourage you to pick up a copy on our Bandcamp page.
It’s been a wild ride with Kickstarter and getting things ready for the album – we are so excited to be in the recording studio this weekend and have so many people to thank for this. Specifically, our incredible backers who have funded this endeavor with their pre-orders and merchandise purchases vis-a-vis a Kickstarter campaign! We were able to raise a total of $14,025, which exceeded our goal and will help us not only with anticipated expenses, but also with those pesky unanticipated ones.
We love you madly! Thanks so much to our backers, in chronological order:
Our album artwork was lovingly painted by the incredible Durham-based artist Darius Quarles.
(From our vocalist Laura Windley)
When I was young, I wondered why each subsequent band album seemed to have more and more years between albums, but now I understand. When a band does well, they are busy, then the members are busy contributing to other endeavors, and then people need a break after being so busy, so the thought of a new album is definitely lower on the priority list, particularly when other work is steady.
In 2020, we decided that 5 years was enough time gone by since the release of Battle Axe and that we should record another album. You know how the rest of this story goes with the global COVID-19 pandemic essentially putting a halt to life as we knew it.
We scheduled this recording a couple of times during the pandemic and had to keep pushing it back, but we believe it’s for real this time, so we are launching a Kickstarter today for album pre-orders and swag. I know some of you have told me that you need a new tee shirt, so we got you! I’m also excited to add enamel pins, Burt’s Bees, a sponsorship option, and some quality time noshing with yours truly as rewards, in addition to some of our recurring rewards.
What will this album be? It’s a dance album, of course, but it’s also the culmination of efforts aggregated just prior to the pandemic that still feel new to us, plus some new-to-us arrangements created during the pandemic, and some old favorites that should be put on tape. The project feels fresh to us, so we hope you enjoy it as we slowly re-open our jazz dance and music community.
It’s also a celebration of our 10th anniversary as a band! Our first gig was in February of 2012 at the (now defunct) Hot Club of Durham weekly swing dance in the Trotter Building in Durham’s DIY district. I look at videos of that night and think about how far we’ve come, but also how we did a respectable job for a very first gig. It’s been a wild ride and we thank you for all the wonderful musical experiences we’ve shared since then.
Visit our Kickstarter page for more information about the tracks on the album, swag, and how to get your copy/copies of our recordings – we’re offering digital, CD, and vinyl this time! You have 58 days to get your order in, the countdown begins…
Photographs from the 2021 Orchard Park Jazz Picnic, courtesy of Tom Lassiter
We are excited to announce that the Orchard Park Jazz Picnic will be happening again on June 4, 2022 from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. at historic Orchard Park near downtown Durham. The first OPJP in June of 2021 was a huge success, in that small, hopeful period of time between vaccinations and the rise of the Delta variant. For many, it was their first outing amongst a gathering of people and/or their first social dances since the beginning of the pandemic.
We were able to crowd fund our basic expenses for permits, port-a-potties, and band pay in order to make this event happen once again – thanks so much to our swing jazz community for supporting this event, which is free and open to the public. Our donors/sponsors are the following:
The Mint Julep Jazz Band cordially invites you to a jazz picnic at historic Orchard Park! Join us on June 12, 2021 from noon to 3:00 p.m. for an afternoon of music under the trees, enjoy the provisions in your picnic basket, do a little dancing (pursuant to the current safety guidelines), and then recline on your picnic blanket six feet away from the nearest attendees. This event is all ages and open to the public.
Through crowd funding from our wonderful community, we were able to cover the bare minimum costs of this event, but we will continue to take donations toward musician compensation and any unforeseen expenses – please send your donation to me with a note for “picnic” or “jazz picnic” to Venmo @Laura-Windley or via PayPal at caab241@hotmail.com (select friends and family so there is no fee). We will also have a virtual tip jar at the show and hope that you will support this live music endeavor.
Orchard Park is a park owned by the City of Durham and we want to be sure that the event is enjoyed by everyone and hope that we could potentially do this again. The city’s guidelines are applicable to attendees as follows:
Please wear a mask when you are not eating.
If you are feeling sick, please stay at home.
Please make sure your picnic area is 6 feet away from the nearest groupings of people. If we reach attendance of 100 people, we may ask newcomers to set up in an adjacent section of the park.
At this time (4/23/21), the city’s guidelines say “no shaking of hands,” so this means no social dancing. I hope this changes, but make plans to do solo dancing.
Hand sanitizer is encouraged, please bring some with you, as we will have port-a-potties and no facilities for hand washing.
There is a water fountain at the park, but you should also plan on bringing enough water for the afternoon.
Please pick up your trash and dispose of it appropriately; otherwise, Lucian Cobb and Laura Windley will be picking up your trash and that makes for a long day.
To RSVP to the Orchard Park Jazz Picnic, ask questions, and for more information and updates, please visit our Facebook invite for this event.
Orchard Park is located at 1000 S. Duke Street in Durham, North Carolina.
This past weekend the Mint Julep Jazz Band premiered three new music videos as part of the California Balboa Classic’s virtual event, CalBal Live! The event reached out to 5 bands/bandleaders to create brand new recordings for the event, compiled remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including Michael Gamble and the Rhythm Serenaders, Gordon Au’s Grand Street Stompers, the Jen Hodge All-Stars, Keenan McKenzie and the Riffers, and the Mint Julep Jazz Band. We hope you enjoy these new-to-us tunes, here’s the scoop on each song, the sponsors, and the musicians for each recording:
COWBELL SERENADE
If you say CalBal three times fast it might come out sounding like cowbell at the end – hence this tune is a pun on the event’s nickname. We’d been looking for pitched cowbells for years, online an at music stores, and it took a pandemic Zoom cocktail hangout for the topic of almglocken to come out. Thanks to Jonathan Stout for the suggestion, we think they worked out great! Here’s our rendition of Johnny Blowers’ Cowbell Serenade, sponsored by Gary Chyi.
I’M GONNA SIT RIGHT DOWN AND WRITE MYSELF A LETTER
This is an original arrangement of I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter, written by Lucian Cobb, with vocals inspired by the Boswell Sisters. Thanks so much to Kevin Wang, Lian Tarhay, Ursula Hicks, Kevin Nguyen, Matt Mitchell, and Jennifer Reed, all swing dancers in Austin and Dallas, Texas, who joined forces to sponsor this song for CalBal Live.
When we started talking to the CalBal Live organizers it became clear that they were excited about everything the bandleaders proposed and were up for funding big band charts. While the Mint Julep Jazz Band isn’t a big band, Lucian really wanted to do a big band song because it would be fun to put together. He had already transcribed Raggin’ the Scale (from an Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra live recording from the Savoy Ballroom) for Michael Gamble and the Rhythm Serenaders Orchestra and Michael gave his blessing for us to record Lucian’s transcription, so here we are! Thanks so much to Pasadena Balboa and Jam for sponsoring Raggin’ the Scale, this song is an absolute blast.
In non-COVID times, the Mint Julep Jazz Band would have performed over Labor Day weekend at Camp Hollywood, but this year Camp Hollywood put on a four day virtual event that was as close to the real thing as we can get right now. We decided to put together a remote recording with video and audio of the band performing “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet” to premiere at Virtual Camp Hollywood and now you can watch it on YouTube. Enjoy!
Mint Julep Jazz Band 