Prepare to get your groove on: Vaud & the Villains return to Ford Amphitheatre on Aug. 19
Pulling together a 19-piece band is no easy feat in any circumstance — keeping one together for close to a decade borders on the miraculous, but it’s something L.A.’s jazz-swing-gospel-theater collective Vaud & the Villains has managed against the economic and logistical odds for close to a decade now.
The group serves up one of its typically exuberant and freewheeling shows Friday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, where group co-founder, singer and saxophonist Andy Comeau, a.k.a. Vaud Overstreet, says to expect “new dances, six dancers, new costumes, a big flat-footin’ number and new originals we have not recorded or played yet.”
Comeau and his dancer-singer wife, who uses the stage name Peaches Mahoney, started the group in 2007, inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s recording and live shows with his similarly large-scale Sessions Band, which merged New Orleans traditional jazz with rock ’n’ roll attitude and burlesque theater presentation.
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The Villains, which previously played the Ford Amphitheatre in 2013, include various brass and woodwind players, plus singers and dancers. The group has recorded two albums of original material, “Sin & Tonic, Vols. 1 & 2” and has expanded its live shows from its base in Southern California to performances across the country.
“We are on the road more lately,” Comeau said, adding that the band will be “off to Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania, Ashville (N.C.) and Nashville this fall.”
While they’ve succeeded in keeping Vaud & the Villains afloat now for years, Comeau and Mahoney recently started a scaled-down side project, Overstreet’s New Orleans Jazz Band, for calls they get where for various reasons the full complement doesn’t work.
“There were times when Vaud just felt like too much of a showpiece and people just wanted music but not necessarily a show,” Comeau said. “So we drew from what we loved about the Frenchman Street bands [in New Orleans] and came up with something that adheres to more of the trad jazz sound. It was pop music of its day, as you know, and it all still works. It’s amazing how great some of these tunes are.
“We don’t really do any Vaud songs, or ONOJB songs in Vaud, aside from maybe an occasional instrumental tune. It’s pretty much a separate thing. It’s going pretty well. We play every month or so in a restaurant in Santa Monica, Areal.”
After Friday’s hometown show, the Villains head south for an Aug. 28 date at the Belly Up in Solana Beach and continue touring to the Northeast and Midwest.
randy.lewis@latimes.com
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