BLUES-NOIR FOR THE COCKTAIL HOUR

Tank! plays like a band that has to be out of town by the morning. It's blues noir for the cocktail hour.

An instrumental trio out of Madison, Wisconsin, working the postwar American songbook: bebop, jump blues, swing, clave and second line, and the harmony that film noir borrowed from all of it. Guitar, upright bass, drums. No singer (most of the time). The writing comes from an itinerant childhood spent moving through the South, and from the road that made it possible. The interstate is America's secular religion: a national circulatory system that tears families apart and promises a new belonging at the far end. Music from the crossroads, where everybody's leaving and nobody arrives.

Dates above. If you want to know when there's a record, leave an address.