BLUES-NOIR FOR THE COCKTAIL HOUR
Tank! is an instrumental trio from Madison, Wisconsin: guitar, upright bass, and drums. Formed in 2005, the band plays original music and postwar repertoire drawn from bebop, jump blues, swing, Latin rhythm, and film-noir harmony. The writing takes up migration, displacement, and cultural collision. Guitarist Matthew Nelson studied with Stephen Ulrich of Big Lazy. Gary Chin plays upright bass; Jay Hughes plays drums.
LIVE DATES
THE SIDES
Last Call
Nine cuts recorded live to tape between the last ferry and the first light. Coming Soon!
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.
TANK!
Shows are free. Everything else by mail — we answer between sets.