The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band
Encyclopedia
The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band is a seven-piece jazz band based in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. The band play original material influenced by 1920s and 1930s jazz and 1940s jump blues
Jump blues
Jump blues is an up-tempo blues usually played by small groups and featuring horns. It was very popular in the 1940s, and the movement was a precursor to the arrival of rhythm and blues and rock and roll...

 alongside classics and standards. The band has been cited for its "extraordinary enthusiasm" and "pulling in fans who would never otherwise contemplate dancing to a jazz band". They alternate between raucous club and festival sets and quieter jazz clubs across the UK, and recently featured on Mark Lamarr
Mark Lamarr
Mark Lamarr is an English comedian, radio DJ and television presenter.-Early life:Lamarr was born in the Park South area of Swindon and has three elder sisters. His father is Irish...

’s BBC Radio 2
BBC Radio 2
BBC Radio 2 is one of the BBC's national radio stations and the most popular station in the United Kingdom. Much of its daytime playlist-based programming is best described as Adult Contemporary or AOR, although the station is also noted for its specialist broadcasting of other musical genres...

 programme God’s Jukebox.

Band members

  • "Baron" Stuart Macbeth (bandleader, vocals, piano, kazoo, composer/arranger)
  • Paul "Bunny" Eros (trumpet, vocals)
  • "King" Martin (trombone, vocals)
  • Muggsy "Westy" West (tenor sax)
  • "Blind" Bill Fadden (guitar/banjo)
  • Buzz Booker (double bass)
  • John "Hurricane" Gannon (drums)

History

The band was originally founded by "Baron" Stuart Macbeth as a proper three piece spasm band playing jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 and skiffle
Skiffle
Skiffle is a type of popular music with jazz, blues, folk, roots and country influences, usually using homemade or improvised instruments. Originating as a term in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, it became popular again in the UK in the 1950s, where it was mainly...

 on homemade banjos, ukuleles and washboards. Their first performance was at the Hollybush Inn in Oxford on 21 October 2006, advertised as "Banjo Madness". By 2007 the band had begun to shift away from skiffle and more firmly towards jazz. The instrumentation of the band began to reflect this change with the addition of bass and drums and a horn section.

In February 2009 the band played a gig at Oxford’s Wheatsheaf pub which met with a favourable review in Oxford's Nightshift
Nightshift (Oxford Music Magazine)
Nightshift is a free monthly music magazine in Oxford, England. Distributed via music venues, pubs, and shops, it provides music news, gig listings, and reviews for the city and surrounding area.- History :...

magazine: "The Spasms get to grips with the soul of the music through riotous trumpet, rasping sax and by being heroically, Biblically drunk. This, my friends, is the authentic sound of New Orleans. Possibly during the hurricane.". Oxford Music Scene described their performance at the OX4 Festival that summer as "completely brilliant" and "a breath of fresh air". Since then the band has been growing in popularity, referring to itself as comprising "seven of the hardest working, hardest drinking, hardest playing jazz musicians this side of the Pond": in a recent interview in The Oxford Student
The Oxford Student
The Oxford Student is a newspaper produced by and for students of the University of Oxford; it is sometimes abbreviated to The OxStu. The paper was established in 1992 by the Oxford University Student Union...

 Macbeth claimed the band played 119 gigs in 2009.

Highlights of their 2009 touring included Bestival
Bestival
Bestival is a four-day music festival held at the Robin Hill country park on the Isle of Wight, England. It has been held annually in late summer since 2004. The event is organized by DJ and record producer Rob da Bank and is an off-shoot of his Sunday Best record label and club nights. The initial...

, Oxford’s OX4 Festival (where the Oxford Mail described them as being "bang at the top of their high-octane jazzy game"), Truck Festival
Truck Festival
Truck Festival is an annual independent music festival in Oxfordshire, England. It was started in 1998 by the Bennett family , who decided that mainstream festivals such as Glastonbury had become too commercial and predictable. It is held in July at Hill Farm in Steventon, near Abingdon...

  and its off-shoot, EquiTruck, in February 2010. They recently supported Ska Cubano
Ska Cubano
Ska Cubano is a London-based group which combines ska and Cuban music such as son and mambo, with elements of other genres including cumbia and calypso.-History:...

 at the O2 Academy Oxford on 27 February 2010.

Macbeth discussed the origin of the band’s name in a 2009 interview with Oxford Bands:
"Many of our heroes, like Ma Rainey
Ma Rainey
Ma Rainey was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues....

, Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith was an American blues singer.Sometimes referred to as The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s...

 and Louis Jordan
Louis Jordan
Louis Thomas Jordan was a pioneering American jazz, blues and rhythm & blues musician, songwriter and bandleader who enjoyed his greatest popularity from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as "The King of the Jukebox", Jordan was highly popular with both black and white audiences in the...

, started out with a black touring troupe called who used the Rabbit Foot in their name. Spasm bands in New Orleans in the 1890s made music out of homemade instruments, which is how we started out. The Original bit is just quite funny, and a little homage to a whole host of early Jazz bands who stuck that at the front of their name. Kid Creole
Kid Creole
Nathaniel Glover Jr., , is an American rapper first known as Danny Dan and after 1975 as the better-known stage name The Kidd Creole. He is one of the pioneers of classic hip hop, and is most famous for his work as a founding member of the group Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five...

 had his Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band as well, and he was about as original as we are."


In addition to the influences mentioned above, Macbeth employed a term used by Hugues Panassié
Hugues Panassié
Hugues Panassié was a French jazz critic and producer. His most famous works were Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music and The Real Jazz, published in 1936 and 1942, respectively....

, "real jazz", to distinguish the kind of jazz they play from more modern variants. Both Macbeth and Eros have extensive collections of 78 rpm gramophone records from the 20s through 50s, which has informed their repertoire and provided ideas and inspiration from forgotten songs or obscure variants of what have become jazz standards.

The band released its first CD, "Gin & Sympathy", on their own Rabbit Jazz label on 14 December 2009. BBC Radio Northampton
BBC Radio Northampton
BBC Radio Northampton is the BBC Local Radio service for the English county of Northamptonshire. It broadcasts from its studios in Broadcasting House, Northampton on 104.2 and 103.6 FM. The station also has two studios in Daventry and Corby...

 broadcast an original Macbeth composition, "Nappy Head Rag", in advance of the release of the CD on 11 December 2009. Another original composition, "Squalor", has been broadcast by BBC Oxford
BBC Oxford
BBC Oxford is the name given to the sub-opt out region serving Oxford and the surrounding areas. Its services include:*BBC Oxford News, the local news service called BBC Oxford on screen...

.

Their radio appearances include a March 2009 broadcast with Sue Marchant on BBC Radio Northampton
BBC Radio Northampton
BBC Radio Northampton is the BBC Local Radio service for the English county of Northamptonshire. It broadcasts from its studios in Broadcasting House, Northampton on 104.2 and 103.6 FM. The station also has two studios in Daventry and Corby...

; a session with Tim Bearder and Dave Gilyeat on BBC Oxford Introducing
BBC Oxford Introducing
BBC Oxford Introducing is a local music show in Oxfordshire, and part of the main BBC Introducing brand. The show is broadcast between 9 and 10pm on Sunday nights on BBC Oxford and is presented by Dave Gilyeat and Sam King.- History :...

 on 30 May 2009. On 8 March they recorded a session in Maida Vale Studios
Maida Vale Studios
Maida Vale Studios is a complex of seven BBC studios on Delaware Road, Maida Vale, London.It has been used to record thousands of classical music, popular music and drama sessions for BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4 from 1946 to the present...

 for Mark Lamarr
Mark Lamarr
Mark Lamarr is an English comedian, radio DJ and television presenter.-Early life:Lamarr was born in the Park South area of Swindon and has three elder sisters. His father is Irish...

’s Radio 2 programme God’s Jukebox for broadcast on 12 March.
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