North Carolina native Ellis Dyson (of the band Ellis Dyson & The Shambles) joined Six Count just before a performance at The Cave in Chapel Hill. The show was the first gig on The Shambles’s short tour along the East Coast this October. The band is known for combining “old-time influences ranging from early New Orleans Jazz to Piedmont Murder Ballads.”Now based in New Orleans, Ellis shares about the group’s origin story from 2015 as a banjo and saxophone duo in “The Southern Slice of Heaven,” the role of storytelling and theatrics in his music, and what’s next for the Shambles.
North Carolina native Ellis Dyson (of the band Ellis Dyson & The Shambles) joined Six Count just before a performance at The Cave in Chapel Hill.
The show was the first gig on The Shambles’s short tour along the East Coast this October. The band is known for combining “old-time influences ranging from early New Orleans Jazz to Piedmont Murder Ballads.”
Now based in New Orleans, Ellis shares about the group’s origin story from 2015 as a banjo and saxophone duo in “The Southern Slice of Heaven,” the role of storytelling and theatrics in his music, and what’s next for the Shambles.
Musicians:
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Music credits
This season features the songs “Forged in Rhythm” and “Callous & Kind” by Keenan McKenzie & The Riffers (2017), used by Six Count with permission from the artist.
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Xara:
Ellis, thank you so much for speaking with Six Count tonight.
Ellis:
Yeah, no problem. Happy to be here.
Xara:
We’re here now at The Cave on West Franklin Street, which claims to be Chapel Hill’s oldest bar and music venue, established in 1986. Chapel Hill is also the founding place of The Shambles. So, I’m sure tonight feels something like a homecoming for you.
Ellis:
Oh, absolutely. We love coming back to town and we love playing a the cave. It’s a good way to get all of our friends here for an intimate, almost secret show before we do the bigger shows.
Xara:
And I learned that The Shambles is now a five-person band. [It] began as a banjo and saxophone duo. Tell us about more about The Shambles’ origin story.
Ellis:
So, I was a student at UNC, what seems like forever ago now. And I’d written a few tunes, you know, kind of in the vein of old jazz tunes. I went around looking for a band, and I met Danny. He was playing saxophone and minoring in music at the time. He was hanging around the music department, which is where I was hanging, trying to fill a band. We played, and he liked the tunes. And, you know, we started busking them out on Franklin Street to good reception. After that, we started filling in the band. We found a whole rhythm section, and added another horn, and eventually added a fiddle, too. For a while, we were a six-piece band. That was it. We started writing more tunes, we started recording albums, we started releasing those albums at local venues around and building a bit of a name for ourselves. Eventually, we happened onto an agent and started playing out of town. And that’s kind of led to where we are now.
Xara:
And where did your interest in historic jazz or traditional jazz come from? I feel like, sometimes, the community of jazz lovers who loves this type of music gets smaller and smaller over time.
Ellis:
Yeah, that may be true. I have this sort of nostalgia for old things. I think I’ve always been that way. I’ve always gravitated to old people, and I’ve always loved hearing their stories. So, naturally, I gravitated to older music. I really started listening to old-time banjo and fiddle music as any North Carolina boy growing up would do—you can’t escape it. So, that was what I did for a long time, but when I started writing, I just really like the feel of old jazz. I liked what the rhythm section was doing. It would pop up on the radio almost never, but occasionally, and usually it was Louis Armstrong or something, kind of in his later years. And I started looking into his stuff. Of course, I heard the early Hot Five, Hot Seven albums, listening to Johnny St. Cyr play the banjo. I don’t quite play the same style that he played. That was definitely an early influence on me and my songwriting. So, my songs just kind of gravitated towards that sound, my original tunes.
Xara:
I’d love to hear more about the songwriting process in a little bit, but wanted to share about your short tour that’s happening along the East Coast this October, with Asheville, North Carolina tomorrow night, and then the Shakori Hills GrassRoots Festival [of Music and Dance] in Pittsborough, a very well-known one around here, and, finally, in Maryland at Garrett College. So just as you begin this stint of performances, what are you most looking forward to, what do you hope to get the most out of it?
Ellis:
Well, it’s really nice to be back in North Carolina. This is where we got a name for ourselves. So, being back is always back is always nice. Being back at our favorite haunts. And Shakori Hills Festival is very dear to us. We’ve played there since our formation, really. So, it’s nice to be able to come back home and have these venues be so open to having us. And there’s a sense of comfort to being home and playing shows in North Carolina.
Xara:
And nothing like the “Southern Slice of Heaven,” either.
Ellis:
Oh, yeah. Honestly, there’s not a lot of fall in New Orleans. It’s just hot and then it’s cold. You know, so we couldn’t of picked a better time to come back home and . . . [it’s] very nostalgic.
Xara:
Well, we’re so glad you’re here. And, you mentioned you’re now based in New Orleans, and it’s been a while since I’ve gone to Nola, certainly before the pandemic, so, for those of us, myself included, who wish to live vicariously through you, can you share a bit about the scene, and how it’s fared post-pandemic? What’s the sort of state of vibrancy in New Orleans?
Ellis:
Well, New Orleans is this really uniquely resilient community. They’ve faced natural disasters, they’ve faced being in the deep South and being removed from a lot of the country, and everything that comes with that. They’ve been through adversity before, and when it happens, the community pulls together and lifts each other up. It’s like one big family down there, really. So, coming out of the pandemic, we definitely lost a couple clubs. But a lot opened, too. And, right now, the scene is really, really good. It’s October, so it’s about to get busier down there. That’s the big season in New Orleans. There’s still jazz on Frenchmen Street, there’s still jazz in the Quarter, there’s still all sorts of music on any day you go down there. There’s crowds of people who want to see it. And there’s musicians who care about the music and playing the music and learning the music. And I’m in this phase where I’ve been there for two years, and I’ve started to play a lot of traditional jazz gigs outside of my band, and so I’m getting to learn the music and learn the feel of New Orleans music, which is completely different than from anything else, definitely that I’ve ever felt. And I’m getting to do this alongside musicians who really, really care about their instrument, and who really care about the music, and who really enjoy playing music. And it just seems to be the spice of everyone’s life down there. And everyone really cares, and everyone has a very vested interest in keeping it alive. So, New Orleans came out OK, I think.
Xara:
I’m glad to hear to that. Sometimes, I get a little jealous that you can access jazz and dance so easily, but I’m so glad it still exists and is healthy, as you’re describing. For any listeners who might be going to New Orleans in the next year, where are some places are they likely to find you and The Shambles?
Ellis:
Well, you can find me all the time on Frenchmen Street. I play the Spotted Cat a bunch, as do most jazz musicians. And I play on Tuesdays at a place called Fritzel’s, a European jazz club. It’s one of the few remaining, might be the last remaining, traditional jazz clubs on Bourbon Street. It’s removed from the, uh, you know, nastier parts of the street. But I play there every Tuesday with a great quartet. You can always find me there. But I’m around. If you find yourself on Frenchmen Street, if you find yourself in the Quarter, there’s a good chance we’ll run into each other. That’s kind of how the scene works.
Xara:
Very cool. In a place like New Orleans, I imagine that it’s also a bit difficult to differentiate yourself amongst this concentration of jazz bands, and even historic jazz bands like yours. How have you been able to do that for your group?
Ellis:
We’re still definitely new in the scene. A lot of that has come from adding a repertoire of old jazz songs that we like and that sometimes not a lot of bands do. You know, there’s a million songs that you could choose, and there’s definitely a repertoire that you’ve got to know, and that we do. So, I think it’s really about the players in the band and how you choose to present the music. And we’re doing that kind of in the way we know how, which is putting on a really good show and being entertaining with the audience, which goes far beyond the music that we play. And also just playing some local New Orleans favorites that people come to the city to see, that’s always a good way. But I think it really boils down to who you put in your band, and how everybody wants to present the music.
Xara:
And you describe The Shambles as having “theatrical performances.” So, I wanted to ask what you meant by that and [whether] that’s a way of making the accessible for perhaps younger crowds or those for whom jazz might not be their first genre?
Ellis:
Definitely. It’s a method of inviting everyone into a show. I’ve always considered a live show to be an experience. I think people are paying for an experience. If they wanted to just listen to the music, the records are at their fingertips, and they can do that. But the reason that people want to spend their hard-earned money to come out to a show of ours is because it’s interactive, not the sense that we’re calling people up and making them do things, but we’re directly connecting with the audience, which is the thing that I love the most about music: when you’re really connecting with an audience and they’re really listening, and they’re really hanging onto your words, that’s when magic happens. Because then it’s a collective experience. So, that’s always been my philosophy, to put on a good show. You know, we banter, and we do things like that, and our songs have a lot of theatrical flair to them, which we really lean into. And I think that makes people feel comfortable . . . maybe uncomfortable. I don’t know. Maybe uncomfortable, but definitely that it’s an authentic show, like we really care about the music, we really care about you and your experience, which we do.
Xara:
I remember the first jazz performance I went to after being, you know, stuck at home for so long, and I just forgot what it’s like to be in audience that laughs together, and yells out to the band, and is encouraging or responding in live time. That just was so special to experience again, and something that I must’ve taken for granted because when it came back again, it almost felt like a shock. Now, you mentioned about sharing stories, and storytelling seems like a trademark of your music, so can you share about your process of creating and sharing these? And I’d also like to hear your favorite Piedmont Murder Ballad Story.
Ellis:
Well, the Piedmont Murder Ballads are, you know, a part of North Carolina history. And I try to just incorporate what I know into my music, and that’s a lot of what I was hearing when I was coming up in music. You know, those kind of tunes, which is just an interesting subset of old-time music in North Carolina. But I’ve never liked writing deeply personal songs. It works for a lot of people, and I think they can be really moving songs, and I really respect that. But I never really could. It felt like I was trying to codify an emotion, and that’s not really how I deal with emotion. It’s hard for me to put it into words. It’s hard for me to dance around it with metaphors and things like that. I always just really liked where my imagination went, and that led me to making up stories about weird people in weird places, and that turned into songs, and people were digging the songs and thought they were funny. That’s just kind of where it went. Now it’s kind of a trademark of the sound and the songwriting, and we’re just owning it.
Xara:
And where do you think you get your sense of whimsy from?
Ellis:
Oh, I grew up in a really silly family, I think. All my relatives live in North Carolina except for a couple. And my whole family has always had a sense of humor and kept things light and taught me that from a young age.
Xara:
Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that. Is there anything else you’d like to share about your upcoming music that you’ll be producing, or about any of the three albums you’ve already released? And I also saw that there’s a board game that people can buy, which I liked the concept of that.
Ellis:
Yeah, we released the “Greetings from Shamblevania,” it’s been a few years now. Obviously, the pandemic hampered our writing and things like that. But the inside panel of that LP is a playable board game, and that was an idea that started with Danny, our saxophone player, and we fleshed it out, and yeah, if you buy the LP, you get game pieces and playing cards, and you can play it, which is another rung on the ladder of the little world that we’ve created. We just created four tracks that are fairly new, new for a lot of folks and pretty new to us, with Jon Atkinson of Big Tone Records, a recording label, and he has all this old recording equipment, he runs it through tape, and it’s just a great recording experience. So, we recorded some new tunes that will eventually be part of a larger album, a ten-track album. Timeline on that is a bit iffy, especially now that we’re all gigging musicians and busy, and you know how that goes, everybody does. But there’s definitely more on the way, but I think each of the three albums that we have out are really good representations of who we were at the time the albums were released, and that’s all an album really is. So, I still stand by those and think people can still get a lot out of those albums until we release the next one.
Xara:
Well, looking forward to seeing those come together, and thank you again for spending time with us, and welcome back to North Carolina. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your visit here.
Ellis:
All right, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.