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Get ready to guzzle a bottle of cheap bourbon; howl about love, loss, death, and redemption; and smash a saxophone into shrapnel ’cause Juke founder and frontman Eric Garcia (AKA Uncle Scotchy) tells us, “Miami’s favorite dirty blues band is going big,” and adding a hot shot of fat brass to its standard four-man roster.
Under normal circumstances, Juke’s instrumental arsenal is limited to Garcia’s harmonica, Evan Lamb’s axe, Taylor Byrd’s bass, and Brian Lang’s drum kit. But this Friday, Miami’s baddest blues band will become Big Brass Juke, a swampy septet costarring ArtOfficial sax man Keith Cooper, Spam Allstars trumpet player Ted Zimmerman, and keyboard wizard Alex Hoyt.
Masterminded during a boozy, postgig planning session at legendary Key West saloon the Green Parrot, Juke’s move into the realm of horns and keys is really an attempt to redefine itself. “It’s a question of taking the band to the next level,” Garcia explains. “And one of the problems with Juke has been that if you’re under 30, we’re a blues band. But if you’re over 30, we’re a rock band.
“We’ve been kinda stuck in the middle,” he says. “The young kids dismiss us, and the traditional blues dudes don’t like us at all. So we may as well just put the best band together, throw in some horns, and see what happens.
“We sing about a lot of dark shit,” Garcia laughs. “It’s just dark, dirty music. So the brass might brighten it up a bit and get people shakin’ some ass.”
