Hello!
It has been a minute. Hope that all is well in your corner of the world?!?
You might be wondering why you seem to all of the sudden hear from us again around this time of year, and how the Midwest figures into a Los Angeles/New Orleans-based organ trio? I know it’s been keeping you up at night, so I thought that I’d start with a brief history lesson for you:
Swell Gibson was born in March of 2013 in Los Angeles. I (Tony) had invited my good friends Tris Duncan and Andy Ellsworth over to jam together for the first time. I had played for several years with both of them, but we’d never played together as a trio before. As we were getting set up in my home studio that day, a MAJOR plumbing issue made its presence known (let’s just say that the studio’s toilet was doing its “volcano impression” for a bit), so we grabbed everything in harms way and got it safely to the lawn outside.
I didn’t have the heart to start the cleanup right away, especially not in the company of old friends, so we started drinking and watching the March Madness basketball tournament. We never ended up making any music that day, but we had a great time hanging out and the groundwork for a long-term (and eventually, long-distance) friendship was laid.
A plumber was called, and we soon started rehearsing regularly. Before long, we were playing gigs as “Swell Gibson” around Los Angeles until the Covid shutdowns of March, 2020.
Backing up a couple years before that, though, in 2018 Tris had started touring intermittently with Louis Prima Jr. And through Louis, Tris met several musicians based in New Orleans, LA.
Now back to 2020…once the Covid shutdowns hit Los Angeles, there was NO live music happening in town. I am a school music teacher, so I had my own challenges teaching online certainly, but it didn’t radically change my livelihood. Tris, on the other hand, is a bonafide full-time, gigging musician who suddenly found himself essentially out of work. New Orleans was much looser with its Covid-restrictions, though, and it just so happened that some of Prima Jr.’s band members were looking for a new pianist for one of their local projects. They extended an invitation to their new bandmate, Tris, who decided it was a good time to try living and playing in the Big Easy.
It seemed like Tris’s move to New Orleans might mark the end of Swell Gibson.
But our love of playing together and hanging out (and maybe having a few drinks!) has remained strong, so the idea of meeting up in the Midwest for some summer shows was hatched a couple years ago… and I’m happy to say that it has become a bit of “tradition.” We’ve played in Iowa and Kansas the last couple of years, but Nebraska has always been the nucleus…it’s where I grew up, and it’s a place that I still love deeply. And perhaps unsurprisingly, Tris and Andy fit right in, and have become close with my friends and family; we have been incredibly well-supported there over the last few years and have had an absolute blast every summer!
Work, family-obligations, and geography make it tricky for us to play together as often as we would like to, but life is short, and any amount of time together is Swell.
Thanks for being along for the journey! See you in Nebraska summer of 2024!
Best wishes,
Tony
Swell Gibson 