The Bad Penny Pleasuremakers are a New Orleans-based band built around Matt Bell and Joy Patterson, who met on a blind date shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and have been playing music together ever since. Their music is rooted in pre-WWII America — ragtime, acoustic blues, country blues and traditional jazz — with a focus on Louisiana history and roots. On stage Bell plays guitar and Hawaiian guitar and sings, while Patterson takes lead vocals, plays horn-like solos on a kazookaphone (a bugle-shaped kazoo with a plunger mute) and keeps time on washboard and a table of small percussion.
As a full band they're a collaboration of New Orleans musicians, including Coleman Akin (strings), Jonathan Greene (reeds), Joplin Parnell (keys) and Max Bien Kahn (strings) — everyone multi-instrumental, everyone singing. Their repertoire mines Tin Pan Alley, the Roaring Twenties and the early swing era with an eye to fun and humor.
Their album Hello Bluebird! arrived on Bigtone Records, a celebration — in the band's words — of the resiliency of music and life: the songs came together during the pandemic and were recorded shortly after lockdown. The title nods to Josephine Baker's 1926 recording of 'Hello Bluebird.'
