Banu Gibson was born in Dayton, Ohio, on October 24, 1947, and raised in Hollywood, Florida, where she began dance lessons at age three and voice lessons at nine — studying as a child with an opera singer and dancing professionally by her teens. She graduated from college in Florida with a degree in music and theater, then hit the road as an entertainer: playing a Miami club opposite trumpeter Phil Napoleon in 1967–68, touring with the banjo band Your Father’s Mustache from 1969 to 1972, appearing at Disneyland in the Class of ’27 revue, singing and dancing at Jackie Gleason’s nightclub, and even opening for the Ed Sullivan Show in New York.
In 1973 she followed her soon-to-be husband, Buzz Podewell — who had accepted a theater teaching position at Tulane — to New Orleans, and quickly became a force in the city’s traditional jazz and musical theatre scenes. She played with the Dukes of Dixieland, cornetist Connie Jones, and other local legends, learned to play rhythm banjo, and on April 1, 1981, put together her own six-piece band. That band, Banu Gibson’s New Orleans Hot Jazz, became a fixture of French Quarter and hotel gigs and a popular attraction at traditional jazz festivals through the 1980s and beyond. She has recorded for World, Jazzology, and Stomp Off — and most rewardingly for her own Swing Out label.
“Rather than mimic singers of the past, she mixes fresh renditions of Tin Pan Alley standards and jazz classics by Gershwin, Ellington, Berlin, Carmichael, Waller, Porter, et al.”
— Banu Gibson’s official biography
Gibson’s national profile grew through appearances on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, Entertainment Tonight, and PBS, and through more than 80 symphony pops concerts from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon — including the Boston Pops, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra in Oslo. She was the only guest artist of the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall bringing in the millennium, sang at the 2001 Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, toured Europe with legendary cornetist Wild Bill Davison in 1986, and toured Japan as featured vocalist with the World’s Greatest Jazz Band in 1996. She has headlined the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival nearly every year since the 1980s and is a French Quarter Festival regular.
Closer to home, she directs and choreographs for the National WWII Museum’s Stage Door Canteen and works closely with pianist and musical director David Boeddinghaus. In 2010 she co-founded the New Orleans Traditional Jazz Camp, which draws some 150 youth and adult campers to the city each year. Her honors include a 2009 Preservation Resource Center award for contributions to music, New Orleans Magazine’s 2007 Jazz All-Star nod and 2010 “Top Female Achiever” feature, and the cover of OffBeat in June 2015.
