In March 2020, leader and bassist John Joyce was playing a weekly Frenchmen Street gig when police came in and shut the room down — the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. After months of livestreams, he returned to the streets: parks, playgrounds, flea markets, church picnics, levee lunches, porch parties, and backyard gatherings, playing for locals starved of live music. “We met people with tears in their eyes because they had not heard live music in months,” Joyce writes on the band’s site.
The name nods to abolitionist John Brown’s “Secret Society of Six” of 1859 — a fit for a summer of civil-rights protests and, of course, a core group of six musicians. As the pandemic eased, the Six developed into a classic New Orleans traditional jazz band, delving into the deep cuts of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, 1920s dance tunes, and the New Orleans revival era.
Their recordings include the debut Secret Six (2021), hailed by OffBeat as “one of the best new albums in 2021”; the Centennial Tribute to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (c. 2023); and Toot Sweet and Goose the Beat (c. 2026), a self-released set the Syncopated Times praised as “highly recommended to fans of the livelier side of New Orleans jazz.” By 2026 the personnel had solidified into a two-trumpet octet: Zach Lange and Nathan Wolman (trumpets), Haruka Kikuchi (trombone), James Evans (clarinet), Joplin Purnell (piano), Hunter Burgamy (banjo), Dizzy Incirlioglu (washboard), and Joyce on bass. The band holds residencies at clubs including DBA on Frenchmen Street.
