The Garden of Joy takes its name from a real place: a rooftop venue atop the Pythian Temple in New Orleans' Central Business District, reopened in 1927 by bandleader, publisher, and violinist Armand J. Piron. In its time, the Pythian was among the city's most significant Black-owned cultural institutions, and the Garden of Joy was its crown jewel. The modern band borrows the name, and something of its spirit.
The band was founded in the summer of 2018 in Boston by Hunter Burgamy and Colescott Rubin as a group of friends drawn together by a shared love of swing, playing for tourists in the Boston Common and at Club Passim before bringing their sound to New Orleans for the 2019 Satchmo SummerFest — where they opened the festival's main stage on Louis Armstrong's 118th birthday. That week they played The Spotted Cat, Buffa's, and WWOZ, and shared stages with Charmaine Neville, Carl Sonny Leyland, Paul Sanchez, and members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Burgamy took over the Garden of Joy name as his own New Orleans-based project.
The band's debut album, Bouncin' Around, was recorded over four days in the summer of 2022 on Poland Avenue and at the Tigermen Den, and released via Big Tone Records in February 2023. Its fourteen tracks range from a tune written in 1877 to a set of 1910s and '20s blues and stomps, played by a rotating cast of New Orleans' sharpest young traditional jazz musicians, including trombonist Colin Myers and clarinetist/saxophonist Jory Woodis. The record earned strong reviews from OffBeat Magazine and The Syncopated Times, and the band performed the 2022 French Quarter Fest and has since appeared on the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival's lineup.
