“...their music is honest always, raw when it feels like it, dainty otherwise, and breathing all the time. These recordings are magnificent. And unruly. And alive.” - Michael Steinman, “Jazz Lives” https://jazzlives.wordpress.
“Heather Stewart is a remarkable vocalist…Barker has collected great bands on two continents and you should acquire both.” - The Syncopated Times October 2021 - https://syncopatedtimes.com/
“Dancers will find nothing but gold on this album. Songs like Play The Blues And Go and The Pearls bear up to repeated listenings, and would make excellent songs for performances. The combination of ‘live’ and studio recordings across the two discs offers dancers that mix of exciting high energy and more thoughtful engagement that make for great dancing.” - Sam Carroll http://dogpossum.org/2022/09/
“Heather Stewart's ability to stretch phrases subtly over the bar line gives her vocals a seductive, slightly world-weary quality, and her fiddle playing contains echoes of old-time country and folk styles.”
Leigh Barker and The New Sheiks
Reviewer rating:
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Surrey Music Cafe, November 29
In 1920s slang, a ''sheik'' was a hip gentleman - a man about town - with obvious romantic appeal. Leigh Barker's band The New Sheiks are five snappily dressed young lads and one sassy lass, re-creating the sound of early jazz and blues. They dig up obscure songs from the American South, polish them up and make them sparkle with life.They also incorporate new tunes, dressed in vintage clothes but delivered with a playful nod to the now. A case in point from Friday's concert: Sex With My Ex, a mischievous update on the flagrantly suggestive blues tunes sung by Bessie Smith and others.
Singer Heather Stewart's ability to stretch phrases subtly over the bar line gives her vocals a seductive, slightly world-weary quality, and her fiddle playing contains echoes of old-time country and folk styles.
The rhythm section (Barker on bass, Matt Boden on upright piano and Sam Young on drums) imbues each tune with a buoyant swing that can be nudged into a strut or swagger, while Eamon McNelis and Don Stewart - on trumpet and trombone respectively - sound crisp, airy, jovial and mournful by turns.
The second set of Friday's show saw the Sheiks morph into the Melbourne Rhythm Project. Seven impossibly energetic dancers (led by Ramona Staffeld and Grant Swift) took to the floor, blending tap and lindy hop in choreographed routines and improvised solos that demonstrated - in irresistible fashion - the once inextricable links between jazz and dance.
Leigh Barker & The New Sheiks - The Sales Tax
Led by bassist Leigh Barker, The New Sheiks is a splendid band that proudly specialises in a vintage form of jazz and blues that harks back to the early days of jazz, an era when the leading blues singers were formidable women like Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith and Victoria Spivey.
On this album, recorded variously live and in the studio, they all have great fun performing a variety of original songs and vintage classics. The latter include ‘Sales Tax’ and ‘Lonely One In This Town’ by the Mississippi Sheiks, Ellington’s ‘Come Sunday’ and ‘Creole Blues’, and a neat medley of Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘Jungle Blues’ and Robert Johnson’s ‘Love In Vain’. Impressive teamwork, lots of strong solos and vocals, plenty of fun.
By Adrian Jackson - Rhythms Magazine
