Nu Deco at New World Center ft. Tank and the Bangas & Aaron Parks

Tank and the Bangas

Coming from New Orleans, Tank and the Bangas are surrounded by plenty of grand musical  traditions. And the five-piece group has a rare knack for combining various musical styles—fiery  soul, deft hip-hop, deep-groove R&B and subtle jazz—into one dazzling, cohesive whole that evokes  the scope of New Orleans music while retaining a distinctive feel all its own. 

“It’s music that can’t really be put in a box,” says singer and poet Tarriona “Tank” Ball. She fronts the  band with vivid charisma that helped Tank and the Bangas win NPR’s 2017 Tiny Desk Concert  Contest by unanimous acclaim, standing out among 6,000 entrants because of what Bob Boilen  called “the depth of their lyricism and the versatility of their players.” Those same qualities also  attracted the attention of Verve Records, which has signed the band. 

Ball’s lyrical depth has been years in the making. She came up in the strong local slam poetry scene  before meeting her bandmates: Merell Burkett on keyboards, Joshua Johnson on drums, Norman  Spence on bass and synth keys and, eventually, Albert Allenback on alto sax and flute. “Growing up, I always could sing, but I wrote better than I sang, so I focused on writing,” she says. After her team  won the National Poetry Slam Championship two years in a row, Ball turned her full attention to Tank  and the Bangas. 

What started as a loose collaboration at an open-mic night in 2011 has grown into a mesmerizing musical force that’s only picking up speed. After a featured set at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage  Festival early in the band’s career, the musicians built a reputation outside their hometown by

grinding it out on the road, honing their live show and releasing the 2013 album Think Tank, all the while converting audiences into passionate fans and garnering critical acclaim, from the New  Orleans Advocate to The New York Times. “It made us work hard,” Ball says of playing Jazz Fest. “It  made us want to feel deserving of it.” 

Their hard work is paying off: The Huffington Post says Tank and the Bangas defy description  onstage, adding, “It’s music that you have to experience.” The experience is subject to change from  one night to the next. 

“One show will feel very electronic, or hip-hop, and another show will feel slow and vibe-y and jazzy, and then another show will just be poetry and off-the-cuff riffs,” says Johnson. “As a band, we don’t  like to hear ourselves do the same thing for too long, so we might change a small thing here or there, and if we change enough small things, it seems like a big change.” 

Tank and the Bangas won the Tiny Desk contest with “Quick,” a riotous single they released in 2017  (and soon accompanied with a cheeky, not entirely safe-for-work video). There’s more new music  where that came from as the group works on the follow-up to Think Tank. “It’s going to be  awesome,” Ball says. “It’s going to be fun, and a little vulnerable at the same time.” 

The band’s ongoing evolution involves more than just music: Ball continues to grow and develop as  a performer and writer. Even back in the open-mic days, she was a force of nature. “I don’t know if  there’s such a thing as too free, but it was totally uninhibited. She was inspired,” Spence says, laughing at the memory. More recently, Ball has become less of a dervish onstage—“I was running  around so much I didn’t have time to sing at all,” she say—while finding new ways of expressing  herself as a writer.  

“I don’t just think about myself when I write now,” she says. “Just being with my bandmates taught  me to think more about other people. And when you have an audience of people ready to listen to  you, you’re excited to connect with them, you really are.”! 

Aaron Parks

Pianist Aaron Parks (born Oct 7, 1983) released his Blue Note debut “Invisible Cinema” at the age of 25 following three Blue Note releases with trumpeter Terence Blanchard. The BBC declared it “one of the great albums of 2008.” JazzTimes hailed him as “a new visionary.” The San Jose Mercury News named his “Alive in Japan” release as their 2013 Top Jazz Album of the year. He has released two albums on ECM including a solo piano recording and a trio record featuring Billy Hart and Ben Street. Parks has performed and recorded with Kurt Rosenwinkel, Dhafer Youssef, Terri Lyne Carrington, Ambrose Akinmusire, Gretchen Parlato, Kendrick Scott, and Marcus Miller among others. He is also a founding member of James Farm with Joshua Redman, Matt Penman and Eric Harland. His latest project “Aaron Parks Little Big,” hailed by PopMatters as “what jazz can be in the new century,” released their debut in late 2018; the follow-up “Little Big II: Dreams of a Mechanical Man” was released in May 2020 to critical acclaim. Later that year, Aaron was one of six composers selected to participate in Sundance Institute’s prestigious Film Music and Sound Design Lab. In 2022, he released a pair of collaborative trio albums with Matt Brewer and Eric Harland. He lives in Beacon, NY.