Courtesy of Annie and the Fur Trappers
Annie Linders is an avid participant in the subculture of bike polo, an athletic pursuit that keeps her busier than fans of her musical pursuits may realize.
“It’s probably the biggest thing that cuts into my music time,” says the leader of Annie and the Fur Trappers. “We travel to play tournaments, like last summer, when we went to Bogotá, Colombia. There’s a huge club there, and it was a really fun experience. I was in Seattle a month ago to play. It can be a lot of traveling and being gone on the weekend, which can be tough when I should be working.”
Recently, though, Linders took her trad jazz band on the road for a couple-week stint that covered a good chunk of the East Coast and the Midwest. The trip was timed to coincide with the release of the band’s disc, Muskrat Ramble, which was released in physical form on June 1 and is slowly becoming an online presence as well.
“We called it the Great Lakes Tour,” she says. “We went to Bloomington, Illinois; Madison; Milwaukee; Chicago; Toronto; Rochester; Buffalo; Boston; and Lexington, Kentucky. It was kind of all over the place, but it was a really good experience, overall and I think a lot of people discovered the band during the tour and we sold a lot of CDs. Maybe we’ll have to do another tour, we’ll see. The four core members definitely got tighter from the beginning of the tour 'til the end.
“One of the funniest parts of the tour was that right after the Blues won the Stanley Cup, we ended up in Boston the day after, and made a lot of jokes about that,” Linders says. “The people were pretty respectful, though, and someone gave me a Bruins wristband to protect from the people of Boston. And when we were in Toronto, the Raptors were playing in the NBA Finals and happened to be playing on the night we were there. Had a bar full of people watching the basketball game as we were playing, which was a funny experience.”
The group, in this case, was made up of sousaphone player Jon Weiss, clarinet player Joshua Baumgardner, and Dustin Sendejas, a banjo player based in Nashville. Others jumped on/off the tour. At times, though, the group swelled to seven players and by the end “we had to cram five of us into an SUV for 10 hours. If a band’s still together after that I’d say that we’re still friends. There was some arguing over who got the middle seat, but other than that we were pretty good.”
While her road troupe had some flux, that’s not an abnormal thing for the Fur Trappers. About 12 people, Linders figures, is on the call list for gigs and it’s from that dozen that her band’s set on a gig-to-gig basis.
“When someone’s not available, someone else usually is,” Linders says. “The people on the album are on most of the gigs.”
Together, the collective’s schooled in the 1920s and ‘30s jazz and blues that’s present on the album, with artists such as Kid Ory, Lonnie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton all represented, along with the occasional original dotting albums and live playlists. The current album, Muskrat Ramble, is the band’s second and was recorded by Blue Lotus Studios house engineer/producer Paul Niehaus IV and is now available at select local stores, gigs and, soon, via Spotify.
Though there’s not yet a full month of release in the books for Muskrat Ramble, Linders has already had a chance to daydream about upcoming projects, beyond the fall release of Muskrat Ramble on vinyl. There’s thought of a Mardi Gras record, timed to next year’s celebration; though the thought of rights clearances is a hindrance, for sure. Much more likely, is a vaudeville show that Linders has begun chipping at, with performers slowly sought out and secured; that said, a magician’s still on the want list.
And, in the meantime, there’s a steady dose of local gigs to attend to. Every Saturday night, the group plays Yaqui’s on Cherokee. There’s regular work at the Thaxton Speakeasy and at Handlebar, where they play once a month for NOLA Swing nights. Taytor’s in Festus provides a nice, outta-the-city locale. And a bit more gigging has come at South City’s Alpha Brewing Co., where the band’s playing Thursday.
