INTERVIEW: Giselle Anguizola ready to swing at French Quarter Fest
G & The Swinging Three, a jazzy quartet set to play this year’s French Quarter Fest, will time travel with audience members for no extra expense. The shared destination are the Prohibition-era bars and underground dance halls of the 1920s, although a few stops in the decades of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s are likely as well.
Giselle Anguizola and John Saavedra lead the quartet, with the dancing Anguizola on vocals and percussion, and Saavedra on guitar. They are helped by a trumpet player and bassist, and when taken as a quartet, they each have hold the time-travel key.
G & The Swinging Three will play 2 p.m. Friday, April 7 at the French Market Traditional Jazz Stage as part of the annual French Quarter Fest. Anguizola promises to bring the dance tunes, likely from their latest album, The Vintage Jazz Hour; audience members simply need to bring the moves.
“Yeah, we’re super excited to be playing so much and being able to expose so many people to this older style of jazz, and we’ve been working on a lot of songs that have dance choreography, so incorporating the vintage jazz dances, such as the Charleston and some blues,” Anguizola said recently in a phone interview. “Our fans and people that enjoy our music will really get inspired to get up and move hopefully. That’s our plan. We want to inspire them.”
The actual jazz that G & The Swinging Three play is difficult to pinpoint to one particular time period. It spreads across multiple influences and includes traditional jazz, swing and gypsy jazz. It’s a cliche of New Orleans, but it seems appropriate: They put together a musical gumbo.
“I grew up listening to Latin music,” Anguizola said. “Being a Latina, my father is Panamanian; my mother is Mexican, and I grew up in the States, however. But listening to the orchestrations and the instrumentation of salsa, meringue already exposed me to live music and the feeling behind someone playing a physical instrument, such as a horn or guitar or drums, and when I found jazz, I completely fell in love with it. I was very young, and I knew that that was going to be part of my life forever. And I felt almost married to it. It was my first love, and it’ll always be my first love. And my heart is just so happy when I’m able to express that style of music. I must have been born in another era, I’m not sure, but I’m glad I’m able to preserve that art form and keep it alive and to share it with other people. It’s really special.”
Saavedra and Anguizola have a sister band called the New Orleans Swinging Gypsies, which features many more members than the quartet. That larger group plays mostly swing and gypsy jazz, so the two musicians decided to start this side quartet to play more danceable tunes.
In many ways, G & The Swinging Three are trying to replicate “some of those classic acts that you would see in the old movies with the actors and actresses that would sing and dance.”
The band also needs to be accessible for smaller venues, and tap dancing is actually part of the rhythm section. The vocals mostly fall on Anguizola, but she’s happy to share the spotlight. “All of us pretty much sing, except most of our bassists, but I like to share the load with other people and have other people express the art as well,” she said. “So I let people take songs, and we kind of trade. And we just have a lot of fun together as a group.”
It’s appropriate that G & The Swinging Three are finding success in New Orleans, the epicenter of music in the United States world. The city supports and develops its bands into world-class entertainment. With weekly residencies and special festival showcases, musicians are able to evolve their sound and take a risk from time to time.
“New Orleans is quite the magical city,” she said. “I tell people that all the time. It’s such a place because there’s so much music going on already. There’s so much art, and the energy is so vibrant in that area. It’s a place that people can really truly blossom into themselves and realize what it is that they have, what gifts they have to share with the world, and it’s one of the last cities here in the United States that resembles a feeling of freedom, of a sense of pure humanness the way that people interact with each other and the openness and the acceptance and the true sense of expression. In a lot of other cities, it can be quite challenging to meet the standards of whatever it is that will sell the most, and it seems like that globally. But in a place like New Orleans, it’s pretty much a free for all, and you get to be who you truly are. And I really thank the city for that. It’s helped me blossom into who I am now.”
The sound of G & The Swinging Three is at home on a large festival stage with hundreds dancing along, and it’s accessible in a smaller, more intimate venue like the 21st Amendment Bar, Bamboula’s or The Bourbon O Hotel Bar — all places the quartet performs on a weekly basis.
“I do enjoy the big festivals and large crowds,” Anguizola said. “I’ve been performing for probably almost 20 years, and I’ve been in different situations. The big crowds are a lot of fun. You get the energy hyped up, and you can really feed off everyone else’s energy and captivate and create together collectively. And that can be really inspiring and create a wonderful show, and that is something that’s delightful for me. I enjoy that. I enjoy performance in general, and the intimate setting in a smaller venue is really nice, too. There are days where I prefer a smaller group because I can speak to people, and they can hear what I have to say a little bit easier. But, you know, I think the important thing is to be able to take what I would tell people in a smaller group to a bigger audience and still have that same feeling of hanging out in a living room, so whether it’s three people that we’re performing in front of or 1,000 people, I still want to create a vibe where people are comfortable. And they feel at home, and it’s as though we’re just sharing with one another.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
G & The Swinging Three will play 2 p.m. Friday, April 7 at the French Market Traditional Jazz Stage as part of this year’s French Quarter Fest. Click here for more information.
