Welcome Miles!
I think TC is a goner. No worries, glad you made it here! Tell us more about your band!
Thanks for having me.
Well, I’m not bragging or engaging in shameless promotion if you ask, right?
Jill Martini & The Shrunken Heads- Imagine Julie London and Hilo Hattie having a drink in a tiki bar with Django Reinhardt and Daffy Duck. True fact!
We used to be a gypsy jazz trio with a great upright bassist, and then we got ukuleles. Same licks, sillier songs. Jill has such a wide range that it makes a fun little sandbox to play in. I’d been playing steel guitar in another tiki band (Rin-Kon-Tiki), so I brought that into the mix. We have a percussionist that covers all the groovy Martin Denny beats. It could be anything from a Don Ho song to Santana or Ozzy Osborne or Arthur Lyman. We adore Johnny Aloha, and covered his song “Drink to Hawaii” on our first CD.
That first CD, The Natives Are Restless, was very acoustic oriented. I hadn’t been playing the acoustic steel very long when we made it. In fact, I had only had that steel for two weeks when we recorded the steel part in Drink to Hawaii. The title track is, of course, a Don Tiki song.
Once that album came out, we were able to play some of the bigger tiki events, like Tiki Caliente and the Original Tiki Marketplace. Our current album, Sip It!, is a love letter to that Palm Springs exotica nightlife. It is much more layered and lush than the first album. That’s what we call the “supper club set”. I keep calling it the “stripper beat” set, but that’s a long story for another time.
There’s so much on my drawing board that I want to do with this band in a tiki setting, like interactive musical presentations. Now that we know a lot of people in this community, we can really stretch out.
