[ a non-commercial project ]

     YOU SEE  the people rushing by. You hear the cries of the vendors as they peddle their nutty pralines and colored ices from the crowded sidewalks. You smell the oleanders and the sticky, warm, humid air of America's South. Sharkey is in town !

     Sharkey means music. Happy music, danceable music. Music you can hum and whistle and clap your hands to, on the second and fourth beats of each measure. Southern music.

     Somewhere in the official records of the state of Louisiana, filed away in the massive capitol at Baton Rouge, Sharkey's legal name is duly registered as Joseph Bonano. But to Louisianans in particular and Southern folk in general he is and always will be plain Sharkey, the little man with the derby hat and gold-belled trumpet, who for more than thirty years has faith-fully purveyed the finest jazz heard below the Mason-Dixon line.

     When this same diminutive musician, in 1951, took temporary leave of New Orleans' fabulous Bourbon Street to play engagements with his Kings of Dixieland at the New York Waldorf-Astoria, the Palmer House in Chicago and even concert and night club commitments in far-off Los Angeles, it was, to regular habitues of the Crescent City's old French Quarter, almost as if the Creole gumbo, B-Girls, Poor Boy Sandwiches, Chicory coffee and weatherbeaten window shutters had abruptly disappeared. For Sharkey and his musicians, veterans all, are valid and time-tested landmarks.

     When Sharkey tours through Texas, or Georgia, or Alabama, and through the upstate swampy marshes of his native Louisiana, he is welcomed by the mayors, by the old-timers who have danced to his music on memorable visits to New Orleans years ago, and by hep youngsters in blue jeans who regularly collect his Capitol records and hear his broadcasts from the Mardi Gras city.

     In this collection of Sharkey's best performances, selected by the leader himself and all of them recorded in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans on special equipment, there is music for every mood. "Basin Street Blues" is pure Indigo; "Temptation Rag" reflects the 4 a.m. hilarity of a Bourbon Street bistro. Along with the Sharkey trumpet are featured the trombones of Santo Pecora and Charlie Miller, clarinet by Lester Bouchon, mellophone and drums by Arthur (Monk) Hazel, Jeff Riddick's piano designs and bass — both string and tuba just for good measure — by Chink Martin.

     Capitol is privileged to present this, the first album ever to feature Sharkey and his Kings of Dixieland. It's the music which Southerners have loved for nearly half a Century. It's the music which the entire world will love a half Century from now. "Stomp off," as Drummer Hazel shouts, "let's go !"