Willamette Week - November 2007
Portland Tribune - December 2006
CD Baby
The Oregonian - September 2004
Willamette Week - August 2004

HeadOut

- Stephen Marc Beaudoin, Willamette Week

[TIN-PAN-ALLEY VALENTINE] Captain James Cook—he’s the lead “trashcanjo” player of this infinitely entertaining foursome—may just be a “junk junk junk junk junkie,” but let’s hope music is a habit he won’t quit. Bad metaphors aside, this is one hard—rocking quartet of modern ragtimers. When not sending listeners tumbling more than half a century backward in their resident Wednesday gigs at the Moon and Sixpence, the group is out spreading the gospel of the cornet, the carnorgan and the trash bass.


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Sweet synergy sings from DIY instruments

- Barbara Mitchell, Portland Tribune

All pretense aside, any band that started out as a vehicle for a newly created instrument called the “trashcanjo” (that would be a banjo crafted from a waste receptacle) and then named itself after said item set out to have a good time.

You can certainly hear that on Real Life, the third and latest offering from local combo Trashcan Joe.

Cap’n James Cook and his merry men play “idiosyncratic old-time jazz.” What that means is much less stuffy than it sounds. While plaintive instrumentals like album closer “Monology” are lovely postcards to a bygone era, the band’s raucous originals are sure to raise eyebrows - and get feet stomping.

From the opening strains of “Real Life” through tongue-in-cheek ditties like “Cell Phone,” “Enough About You” and “Rehabilitation,” it’s clear that this is not your grandparents’ music.

While the instrumentation on Real Life is enough to raise a chuckle, the vocal harmonies are the star of the show. In addition to the trashcanjo, the album features kazoo, washboard, zob stick, accordion and a one-string trashcan bass.

This is an album you’ll want to put on repeat - but, more important, this is a band you want to see live. This kind of energy and old-fashioned good time doesn’t come along every day.


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5 out of 5 stars

I couldn't be more excited to announce Trashcan Joe on CD Baby. I first heard these guys at a rooftop cocktail party in downtown Portland, Oregon. Literally having made their instruments out of trash can remnants, their unique jangle is one that stands out from its roots of dixieland, ragtime and early swing jazz. Let me tell you, as soon as these guys start thunking, picking and plucking on their modest instruments, everyone in the vicinity shuts up and dances along. Throw in some kazoo and vocals for the distintive touch of humor and wit. There is an unmistakable genius in this catchy mix of 1920's style jazz, folk and blues that leaves all the others in the dust.

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Notes from the Northwest music scene

- By DON CAMPBELL

NOW WE'RE TALKIN' TRASH -- Duke Ellington drew a major line in the musical sand: You either swing, or you don't.

Trashcan Joe swings. Like nobody in town.

Founded by former San Franciscan swingster Captain James Cook -- a member of the Wags, Whiskey Puppy and Jimbo Trout and the Fish People -- Trashcan Joe is a quartet of inestimable talent, humor of the tongue-firmly-in-cheek variety, and a certain preservationist quality for the string swing that found favor in the 1920s and '30s.

Cook, it seems, designed and built possibly the world's first trashcan banjo, more affectionately known as the trashcanjo, and needed an outlet for the ensuing alter ego, Trashcan Joe. Adding fuel to Cook's musical exploration are washtub bassist and co-founder Chuck Masi, cornetist Jason Wells, and string wizard Ben Bonham on trash steel (his invention) and National steel guitar.

All four contribute original swing music, faithful in every way except the scratchy output to the thick and archaic 78 rpm recordings of '20s and '30s jazz and ragtime. These boys may as well have walked out a Portland Shanghai tunnel, dusted themselves off, plopped themselves down on a bandstand, and counted off a rag or ballad or Django-style swing number.

"It's the ultimate negation of responsibility for being good at your instrument," says guitarist Bonham of the band's bent. "We're playing trashcan."

It points once again to Portland fast entrenching itself as a fertile and anachronistic home for old-time swing music. What's the attraction for the trashcan phenomenon? "We think it's quite funny," says Bonham, himself half of the adept swing duo Stillway and Bonham. "We pretend it's jazz. We just try and get the chords right. We're all obsessed with the music of the '20s and '30s. We play a lot of Fats Waller. All the stuff we're writing is in that vein."

Bonham, who found his way into music through punk until he discovered Delta blues, adds, "I think there really is an audience. We get extraordinarily good reactions. Younger, trendier people see it as kind of freaky. Older people can dance to it. At the various festivals we've played, there's a wide cross-section."

The band holds court with a regular Wednesday gig at the Moon and Sixpence on Northeast 42nd Avenue. Friday the quartet is set to release its new CD, "Wrong Side of Town," 15 delightful songs that jump and swing and tickle a musical funny bone. There's nothing deep or ponderous here. It's all about sweet little melodies, relaxed harmonies, and the deft execution of that darned swing music.

Only three tunes are covers: Louis Jordan's "What's the Use of Getting Sober," Western swing bandleader Milton Brown's "Pretty Woman" and Jimmy Bruno's "On the Avenue."

The other 12 hit the ears like timeless classics. Cook's trashcanjo and Bonham's guitar work anchor the solid rhythm required by swing. It's a feel that's hard to teach, but so much fun in the hands of masters like these two. Wells' cornet ditties give each song a lift and lilt. For those not familiar with the thump of the one-stringed washtub bass, Masi slaps and rumbles with the best of them, biting off more than one gut-punching solo.

Trashcan Joe is a marvel, a wonder that defies categorization in any sort of contemporary setting. The one word that seems to cover the band is charm.

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METAL MUSIC MACHINE

by Kelly Clarke - Willamette Week - August 18th, 2004

Every Wednesday night, the Moon and Sixpence, a cigar-perfumed English pub in the Hollywood District, pushes aside a few of its chairs and tables to clear just enough space for a time machine: Trashcan Joe.

The trumpet player snaps his suspenders. A rough-whiskered man straps a metal washboard over his beer belly and signals a pair of men crouching over a converted steel washtub and a battered beer keg--and suddenly the pub rockets back in time. A tinny, warbling barbershop-quartet harmony races up its burgundy walls, the sound soaking into the smoke-laced woodwork just before a double jangle of steel guitar and banjo can catch it.

These folk 'n' old-timey metal music machine romps are led by trash master James Cook, the gentleman whose Junkyard Wars-worthy idea to marry a trash can and a banjo spawned, we're told, the world's only "trash-can-jo," as well as the band Trashcan Joe itself. Armed with converted washtubs, cigar boxes and the Sixpence's own pint glasses, the dumpster-diving foursome treads lightly upon the decades, visiting the 1930s with a rendition of "All of Me" and then fast-forwarding to the Beatles. It's as if someone is playing an old gramophone record in surround sound.

It's an apt soundtrack for a place where Guinness ads and framed photos of the Sex Pistols jostle for wall space and copies of The New Yorker litter the stout benches. The tall bookshelf is stocked with a copy of American Foreign Policy Reader--from 1964.

As Trashcan's old-time radio warble resonates through the space, the tavern's near-necking couples, beer buddies in Kyuss T-shirts, and serious dart contenders pause to let out a cheer before resuming their primary pastime: drinking.

From the lithe French brew Stella Artois to burly Farmhouse and Belgian draughts, the Sixpence is the Olympic Village of beer and spirits. If the frothy Lindemans Framboise on tap doesn't clue one in to the tavern's liquid superiority, perhaps this will: Its menu includes a footnote about Reinheitsgebot, the German law that forbids brewing bad beers.

The pub's attention swings back to the band as the horn player hops atop a chair and launches into a one-man can-can while shaking a broomstick studded with jingling bottle caps.

As he finishes the number, the pub's light fixtures begin to flicker, as if clapping in time with its beer-flushed patrons. It is easy to imagine that we are in a decade past, perhaps in the belly of a great London train station. We travelers share a pint and let these Americans entertain us, their brash tunes filling our heads with silver-screen images of the land across the pond.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's the Guinness talking.

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