Hot Sardines bring joy to the Meadow

Hot jazz ain’t dead. Far from it. Twentysomethings rediscovered it in the 2000s and started selling out joints in New York City, playing music written decades before they were born.

It’s great music — tunes from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and the early ’50s, before modern jazz drowned out hot jazz. If you have a pulse, it makes you want to dance.

Right now, the Hot Sardines are sitting pretty on the hot jazz seat. Their album, “The Hot Sardines,” was No. 24 last week on the Billboard jazz albums chart; it peaked at No. 4 after the band was featured on “CBS Sunday Morning,” and it has spent 17 weeks on the charts.

The Hot Sardines tour stops Sunday, Aug. 2, at 7 p.m. at the Trapp Family Lodge Concert Meadow.

What can people expect from the show?

“Two hours of their lives to hear some of the greatest music ever written, and feel our sense of joy about it,” said Evan “Bibs” Palazzo, co-founder of the eight-member group; he’s the bandleader and plays stride piano. “We want them to leave with the joy of this music. It’s really a joy to the soul.”

Dancing will be required. “We want the audience to move,” Palazzo said. Even when playing in dark speakeasies, Hot Sardines always have the lights turned up, so people can see to dance in the aisles.

Palazzo is highly familiar with Vermont; he grew up and lives in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, and has skied in Stowe 20 or 30 times.

You might think old fogies would be the biggest fans of the Sardines music, but no. “People in their teens and 20s, they have a great time,” Palazzo said. “They tell us, ‘I’m gonna bring my mother!’ That tells us this music in the 21st century is ready to be absorbed by new generations without the context it had in the 20th century. As rock came in and then the Vietnam War, it became thought of as old people’s music. Our job is to undo that; it’s a casualty of American society.”

The Hot Sardines developed by accident. Palazzo was a working actor, doing theater, commercials and production work on films. Elizabeth Bougerol, the lead singer, grew up in Paris and Toronto, earned a master’s degree in media and communications from the London School of Economics, and made her living as a writer — including the guidebook “New England’s Favorite Seafood Shacks.”

Both loved music, and both showed up at an open jazz jam in Manhattan. They had an immediate musical connection. She asked him if he knew any Fats Waller; he started playing “Your Feet’s Too Big.”

After that, they got together every couple of months to play music, him on piano, she on vocals and washboard. One day, for fun, they went to an open mic night in Greenwich Village, and Edwin “Fast Eddy” Francisco started tap dancing while they were rehearsing. Today, his tap dancing provides the band’s percussion section.

Eventually, the band expanded to three horns, bass, piano, drums, tap dancer and singer-washboard player.

“We got into this by accident,” Palazzo said. He and Miz Elizabeth were playing music “on a lark; we never expected a career. We had other jobs; we were playing for fun, for tips; we were busking in subways — maybe for personal therapy. But we kept getting more and more invitations to play, and three years ago we quit our other jobs, and it’s been more than a full-time job since then.”

The band’s repertoire covers different songs from different eras with different arrangements. “The stuff we love,” Palazzo says. Some Ray Charles, early Louis Armstrong, South American and Cuban, some Nat King Cole, Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Anita O’Day.

“We’re influenced heavily by cities and their culture — Paris, New York City, New Orleans, those cities and all their music,” Palazzo said. “Harlem, Duke Ellington, swing, Dixieland — that’s our wheelhouse.”

Palazzo actually played Nat King Cole’s piano when he was 14; a bookstore had won it as a prize, and after school, he’d go into the store and play.

More recently, Hot Sardines played at Louis Armstrong’s house in Corona, Queens, giving concerts in the garden. “We played there twice,” Palazzo said. “We got to hold his trumpet, listen to his bootleg recordings. Our love of him is boundless.”

The Sardines have also been on the Jools Holland show on the Palladia TV channel, performed with the Boston Pops Orchestra and played at the Montreal Jazz Festival, among other dates on an exhaustive tour schedule.

“We pinch ourselves often,” Palazzo said. “We fell into this because we loved the music. I’d played cocktail piano, but who thought stride piano was something you could make a living at?”

There are other rewards, too.

“In Indianapolis, I think it was, a woman came up to us and said, “I wasn’t sure I was coming tonight because my mother died this morning. I can’t think of anything better to deal with this loss than to come to this show.’”

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If the weather’s bad Aug. 2, the concert will be at the Rusty Nail, 1190 Mountain Road. There’s limited seating, but plenty of room for standing and dancing. The bar will be open and food will be available.