The New Wonders - Steppin' Out

(Turtle Bay Records, 2024)

Bandcamp

Mike Davis’s The New Wonders follows up their eponymous debut recording with another provocative vision of the Lost Generation and its music, Steppin’ Out. This recording is of jazz that traveled upriver to Chicago and then to New York City early in the last century. This is the society music of the Jazz Age before the darkness of the Great Depression. The pairing of “My Melancholy Baby” and “Cornet Chop Suey” in this production serves to illustrate the Chicago/New Orleans rhythm dichotomy melding into an environment where “My Blue Heaven” can emerge into an urban environment without being sullied by it. Davis is a leader in this historically informed performance of period American popular music. The music presented here is too old to be nostalgic, rather, it exists as an aural portal to a time and place scarcely imaginable today. It is joyful and full of mirth, played with no hint of “whistling past the graveyard” as the end of the 1920s drew to a close. All things were possible in this music when it was first imagined and Davis captures that innocent expectation very well.