The Mumbles bring jams back to Boone

The Mumbles are a trio of musicians that bring a big sound to their live shows.

Made up of Keith Burnstein on keyboards, bass and vocals, Ethan Shorter on drums and vocals, and Ejric Bernhart on tenor sax and vocals, The Mumbles play original music that runs the gamut from funk and soul to New Orleans-based grooves.

Next Thursday evening, March 7, The Mumbles will bring their party music to Boone Saloon. The show begins at 10 p.m., and tickets are $5.

The Mumbles began as a duo in Brooklyn, N.Y., with Bernhart coming into the band at a later time. With the group playing such blatantly New Orleans-influenced music, the trio made a big decision a couple of years ago when it relocated to the Crescent City to authenticate its chops.

“Sometimes, it is hard for people to understand, especially if you talk with people that haven’t been to New Orleans before,” Burnstein said. “It is nice to talk with somebody that has an idea of what it is like down here, because it is something that is kind of indescribable. You can say as much as you want about the scene here, but you have to come here to experience how magical it is, the way everything sounds and how everything is so laid back, jazzy and warm.”

Brooklyn, The Mumbles former base of operations, is getting a lot of buzz lately, as the scene there has grown in recent years. Surprisingly, however, the members of the band have found that there are more music opportunities in New Orleans, whose metropolitan population is a little more than 1 million, than there is in New York City, which has a metropolitan population of more than 15 million.

“Brooklyn is awesome,” Burnstein said. “We still all go to Brooklyn a whole lot. Our move wasn’t a matter of Brooklyn or New York City not being good to us; it was more that we saw an opportunity down here that we didn’t see there. Here, we saw the opportunity to play and get better, and to be able to play like it is your job. In New York, I would say, there are less opportunities to play every night of the week. You can’t play every day of the week as the same band, unless you get work as a side man. Most of our friends and peers in Brooklyn, and I love a lot of those people, they have to be out on the road all of the time. Here, we play about five or six times a week, at least. I love Brooklyn, and I think it is one of the greatest places there is, but we came down here to incubate. I don’t know if I’ll stay here forever, but New Orleans is an amazing place to get better.”

When The Mumbles do tour outside of Louisiana, Boone has proven to be a favorite destination.
“We’ve been coming to Boone for a long time, actually,” Burnstein said. “We’ve played there, probably, for at least five years. The first place we played in Boone was called the Dragonfly Theater. Then, right after that, we moved over to the Boone Saloon and have been playing there ever since.”

For more information on The Mumbles, visit http://www.reverbnation.com/brooklynmumbles.