If you’re a full-time musician playing in the New Orleans area, one thing is for certain. You’re going to be a part of multiple bands, musical projects, and more. Live music constantly pumps through the Crescent City, and its unending bars and musical venues open until the early morning hours. The opportunity is there for the taking. The problem for musicians who are being pulled in so many directions is they don’t have equal time to dedicate to their top collaborations. Such is the case for Nolatet.
The quartet featuring the legendary rhythm section of drummer Johnny Vidacovich and bassist James Singleton merges perfectly with the freeform improvisation of pianist Brian Haas and Mike Dillon’s vibraphone and percussion. The four musicians are in the upper echelon of the New Orleans scene. They’re the go-to guys in the city. Sadly, they’ve only put out two albums since they formed a decade ago… 2016’s Dogs and 2018’s No Revenge Necessary.
With eight years of material ready to go, an official release was impossible to put off any longer. Instead of hitting the studio to craft their compositions, the band tried a unique approach to their latest release Somethin’ to Relax With. They took their new material and performed it live over two concerts at the LowDown in Tulsa, OK. In a pass or fail test, the six best performances made the album. Walking a tightrope without a safety net, many more did not. Something as simple as starting the next song while the crowd was still applauding the previous one eliminated some of the band’s best material from the final cut.
The album still perfectly captures the talent, expertise, and polish the supergroup delivers nightly on stage. Haas, Dillon, and Singleton’s improvised leads constantlty push the live performances forward. Songs like Switchback and the title track Somethin’ to Relax With have an old school feel while Cluster and Surely Hazard revolve around spacier, free flowing improvised themes.
Haas, who also produced the album, joined Slide&Banjo’s Marty Halpern to discuss Nolatet’s long overdue release and the trials and tribulations of going for broke with its recording. He starts with the decision to record a live album instead of a studio version. “It comes down to composition. Everyone kept writing new material and it got to the point Johnny started mentioning we’ve got a lot of music. James also said, hey, we’ve got new stuff. We’re all composers, so it happened really organically. A lot of it came from Johnny. He’s the patriarch. He was excited and started to notice we were doing something new. We’re evolving. Changing and growing. We have a regular gig in Tulsa. Johnny really loves that club. It was his idea to record there. For better or worse.”
Another major risk for the band was performing a batch of new songs. Nolatet doesn’t tour weeks at a time. They hadn’t put in the miles on the road with songs still in an unexplored form. “All of the songs got played occasionally. There wasn’t a deep familiarity with them.” Hass notes. “They still needed some work. A lot of that work happened on stage. The band is really good with honesty and risk. The fact that some songs still needed work is why they’re not on the album. With some of the tunes, the fact they needed more work is why they landed on the album. It’s a bit of both. The unpredictability and all the associated risk did ruin a few takes. It also created a few takes.”
All six songs on the album are instrumental and heavily improvised. According to Haas, each one still had a basic frame heading into the concerts. “It all starts with the ink on the page. It starts with us reading it down in some way. Then we improvise the core of the material. Let’s take the song Doc Richter To You. James told us at the gig. He said, start improvising on this and then come in with the melody. It’s song specific in a way. That’s why Doc Richter starts with a solo section. James said something like let Mike go in or Brian go in before we come in with the main melody.”
While the six songs on the album showcase the heights Nolatet soared that night, Haas admits that was not always the case. “Oh yeah. The majority did not work. It’s what I’ve been saying. The risk and randomness served the six that made it on. The fact that we didn’t know the music better ruined ten songs. They didn’t come off like we were wanting.”
“I produced this album. It was an honor, but confusing.” Haas continues. “I would be listening to it with studio engineer Chad Mize and we were like, what is this? What happened here? Some of the songs we really knew didn’t come out right. There’s one we had memorized. It’s a fast burner called Jazz Witch. We have played it more than any of the other pieces. Mike counted the song while the audience was applauding from the previous song. Total user error. In the background on the tape, you hear one, two, three, four. There’s no way Johnny is going to hear that. It was, take a breath. Let the audience applaud. Then call the next song.”
With such little room for error, Haas looks back at the decision to not stop and redo a song that may have had the tiniest glitch. “That’s the magic and tragedy of live recordings. You’re in front of an audience, and there are things you don’t feel comfortable repeating. We should have stopped. If one of us had grown a set during the performance, there would have been a lot of that. The four of us are all performers and we got carried away in the moment of being in front of a sold-out crowd. The audience loved the chaos and failure they were experiencing. They were cheering and screaming. We’ll always find a way to redeem ourselves onstage.”
Hass continues, “That’s the vulnerability and why I think this record is so good. Whenever you can honor the composer, audience, and band members and it’s working in an equal way, that’s when you can sense a good take. All six songs I chose, there was a three-way honoring. That’s the only motivation I had. The audience was honored. The band was honored, and the composition was honored. I like how loose the Doc Richter turned out. The end is strange. Instead of taking a bombastic solo, Johnny takes a textual solo. I knew at the end of Richter that it was going to work. There were a few I knew at the time. I knew Black Pencil was a keeper. It’s all about finding the balance. Letting the music come first.”
While several songs may have come up short for making this album, the good news is there’s plenty of material for the next Nolatet release. Haas concludes. “100 percent. I’m so excited about all of our music. We could make two new records tomorrow. Three actually. I’m grateful for that. I love that we got six beautiful songs. It’s plenty of music for an album. It could have been better. It could have been worse. Out of our three records, this is our best.”
Nolatet – Somethin’ To Relax With
Royal Potato Family 2026