I heard a lot of amazing music last week at Jazzfest in New Orleans (I wish I could post something from Elder Edward Babb & the Madison Bumble Bees, but alas they have no recordings), but one of the most fun shows was 007 at The Saturn Bar on Sunday night. 007 begin with the highly improbable premise that four middle-aged white guys can play authentic Jamaican rocksteady, and through a slavish devotion to detail and a laser-beam focus on the soul of the music, they hit the ball out of the park. Massive chops and great voices don’t hurt their cause either.

The Tide is High was written by John Holt and originally recorded by his band The Paragons in 1967. It is one of the definitive core rocksteady works, which in 1980 became a planetary hit for Blondie. 007’s CD Studied Rudeness is chock-full of danceable tunes, all covers, drawn mostly from the canon but also including some rocksteady versions of other songs - Summer Breeze works surprisingly well here, and I had to resort to Google to determine that Bank Robber was in fact written by Mick Jones in the ’80s, not Toots Hibbert in the ’60s. You can pick up a copy of Studied Rudeness at the band’s site here, where you can also here more of their tunes. They also have a myspace page here. 007 are best appreciated live, and they are playing in New Orleans all the time.