Crawfish Fest will feature Ocean Avenue Stompers, Jersey Shore band with a New Orleans sound

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Many of the artists who will perform at the 33rd annual Crawfish Fest — which will take place at The Sussex County Fairgrounds in Augusta, May 29-31 — are from Louisiana. But the “Ocean Avenue” in the name of The Ocean Avenue Stompers — who will perform on the main stage, May 31 at 11:30 a.m. — refers to a street in Asbury Park, where they first started performing, in 2020.

The Ocean Avenue Stompers — featuring veterans of the Shore music scene, and specializing in a raucous mix of R&B, jazz, rock and soul music, steeped in the traditions of both New Orleans and Asbury Park — made their Crawfish Fest debut last year. Trombonist, singer and bandleader Ian Gray says the booking came “after a really great response to what we’ve been doing in Asbury. Music fans had been writing to the organizer, Michael (Arnone), to get us on the bill. So we got on last year and then this year they moved us to the main stage.”

From left, Ian Gray, Jimmy Law, Declan O’Connell and Ryan Gregg sample the boudin balls at last year’s Crawfish Fest. Law, of Dogs in a Pile, joined Ocean Avenue Stompers as a guest musician.

Last year, they played on the second stage, while Marcia Ball was on the main stage. “That was tough: She’s a legend,” says Gray. “But we started with a really great crowd and a lot of familiar faces, and by halfway through our set when we had a couple of special guests come up, the whole tent was just rockin’.”

Those special guests were guitarist Jimmy Law from the jam band Dogs in a Pile, and blues singer-guitarist Al Holmes, who often joins the band at its Asbury Park shows, too. Gray says guests are possible for this year’s set, too.

Gray had never attended Crawfish Fest before performing at the festival, which is always on the weekend after Memorial Day. “It’s just always been tough: That’s normally a pretty busy time for everything the band’s got going on, and all the other bands that I work with,” he says.

He adds that the fans’ push to get the band in the lineup resulted from “our weekly Monday shows at R Bar (in Asbury Park) and getting to know and meet some of the New Jersey fans and New Orleans transplants and all these people in the local community that are obsessed with this festival. They were like, ‘You have to go.’ And then they made it necessary because we got a gig, so (last year) was my first time going, and I was blown away.”

Ocean Avenue Stompers started as a marching brass band, in the New Orleans tradition, but now performs in a variety of different-sized formation, both mobile and stationary. For Crawfish Fest, it will be eight pieces, featuring keyboardist Ryan Gregg, guitarist James McCaffrey, bassist Declan O’Connell, drummer Charlie Patierno, percussionist Kevin Grossman, trumpeter Joe Gullace and saxophonist Robin Clabby, in addition to Gray.

The band is sticking to covers at this point, but has long-term plan to expand into original songs as well. “We’ve been working slowly but surely on our first original release,” says Gray. “We haven’t debuted any of that material yet and we wanna make sure to give the (Crawfish Fest) audience what I think they want from us, which is our take on New Orleans classics as well as some Jersey Shore classics, like I know we hit (Bruce Springsteen’s) ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-out’ last year, which was fun. While we’re probably a year away from some originals, we have some songs written by different people in the band like Ryan Gregg from Shady Street Show Band, that we’re gonna be working into our shows (later) this year.

“So many of us work in our own original projects, with Declan and Black Flamingos, Charlie has a band called Octave Cat. James has Karmic Juggernaut, and Ryan has Shady Street and his solo career. The idea of the Stompers was always to be a bit more of, like, an entertainment company, and a source of having a vision for live music, and it being flexible and being whatever lineup someone envisions us to be, and us putting that together. So I want to make sure to document all of that first, whether it’s ‘Live at Crawfish Fest,’ ‘Live at R Bar,’ a brass band EP … I want to document that kind of stuff in the next year and have those be our first releases before we get into original music so that we can help define the versatility of the band.”

The Talking Heads cover band Start Making Sense toured with The Ocean Avenue Stompers Horns this year.

In addition to presenting its own shows, Ocean Avenue Stompers sometimes loans its horn section to the Talking Heads cover band Start Making Sense, as they did for a May 15 show at The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank.

“This is our fifth year touring with Start Making Sense as a collaboration where we’re playing as a four-piece horn section on every song with them for two sets of all-original horn arrangements,” says Gray. “We also regularly collaborate with our friends like Dogs in a Pile — whose newest record (Distroid) just came out that we’re on, and we do some shows with them in the Philly/Asbury area — and we’re also busy behind the scenes as a horn section working with local artists and different original music projects.”

Prior to forming Ocean Avenue Stompers, Gray was in Remember Jones’ band and toured with Cory Wong, among other projects. He describes the decision to form Ocean Avenue Stompers as a kind of “epiphany,” inspired in part by Bruce Springsteen’s uplifting 2006 Seeger Sessions Band show in post-Katrina New Orleans.

“I remembered listening to him play the Seeger Sessions music live in New Orleans and sort of scratched my head and said, ‘Well, if Bruce can do it … it’d be cool to form something that’s just feel-good music, that’s based in Asbury and that’s versatile: you know, that could be a brass band and move around.’ ”

It wasn’t an entirely new musical direction. Gray and other musicians had been played brass band shows in the area since about 2010. “We just didn’t put a (band) name on it until 2020,” Gray says.

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The Ocean Avenue Stompers perform with Ben Jaffe (far left) of Preservation Hall Jazz Band at The Stone Pony in 2023.

By the end of the summer of 2020, with all the nightclubs still closed because of the pandemic, Ocean Avenue Stompers were presenting regular outdoor shows in Asbury Park. “We did really well, when it came down to paying our rent,” Gray says. And when R Bar opened in Asbury Park, in May 2021, they began playing there regularly; they still do so, every Monday.

So how did a Jersey boy like Gray (originally from Manasquan) develop an interest in New Orleans music?

“Studying jazz in Philadelphia, and getting to understand the Northeast way of doing jazz … when it comes down to bebop, and fast and technical (jazz) … that didn’t resonate with me as much as the birthplace of jazz and the music that still lives in New Orleans. When it comes down to rhythm & blues and funk and soul, that’s really the birthplace of that music, and I very much associate the sound of Asbury Park with the sound of New Orleans. In talking to many musicians from New Orleans, I’ve done nothing but strike major parallels between Asbury Park and New Orleans, as sister cities in many different ways — when it comes down to segregation, and city planning, corrupt politicians, when it comes down to architecture, when it comes down to hurricanes. And most importantly, in knowing the history of The Stone Pony — this one place that kept music alive in a city that was dying around it. Both cities have gone through those tough times.

“Music is more than just a performative art. It’s healing and it’s completely necessary and it defines the culture. And it has to do with the quality of life in Asbury Park and New Orleans.”

Ben Jaffe of The Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park.

He mentioned the popular T-shirt that declares, “Music Saved Asbury Park.” “I always sort of laugh at that shirt, but that’s a pretty good example of how people feel about music,” he says. “It’s a necessity for our lives. And when you go to New Orleans, you see how they value and respect music.”

Gray sees the Sea.Hear.Now festival, an annual Asbury Park event since 2018 — and one that Ocean Avenue Stompers has performed at — as an attempt to create something akin to New Orleans’ famed annual Jazz & Heritage Festival.

“I see a lot of parallels,” he says. “When Ben Jaffe from Preservation Hall (Jazz Band) came up to Sea.Hear.Now and told me that Asbury Park might be the only other place he’d consider living than New Orleans, because of these parallels that we were discussing … that hit me really hard.”

For more about Crawfish Fest, visit crawfishfest.com.

For more about Ocean Avenue Stompers, visit oceanavenuestompers.com.

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