There’s a big band onstage cranking out classic, swinging rock ’n’ roll, complete with a horn section and backup singers. The man behind the microphone has a gravelly, deep, strange singing voice. There are nuts scattered across the bar.
You’re at a Harry Katz and the Pistachios concert.
Mixing old blues with modern lyrics, Harry Katz and the Pistachios are a 21st century big band. Songs range from Rolling Stones rock (“Rest of the World”) to low-down groove (“Fish Wall”) and finger-snapping jazz (“Homeless Baby Girl”). Katz’s unique vocal delivery is almost Tom Waits-esque and provides a unique twist to many of the genres and sounds the band explores. Learn more at andthepistachios.com.
Harry Katz and the Pistachios are set to perform as part of the Desert Blues Revival series at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 25, at Agua Caliente Palm Springs.
“I’m really, really influenced by the blues,” Katz said during a recent phone interview. “Old-school stuff like Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King are huge inspirations for me. There’s the BB King album Live at the Regal, and he’s also played with a big 10-piece band, so that was a big inspiration.”
The Pistachios are a formidable music force, featuring two vocalists plus a piano, saxophone, trombone, lead guitar, bass and drums. You should see their Jam in the Van performance for two reasons: their great performance, and to learn how all those people fit in that van.
“I’ve played in a lot of smaller bands … but there was a point where I just had to make the decision that it was time to have a big band, and just kind of had to jump off that cliff,” Katz said. “… In 2018, we were doing more six- or seven-piece, and then it has grown to, like, nine or 10 over time.”
Learning howto share a stage with so many people was a tricky task—as was learning how to craft songs to fit for every member.
“You can’t overplay when you have that many members; you’ve really got to share the stage,” Katz said. “I think getting a cohesive unit together that can share the stage and give each other that space, that takes a little time to build up to, for sure. I love what I call the economy of sound, where people are fitting in and are not just like, ‘This is your solo; this is my solo section’—but within one meter, one count, who’s filling in where to build up a sound all together?”
In recent shows, the band has significantly raised the amount of crowd interaction, thanks to one of their more popular songs, “OH YES!”
“The roots of it started with a song I wrote to warm up really cold crowds, where people would actually yell, ‘No!’” Katz said. “We would have a song where I would ask people if they wanted to do something with me, and then they would say, ‘No!’ and that really just livened up the room, because even people who are not feeling it love the idea of just saying no to you. That was where we built this idea of really getting a lot of crowd participation. ‘OH YES!’ kind of sprang out of that. It’s a love song that asks for consent, and we’re kind of including the audience in that. We also put out pistachios at the bar, and we have signs, and we have some dance contests. We try to keep things as involved as possible. We also do a bit of a puppet show.”
Katz’s voice can’t really be described, but I’ll try: It’s powerful, gruff and guttural.
“I started out playing in punk bands and then dropped out of school and hitchhiked out to California,” Katz said. “I would busk, and I had to learn to play guitar on a four-string guitar. I would sing and yell over the street noise. A few years later, I started bringing that to the stage. I wanted to figure out a way to translate that energy onto the stage, using the microphone very much like a tool, and kind of figuring out how to have my voice cut through in the same way that I worked so hard to have it cut through traffic.”
While the music may not be explicitly punk, Katz said: “I think that we’re still pretty punk, definitely in the attitude and the lyrics.”
The band’s first album, Scared of Romance, was released in late 2022, and solidified their rock and blues sound. As Harry Katz and the Pistachios move forward, exploration is on the brain.
“Our first album is very curated to be in all of these rock ’n’ roll elements, and as we move forward, I want to develop the sound more and go into more sophisticated and less genre-based realms, and just really focus on songwriting,” Katz said. “I love having all the different tools and sounds to play with in a live setting, to keep it really organic and lively. I’m not a huge fan of backing tracks. I understand the necessity for them for a lot of people, but it’s not really my bread and butter, so being able to do things where I have a piano player and I have horns to fill in these sounds really means a lot to me.”
While some may peg the band as a novelty act thanks to the signs and puppets, the music exudes meaningful lyrics.
“One of my big inspirations is Ray Charles, and his song ‘Bye Bye Love’ is such a happy-sounding song with real heartbreaking lyrics,” Katz said. “I love that experience of seeing a band live and just feeling the exuberance and having a great time—and then taking that music home and listening to it and hearing a deeper level. There’s layers to it. We try to tackle contemporary and serious issues. Our song ‘Homeless Baby Girl’ is about our housing crisis, but it’s wrapped as a love song dropped into this old-school classic swinging kind of rock ’n’ roll song. If you get deeper, it’s talking about some serious, serious issues.”
The band’s entertaining performances have allowed them to land opening spots for other one-of-a-kind acts, such as Tom Kenny and the Hi-Seas, a 12-piece rock and soul band led by the voice actor for SpongeBob SquarePants, and the Kyle Gass Band, led by Kyle Gass of Tenacious D.
“We found this really fun niche that we’ve fallen into, and it was crazy how much of the audience was shared between Tom Kenny and Kyle Gass,” Katz said. “Both Tom and Kyle close out the bar—they’re there until the very last person leaves, so I look up to them in that way, and they’re really great performers and really, really fun. Some of the best shows we’ve done were when we opened for Tom at (Los Angeles music venue) Zebulon to a sold-out house. … It’s a really cool world, and we’ve definitely found this really interesting—I don’t want to call it ‘novelty,’ but it’s a little bit borderline on that. People are really open to the fun and performance when they’re coming to see folks like that.”
Harry Katz and the Pistachios will perform at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 25, at the Cascade Lounge at the Agua Caliente Palm Springs, 401 E. Amado Road, in Palm Springs. Tickets start at $10. For tickets, visit eventbrite.com/cc/desert-blues-revival-1154849.
