His spouse, actress Jennifer Weedon,[8] knowing of Evan's desire to start a jazz band, placed an ad on Craigslist for him.

Undaunted, she taught herself to play the washboard–jug band style and began placing advertisements on Craigslist searching for others who shared her fervid enthusiasm for early jazz.

[11] Serendipitously, Evan and Elizabeth both answered the same Craigslist ad for a traditional jazz jam occurring at a noodle shop near Times Square in Manhattan.

[1] "I started playing [Fats Waller's] 'Your Feet's Too Big' on the piano and Elizabeth joined in like we'd been singing that duet together for decades," Palazzo recalled.

[14] A college acquaintance of Evan's – or "Bibs"[12] as he came to be known – heard that they might be looking for a tap dancer for the band and put them in touch with their first hoofer, Edwin "Fast Eddy" Francisco.

[14] For several years, The Hot Sardines played free gigs for friends and at small open-mic venues such as the now-shuttered Banjo Jim's on the Lower East Side.

"[14] Over the next couple of years the band attracted musicians from prestigious institutions like the Juilliard School and Berklee, accomplished professionals who were unafraid to "get down and dirty" with early American jazz.

[16] Slowly, the core group of the band grew to a septet and then an octet, with Mike Sailors on cornet, Jason Prover on trumpet, Evan "Sugar" Crane on sousaphone and bass, Nick Myers on saxophone and clarinet, and Alex "Tastykakes" Raderman on drums.

[11] During the economic downturn known as the Great Recession,[17] the band fortuitously benefited from the mid-2010s hot jazz revival,[15][18] a Millennial cultural phenomenon emanating from Brooklyn.

"[19] This revival was largely ascribed to the popularity of television programs such as Martin Scorsese's Boardwalk Empire which renewed interest in the Roaring Twenties and, in particular, the frenzied underground music of the Prohibition-era speakeasies.

[10] Amid this jazz revival, a turning point for the Hot Sardines came in 2010 when they performed for the first time at the speakeasy-themed Shanghai Mermaid, a 6,000-square-foot warehouse behind an unmarked door in Crown Heights.

[17][20][21] During the apex of the economic recession,[17] the "extravagantly theatrical" Mermaid recreated the decadent atmosphere of a red-walled 1930s cabaret and was the epicenter of the throwback jazz scene, with monthly underground costume parties and aerialists swinging from the ceiling.

[11][22] She had received a cryptic email stating that an unidentified third party was seeking a jazz band that could perform songs in French for a last-minute gig on the forthcoming Bastille Day.

[37] They played to sold-out appearances at Symphony Hall accompanied by the Boston Pops,[38] with their songs arranged for the orchestra by Tony Award-winner Bill Elliott.

"The real stunner was 'Wake Up in Paris'," wrote The Boston Globe at the time, adding that "with sweet, lush, Technicolor strings, it was hard to imagine how it could possibly work without orchestral accompaniment.

[39]) Later that year, in October 2014, the Sardines headlined the grand reopening of the Rainbow Room located on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, an Art Deco-skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.

[5][40] Traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, the "flaming little fishes"[11] made a splash with their London debut in the Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall in November 2014.

[4] (They also appeared annually from 2012 to 2016 as the musical headliners on the short-lived TCM Film Cruise, hosted by Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz, where the band entertained fans of classic and pre-code cinema amid anchorages in the Bahamas.

[41][42]) On June 16, 2016, the troupe released French Fries + Champagne, their second album on the Decca/Universal label, which featured Tony-winning thespian Alan Cumming on one of the standout tracks, "When I Get Low I Get High" (originally recorded in 1936 by Ella Fitzgerald).

[43] A tongue-in-cheek music video with Cumming and Bougerol performing the song was released the same day on YouTube and gradually amassed nearly one million views.

"[45] For their own part, the Sardines remain light-hearted about their success and insist their continued goal is to promote cultural awareness of little-known 20th century jazz pioneers.

"[11] The band's emphasis on improvisation and gusto led the Festival d'Île de France to characterize their raucous style as "a jubilant jazz" which evokes "Renaissance Harlem cabarets.

They often cite Fats Waller,[12] Louis Armstrong,[12] Thelonious Monk,[55] Count Basie,[54] Django Reinhardt,[12] Fred Astaire,[55] Mamie Smith,[55] Billie Holiday,[55] the Andrews Sisters,[54] Duke Ellington,[19] Jelly Roll Morton,[10] Peggy Lee,[56] The Mills Brothers,[19] and Ray Charles among others.

Palazzo has explained that, since the band views jazz as not sacrosanct, their unpretentious interpretations draw upon an electric variety of sources encompassing "the Muppets to Bugs Bunny and from Harry Connick, Jr. to James Brown and Louis Prima.

"[10] However, in a 2017 review in The Syncopated Times Eli Newberger complained that the band lacked proper reverence for jazz as a venerated art form and did not meet its requisite high standards.

[63] However, Newberger did praise "the tap dancer [A.C. Lincoln], who picked up the subtleties, syncopations and accents of the many pieces in which he took extended solo turns, demonstrating the special connection between layered rhythm and melodic variation, like the best classical jazz soloists from Louis Armstrong to 'Fats' Waller to Benny Goodman.