Who we are
We are a Detroit jump blues and boogie-woogie rhythm collective. On a normal night that means upright bass, drums, piano, guitar, tenor sax and baritone sax. Legally we are 24th Street Roots & Tube Audio Collective LLC, a small company that owns a tape machine, a bench, a van and a lot of cables.
We play for dances, weddings, club nights and private parties. We also restore amplifiers and record other bands to analog tape. Those three jobs feed each other. A horn chart sounds better when somebody has fixed the amp it is played against, and an amp gets fixed better when the person fixing it also plays in a band that uses it.
The bandleader
Harlan “Slim” Kovacs, Bandleader, Upright Bassist & Vintage Tube-Amp Tech, started the group. He picked up the upright as a teenager, learned to repair amps because he could not afford to pay someone else to do it, and has not found a reason to stop doing either. He writes most of the horn charts, leads the band and runs the bench. If you write to us, he reads the message.
The room
We work at 1515 Michigan Ave, in Corktown, Detroit, MI 48216. Corktown is Detroit’s oldest surviving neighborhood, a few blocks of brick between the old train station and the river, and it has been a working musician’s address for as long as anyone here can remember. The room is part rehearsal space, part recording room and part workshop. The tape machine sits near the bench, which is the quiet part of the arrangement.
How we record
Everything we release goes live to 2-track analog tape. The band plays in a room together, a few microphones listen, and the machine writes what it hears to reel. There is no click track, no overdubbing and no punch-ins. If somebody makes a mistake, we play the take again from the top. The listing of our reels is on the home page.
The bench
We service and restore American tube combos from the 1950s and 1960s, especially tweed and brownface. The work is mostly capacitors, grounding, bias and tremolo, plus the occasional speaker. We write up every job, and you can read how we think in the bench notes.
Write to us
- Booking: booking@the24thstreetwailers.com
- Amp bench and tape transfers: bench@the24thstreetwailers.com
- Post: 24th Street Roots & Tube Audio Collective LLC, 1515 Michigan Ave, Detroit, MI 48216
We read the arrangements side too. If you want a horn chart in a specific key, our arranging notes will tell you how we write them.