Astral Project

Formed in 1978, out of the modern jazz side of New Orleans

Astral Project began in New Orleans in 1978, assembled by the tenor and soprano saxophonist Tony Dagradi from the city's modern jazz scene rather than its brass band or R&B traditions. Its first regular home was the Absinthe House on Bourbon Street, a room where Bobby McFerrin was known to sit in during the band's early years. That residency set a pattern the group has never really abandoned: a local stage, a long night, and material worked out in front of an audience rather than in a rehearsal room.

Dagradi arrived at the band with a sideman history that cut across the usual divisions. In New Orleans he worked with Ellis Marsalis, Allen Toussaint, James Booker, the Meters and Dr John; outside it he spent five years as a featured soloist with the Carla Bley Band, touring Europe, Japan and North America, and recorded and performed with Bobby McFerrin, Mose Allison and Nat Adderley. Since 1990 he has been Professor of Saxophone and Jazz Studies at Loyola University, which is part of why the band's diary has always been shaped around the city rather than around a touring circuit.

By the time Compass Records picked them up in the late 1990s the group had already been playing together for more than twenty years — an unusual thing to be able to say about a jazz band, and the single fact that most explains how they sound.

A line-up that stopped changing in 2001

For its first two decades Astral Project was a quintet with the pianist David Torkanowsky, a founding member who left in 2001. What remained was the quartet that still works today: Dagradi on saxophones, Steve Masakowski on seven-string guitar, James Singleton on bass and Johnny Vidacovich on drums. The gap is audible in the catalogue — Down Beat's description of the group as one of the most distinctive and cohesive quintets in jazz of the 1990s describes a band with a piano in it, and the harmonic job it did has since been absorbed by Masakowski's extra string.

Masakowski plays custom seven-string instruments built by the New Orleans luthier Sal Giardina, and has held two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships alongside grants from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation and the Louisiana Arts Division. His own sideman list runs from Woody Shaw and Carl Fontana through Jimmy Smith and Sam Rivers to Dave Liebman, Dianne Reeves, Bennie Wallace and Rick Margitza.

Singleton has recorded with Chet Baker, James Booker and Charlie Rich, and played with John Abercrombie, John Scofield, Ellis Marsalis, Gatemouth Brown and Lionel Hampton; he leads the experimental group 3 Now 4 and produced the band's album Elevado. Vidacovich is the member who most directly ties the group to the city's rhythmic vocabulary, having worked with Professor Longhair and James Booker on one side and Joe Henderson, Donald Byrd, Eddie Harris, Nat Adderley and Charlie Hunter on the other. All four could front their own bands, and largely do.

Eight albums, most of them caught live

The recorded catalogue is compact: eight albums issued between 1997 and 2008, including Elevado in 1998, Voodoo Bop in 1999 and Blue Streak in 2008, most of them for Compass Records. The method was consistent with the live reputation. Voodoo Bop, the second Compass record, was produced by the band itself, mixed and mastered by John Fischbach, and cut at Kingsway Studios in the French Quarter straight to tape with no instrumental separation and no overdubs — a studio record made the way the group plays a set.

Those records bought the band its national profile. It appeared on NPR's Jazz Set with Branford Marsalis, and the press language of the period has stuck to it since: JazzTimes called it one of the more adventurous working units in modern jazz, and the Chicago Tribune wrote that, like New Orleans itself, Astral Project blends a thousand influences into an alluring identity all its own. At home it has taken multiple Big Easy Entertainment Awards.

Nothing has been added to the discography since Blue Streak in 2008. Eighteen years on, the band has effectively stopped documenting itself and carried on working, which makes the live shows the only current record of what it does.

Where things stand in autumn 2026

The spring fixture has held. Astral Project played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at the Fair Grounds Race Course on 24 April 2026, in a 2:50pm slot — the same mid-afternoon placement it had on 29 April 2022 — following appearances on 4 May 2023, 26 April 2024 and 25 April 2025. No setlist has been logged for the 2026 performance.

The club work is concentrated at Snug Harbor on Frenchmen Street. The band played a double-header there on Saturday 10 October 2026, with sets at 7.30pm and 9.30pm and tickets at $46.95; the next date on the books is Tuesday 30 December 2026, again at 7.30pm and 9.30pm, with tickets listed at $41.30. Earlier in the cycle the group played the same venue on 12 July 2025 under the same two-set arrangement.

What is not there is a tour. Nothing is currently listed outside New Orleans, and the pattern of the past five years is a handful of club dates plus the April festival slot. Dagradi fills the rest of his own calendar locally, including a long-running Tuesday residency at the Bayou Bar on St Charles Avenue with the bassist Peter Harris and rotating guests. For a band of this standing the absence of a touring itinerary is a choice about where its four members live and teach, not a sign of inactivity.

A book of originals, narrowed down

The repertoire has been refined rather than rotated. Across the logged festival sets of 2022, 2024 and 2025 the overlap is heavy: Second Thoughts, the band's most-played piece, closed all three; Secret Sky and Ahmad appear in all three; Voodoobop, Lauren Z and Mancuso recur. Long River Running opened the 2025 set, The Whole Truth opened 2024, and Fallen turned up in 2022.

These are all band originals — no standards appear in any logged setlist — and six tunes is the typical count for a festival slot, which tells its own story about how long the solos run. A listener who caught the band at the Fair Grounds in 2022 and again in 2025 would have heard four of the same six compositions and almost certainly not the same performance of any of them.