Recently awarded the Big Easy Music Award for “Best Funk Group of 2008,” Big Sam’s Funky Nation is a driving force of urban funk.

The band is led by trombone powerhouse, Big Sam Williams, formerly the trombonist for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, who the San Francisco Chronicle calls “the top man on the slide trombone in the birthplace of jazz.” Combining his distinctive trombone riffs with a call-and-response MC style, Big Sam refuses to let the audience sit still. Between the band’s solos and his trombone riffs, Big Sam second-lines (a uniquely New Orleans style of street-dance) and gets the crowd going.

Big Sam’s Funky Nation is not a one man show; the members of the Funky Nation, a group of well trained and experienced musicians with impressive credentials of their own, meet the challenges of their funky band leader. BSFN masterfully combines a rock sensibility with improv-style associated with jazz and the horn-heavy front section that’s the hallmark of big band funk.

The energy level is high voltage when this band takes the stage, and as Jambase Online proclaims, “as long as groups like Big Sam’s Funky Nation helm communal happenings like this one the funky fever is bound to spread.”