Alex McMurray grew up in Red Bank, New Jersey and arrived in New Orleans in the late 1980s as a student at Tulane University. He never left. Instead of following an academic path, he fell in with the city's street culture, playing clubs and developing his voice as a songwriter in the toughest rooms the downtown scene had to offer — Maple Leaf Bar, Café Brasil, Tipitina's — winning audiences over with hard-boiled banter and songs that found beauty in the crooked and the broken. He has been writing and performing professionally in New Orleans since 1989.
His early band Royal Fingerbowl, which ran from 1995 to 2001, established him as a songwriter of uncommon originality — sardonic, literate, and deeply rooted in the specific textures of New Orleans life. When Royal Fingerbowl dissolved, McMurray kept writing, releasing a series of solo albums and forming The Tin Men, a sousaphone-washboard-guitar trio with Matt Perrine and Washboard Chaz Leary whose loose, humorous, and deceptively skilled performances have made them a perennial favorite at Jazz Fest and the city's clubs since 2003.
McMurray's bands are numerous and genuinely various. 007, formed in 2000 with drummer Jeffrey "Houseman" Clemens of G. Love and Special Sauce, guitarists Jonathan Freilich, and bassist Joe Cabral of the Iguanas, plays the Jamaican rock-steady and reggae canon — Desmond Dekker, Toots and the Maytals — with a buoyant, sun-drenched groove that stands in cheerful contrast to McMurray's more melancholic solo work. The Valparaiso Men's Chorus has an origin story all its own: in 2001 McMurray spent six months in Tokyo performing sea shanties as "Cap'n Sandy" at Tokyo DisneySea — a stint he has described as "the loneliest in my life." Returning to New Orleans, he channeled that isolation into founding the VMC: a twenty-plus-voice ensemble backed by tuba, trombone, fiddle, and penny whistle that fuses 19th-century maritime songs with the New Orleans second line tradition. Their shows at the Saturn Bar have been described as near-apocalyptic events, the performance space morphing into the swaying hold of a sailing ship.
He also plays regularly in the orbit of cellist and vocalist Helen Gillet, contributing guitar to her adventurous projects, and has worked as a sideman with Susan Cowsill, Paul Sanchez, Lynn Drury, Spencer Bohren, and "Papa" John Gros, among many others. His Tuesday-night solo residency at Buffa's — a continuation of the semi-legendary Wednesday gig he held at the Circle Bar from 1999 onward — remains one of the essential recurring shows in New Orleans, a place where any song from a vast repertoire might surface, where guests drop in unannounced, and where the songs keep getting better.
OffBeat Magazine has called him "the quintessential New Orleans singer-songwriter." His 2010 album How to Be a Cannonball won Big Easy Album of the Year. He appeared as himself in multiple episodes of HBO's Treme, and has co-organized the Jazz Fest fringe festival ChazFest since its founding. He is, in the fullest sense, a New Orleans original — one who arrived by accident and never found a reason to leave.
