The Valparaiso Men's Chorus exists because Alex McMurray spent six months performing sea shanties at Tokyo DisneySea as 'Cap'n Sandy.' The psychic residue came home with him and eventually found form as one of the most singular ensembles in a city famous for singular ensembles. Named for the Chilean port city that haunts sailor ballads — and obliquely for Desmond Dekker's rude-boy anthem — the VMC is not so much a band as a phenomenon.
The music draws from the deep well of 19th-century maritime songs — halyard shanties, forebitter ballads, rum-soaked chants from the Liverpool waterfront — and subjects them to the particular alchemy of New Orleans. Tuba and sousaphone hold down the bottom; penny whistle and fiddle carry the melody; trombone and washboard fill the middle. And then the voices: dozens of them, bellowing and swaying.
The ensemble recorded two albums: the first at the Mermaid Lounge in 2004, and The Straits of Saint Claude at the Saturn Bar in 2010. The Chorus appeared in an HBO Treme scene filmed at the Saturn Bar, directed by Tim Robbins. Shows are infrequent and feel like events when they happen.
