:
Jimmy Luxury and Tommy Rome met while working as busboys and janitors.
Their first moment in the sun was sitting outside on a corner in the Mission
District of San Francisco. They each had a mop in their hands… Jimmy was in the middle of his cigarette break and Tommy was complaining about his back.
“Damn I’m in pain”
said Tommy.
“Life’s a shit sandwich without the bread” , said Jimmy in response. As Jimmy kept rattling off one-liners, Tommy kept appraising this young Brockton outcast who had made a name for himself in the area as the best freestyler alive. And Tommy was known for drinking stiff martini’s and parading around as the poor-man’s Dean Martin.
Slowly, between cigarettes and back therapy, they realized they had something. They made their first album “ A Night In The Arms Of… ” a stylish and ridiculously fun blend of hip-hop/latin music and their staple big-band swing. The CD sold immediately to Sony for a good amount of pocket change and fell into the soundtracks of numerous films and TV shows.
For Tommy, life since then has been a river of marriage, children, divorce, months in Brazil chasing the meaning of life, and popping out the occasional dance number. Jimmy’s life, of course, has been a little more rosy. He’s got two k ids and a wonderful wife, Ingrid. And Tommy’s still complaining about his back. Yet despite the physical problems and brief flashes of success, they still make most of their money from manual labour. “I’ve spent more time cleaning up shows than doing sh ows”
says Jimmy. But that would have something to do with their live show policy. Early on in their careers they vowed to never do a live show in the United States. NEVER . “Its nothing really against the US, we just don’t find the value in playing for the home crowd.” They’ve now played in France, Italy, Brazil (a three month tour of beaches), Mexico and Canada, and are about to make their UK debut in the
UK (in Scotland)… but they’ve never ever played in the United States.
"Jimmy, how do you say break-dance in Spanish?"
"I dunno... breakdance?"
"Hey guys I love your new songs, its just what we been looking for." says DJ Billy who spins in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Brazil. "There ain't nobody doing this shit.
This is exactly what we been looking for, something that plays with the borders.
That’s so fucking happy it will ass-whoop you out of your depressions.”
You can call it swing-hop, you can call it latin-jazz, you can call it some of the funniest lyrics every put on wax. “Somedays’ is my favorite,” says Tommy, “its got a contagious groove, a chorus in Italian (my ancestry) and a chorus in English, and
Jimmy’s lyrics about two petty bird-thieves are amazing.”

Still, their reasons for touring only outside of the US are unclear. It’s a surefire way to achieve limited exposure and success. And it’s left some of their
California fans a little peeved . “It’s in your genes” wrote one of their irate stateside fans,
“you guys are genetically destined to be janitors.” “We buy your records and all you do is mop floors” yelled another as they turned down a series of shows with Run DMC.
But just because they don’t play in their native country, they haven’t given up music. After getting stuck in a blizzard in Manhattan on Christmas, they’ve spent the last two years trying to perfect their Christmas album. “Hopefully ready by Christmas 2008”. “It’s a real punch in the whiskers,”
says Jimmy,
“It’s hard to say good stuff about the Santa Claus anymore, especially since that asshole in a red suit left mud on my rug last year trying to eat the cookies my son and I made for him.”
So, Tommy and Jimmy are still mopping up floors and they’re still laughing, but they’re also part of the famous duet that has now travelled the world, gotten married, learned Portuguese, swam with the sharks.
They’re putting together some big tour action in 2006… to keep the fans dancing… and to keep the martini’s pouring.
And as Tommy has always said,
"Like DeNiro was born to play in ‘Mean Streets’, Jimmy was born to do this"
Phil “The Jeweller”, Jimmy Luxury and Tommy Rome

Tommy Rome (outside the Hungry I, North Beach)
A grimy North Beach alley, where clothes lines sag with tattered clothes, torn shirts and a pair of star-spangled tights.
Spilling down a flight of cement stairs are three homeless men in once-expensive suits belting "I Love Life."
Cue the dancing twins in silver body suits, wearing garbage pail lids for hats, roll in
Jimmy and this drabby scene seems to come fully alive.
Cut to Dempsey's barber shop in the Mission, where black and white photos hang on the walls and dusty Playboy magazines rest on a table.
Three barbers in matching jackets attend to a nattily-dressed young man with the sharp blue-eyed, flat-nosed features of a second-rate Irish pugilist. Over a phat, jubilant groove, the young man raps, "I put my pants on the same way as you, of course, my pants are just more expensive than yours."
That's the scene of a video shoot for Jimmy Luxury and the Tommy Rome
Orchestra, a raucous hip-hop band based out of Philadelphia, PA and sunny
San Francisco.
Jimmy < real name James Kelleher > is an amped-up twentyfive year old transplant from Brockton, Massachusetts who spent his first four years in San
Francisco getting fired from a string of bar-backing and floor-mopping jobs in Mission neighbourhood bars. Not unlike the opening of his first video for
Abacaxi Records, Jimmy's life made a quick cut from rags to swing-aesthetic-

steeped riches when a demo CD that cost fifty dollars to record became the subject of a bidding war between major labels Sony, Island, Warner, Priority and Virgin Records.
And it wasn't but a few months later when the band blew-up big. With three songs featured in the movie "Me Myself and Irene", a song featured on the
“Go” movie soundtrack CD, and yet more songs in “Oceans Eleven” and
“Phone Booth”, Jimmy is in the rare position of having virtually everyone who ever kicked him off their couch after two weeks showing up to try and mug in his videos.
The sudden change was a result of Kelleher meeting Tommy Rome - real name James D'Angelo . (Regarding the moniker, Tommy says "I was going to be Tommy Palermo, but that's my uncle's real name and I didn't wanna ride in on his thang, ya know! But D'Angelo is already using my real name, and there's a bunch of bands and artists using James, so I had to look around.")
A producer and rapper in Philly-based hip-hop band The Goats, D'Angelo discovered Kelleher pouring beers at his neighbourhood haunt, The
Shotwell 59. He recognized in Jimmy - who has always been more than willing to drop a freestyle rap - a raw, original talent that warranted cultivation in the studio. The band started with a dozen rappers, but no one compared to
Jimmy. He wrote five of the songs in an afternoon. The raps were better, funnier and more on target than everyone else had done. "He's a genius" says Tommy Rome. But despite his background in hip-hop, D'Angelo's primary interest has long been in the fifties and sixties pop-jazz of his parents and the psycho pulsing latin rhythms that he’s found travelling. "Jimmy's always been a huge hip-hop fan," he says. "And I've always been a big fan of Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria. I still listen to that stuff all the time, even the other stuff like Poncho Negra, Billie Holiday and
Blossom Dearie." Blossom Dearie? "She's on [the album]," explains
D'Angelo. "Little white girl. They all had pipes back then. It sort of combines to be something entirely different, I guess."
The album also highlights two living female Divas. Brett "Songbird" Abramson from San Francisco and Micaela Saxer from Perugia, Italy. "Most of what people think is Billie Holiday on the album is actually Brett. And Micaela has been scaring up the ghosts of Fellini and Nino Rota. We've been told that both of these women should by right have record contracts of their own.
They're just AWESOME!".
Still, the vision for the album, came about by accident, according to D'Angelo. "I went to sample some other shit, and I threw in a Tito Puente by accident, and I was like, what the hell is this?" It was like dipping his chocolate into South America's peanut butter; he called
Kelleher right away. "I put a drum beat over it, and that night we decided to go out and do a photo session. So we did our first photo session before we did a song." The photos from that session feature Kelleher and D'Angelo dressed to the nines and loitering outside the Hungry I in North Beach.
"That's as close as we get to Las Vegas or Tijuana Mexico," says D'Angelo, laughing. “Not so bright-lights, not so big-city. But Jimmy was always the smallest guy in the biggest high school, so we were used to it.”

The subsequent demo CD soon slipped into heavy rotation in a number of
Mission neighbourhood bar jukeboxes, as well as into the hands of record executives nationwide. The timing was impeccable.
"I think it's safe to say we probably wouldn't have done this album anywhere but San Francisco," says D'Angelo. "I think the jazz scene, the latin culture and the hip-hop scene here definitely encouraged us. For us, our mix of sounds is nothing special. It’s what we see, hear & live with every single day.”
Musically, ‘ A Night In The Arms Of...
’ doesn't play into the flavour-of-themonth concept. The samples on the album, despite most of them being over forty years old, sound surprisingly fresh. Beneath (and between) the swing and latin grooves, an outrageous array of layered scratches, found sounds, and hip-hop and funk vocal samples interweave. The album does more to serve hiphop heads a real lesson about “frontiersmanship” than to offer suburbanites a comfortable entrance into the Luxury world of funk & hip-hop.
The album also features some of the toughest players in San Francisco.
Taylor "Juggy" Cutcomb on piano, Todd Grady on horn, Erik "Smooth Punch" and Phil "The Jeweller" on bass and drums. Even though it was recorded in a warehouse on digital equipment, the feeling is authentic “vintage”. Kelleher's own rapping is deep and hilarious in parts, rich with stories and setting, and always dripping with charm.
Sample lyric:
"You finally punch out and take off your apron/ Like a day off in hell when the devil's on vacation/ Martini shaker shaking like a rattlesnake's tail/ I got twenty to bet, fifty for a room and drinks, and a hundred for bail.../ My bookmaker's in Florida and my thumbreaker's in jail."
For the few samples they have, legalese can render reality rather strange…
D'Angelo recalls the first time he saw his name credited for the Jimmy Luxury project, for the song "Cha Cha Cha" on the ‘Go’ soundtrack…
"For the writers of the main groove, it says James D'Angelo - my real name -
James Kelleher - his real name - and four people who are dead, who we've never met. And they probably didn't even write the groove. Back in the day,
”writership” was [attributed to] the person who wrote the melody. They didn't even give any credit to grooves."
It's all there: more pinky rings, fedoras, horse tracks, cha cha chas and perfumed dames than you could inhale watching an A&E movie marathon. In fact, Kelleher plunged so deep into his International persona for the project that at times it became difficult for his friends to distinguish the artist from the product. "Jimmy Luxury is just in me," he says. "It took a little pushing: you watch a few movies, you do a little research. [But] it was easy. It was very natural for me."
Saturday 29 th April 2006 @ Ocean Terminal