With Thanksgiving approaching, family is on Quiana Parler’s mind. The 43-year-old vocalist’s band, Ranky Tanky, may have won its second Grammy last February (Best Regional Roots Music Album, the South Carolina-based quintet’s second golden gramophone in four years), but the Sunshine State is all she can think about.
“I’m excited about Florida because my brother is there, along with his family, so I’ll get to see them,” Parler told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. Her brother is Malik Parler, a photojournalist for WFLA. Quiana has yet to meet her nephews, including the newest one who celebrates his first birthday the week after Ranky Tanky headlines Suncoast Jazz Festival.
Parler, who spends a lot of her time away from family because of the band’s touring schedule, is packing everyone up for a trip to Sand Key. That’s where Suncoast spends three full days at the Sheraton and Marriott resorts taking over five different stages for nearly 100 different performances featuring bands across the U.S. along with homegrown favorites—sometimes even playing together.
“I’m even bringing my 17 year old. He never travels with us because he’s in school, but it just so happened it would be Thanksgiving break,” Parler added. “This is going to be a family excursion.”
Roots, and familial connections, play a big role in both Ranky Tanky and the Suncoast Jazz Festival’s missions.
Suncoast started 33 years ago when a small group of jazz lovers wanted to create an event that would promote and celebrate the only true American art form and educate youth to keep the genre alive for generations. Joan Dragon and Susan Fuller—the festival’s director and assistant director, respectively—told CL that today, more than 150 people help bring it to life. Clarinet and piano player Dave Bennett first arrived at Suncoast as a 16-year-old before going on to tour the country and be featured soloist at Carnegie Hall.
In Suncoast’s latest period of growth, booking Ranky Tanky represents the leaps the festival has taken in recent years in its efforts to promote jazz locally, but also showcase an accurate picture of where the genre is today.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am that they want to come play our growing festival,” Nate Najar, a longtime Tampa Bay area jazz guitarist and member of Suncoast’s Advisory Board, told CL. “But they’re the right act for us today and I can’t wait to see the show.”
“I don’t think people realize how familiar they are with Gullah and the culture.”
While Ranky Tanky technically formed just seven years ago, the band’s entire aura is window that looks all the way back to the 1500s and the Port of Charleston where the Atlantic slave trade brought nearly 11 million Africans to America until the late 1800s. Those slaves ended up living across America’s low country from North Carolina all the way down to Jacksonville, Florida—and they created their own culture and language, Gullah, which preserved their African heritage as they made lives in the U.S.
Since its inception, Ranky Tanky—featuring Parler along with Quentin E. Baxter on drums, bassist Kevin Hamilton, Clay Ross on guitar, and trumpeter Charlton Singleton—has been driven to bring Gullah music and culture to the masses. The band plays old church songs raised up by elders, Gullah nursery rhymes, and it seeks to show listeners just how ubiquitous Gullah is in America’s musical language. Its songs are cataloged in African American history museums and even archived in the Library of Congress.
“I don’t think people realize how familiar they are with Gullah and the culture,” Parler told CL, adding that popular songs from “Kumbaya” and even The Rolling Stones’ “You Gotta Move” come from Gullah. “Our job and what our mission statement is to keep moving forward and bringing it out of people. It’s in them, they just don’t know it.”
Najar added that the concept of Ranky Tanky is rooted in the very beginning of American music. “Everything we all do comes from it, so as a cultural force I hope that everybody gets to share in the joy with Ranky Tanky at some point in their lives,” he said.
Suncoast festival goers get two chances to have a good time with Ranky Tanky since the band is playing on Friday afternoon and Saturday night inside Haley’s Music Hall at the Sheraton. Parler told CL that the group will play stuff from its two studio LPs and still unreleased, in-the-works, new material. “It’s still rooted in the Gullah tradition, still feel good music. Still that Ranky Tanky sound,” she said, saying some of the new stuff is on the band’s 2022 live album recorded at New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
And while the Gullah influence is familiar to Parler, something different has been happening to her onstage lately. Normally a steely performer (she’s a lifelong singer who trained under the late, famed Carolyn June Bonner and has never held a nine-to-five), Parler has started to become emotional at certain parts of the set including on songs like “That’s Alright.”
“Ms. Bonner, she would always write me notes before big performances, and it would say ‘Sing your ass off.’ You just leave your emotions on the side of the stage because you’re there to do a job,” Parler said, adding that hers is to make sure she reaches listeners who’re going through emotions of their own. “But I’m starting to find now that the older I get, I can’t do that any longer.”
Parler lost her grandma a week before one of her Grammy wins. She lost two friends to cancer and she feels emotions during performances of songs like “Been In A Storm.” And while she pulls them together, Parler—who sings at Unity Church of Charleston where she’s still waiting her turn to raise up songs—thinks that Ranky Tanky gives her a chance to sing music that she is emotionally attached to because of her heritage, lineage and DNA.
“These songs played a big part in me growing up. That may be what’s going on, and I never thought about that until now,” Parler said. “I’m learning that it’s OK to show emotion because it is real and it’s raw.”
And that’s what Ranky Tanky is: real and raw. Like the Gullah culture, the band cannot be contained inside of four walls, and its set at Suncoast will be a celebration and statement of praise.
“That’s the good thing about Ranky Tanky,” she said. “We just leave it all on the stage.”
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This article appears in Nov 9-15, 2023.
