Meet Our Guest Artist

Hokum Jeebs

Hokum Jeebs’ Piano a la Carte

Vaudeville was a familiar sight across America until the Great Depression. These traveling troupers have mostly been forgotten and little evidence of their passing can be found. But the tradition lives on in the unlikely and delightful form of Professor Hokum W. Jeebs, a vaudevillian reincarnated.

Jeebs started his professional career goofing on the piano for laughs at community talent shows in his native Syracuse, New York. A degree in Music Education led to a job teaching public school music. On weekends he played ragtime gigs in bars, directed musical theatre and was a church choir conductor. Four years later he packed his trunks and headed west to the streets of San Francisco.

There he developed a street show in the style of a classic vaudeville act. Jeebs has been professionally playing music and entertaining for many, many… Many, many years, but he hasn’t let formal training or good taste get in the way of his tireless pursuit to find humor in the common ground of history. Through thousands of shows performed in symphony halls to street corners, he has left in his wake a steady stream of giggles, grins and guffaws.

Hokum W. Jeebs is a bit offbeat, definitely eccentric, but always musical. Before he launched Hokum Hall in West Seattle in 1993, Jeebs was an itinerant musician who blended ragtime, vaudeville, and humor at theme parks, on cruise ships, and in the ’70s as a one-man-band street performer. “I played a muffler, a tuba, a toy piano, the saw, a snorkel — that was my act,” he said. “Then I added a calliope and the piano-on-a-tricycle. I had a gimmick — how many novelty piano players are there? There are classical players, there are jazz players, there are even — when I was growing up — ragtime players. There’s not even that anymore.”

His classic act has now been performed in thousands of places as varied as Orlando, Sydney, Anchorage, Tokyo, and Edmonton; and while maestros still take turns at the resonant Steinway grand, Professor Jeebs still plies his trade at his ‘piano a la carte’. High-energy, interactive wackiness unavoidably understates his seemingly endless stream of one-liners and ba-dum-booms. Jeebs is a maestro in his own right, just of a different sort — a very different sort.

After years performing his one-man-band act, self-described as “playing with myself for a long time,” Professor Jeebs is currently doing selected projects and archiving a life spent entertaining people.