There are concept albums, and then there are concept albums that make you laugh out loud the first time you hear the idea and then grin from ear to ear the first time you hear the music. Cory Weeds has made one of the latter. On October 16, 2026, the Vancouver saxophonist, producer, and founder of Cellar Music Group released Hip to Be Square, Plays Huey Lewis & The News (Boop Bop Bing Bash!), a thirteen track album that takes the radio staples of one of the most popular American bands of the 1980s and recasts them for that most soulful of jazz configurations, the Hammond organ quartet. The pitch sounds like a punchline. The record sounds like a revelation.

While early chatter around the project framed it as a large ensemble concept, the truth is both smaller and more interesting. Rather than piling on horns, Weeds and his collaborators went in the opposite direction, stripping away the gleaming production that defined the original recordings and rebuilding each song from the ground up with just four players: tenor saxophone, Hammond B3 organ, guitar, and drums. The core melodies remain fully intact, instantly recognizable to anyone who spent the Reagan years with a transistor radio or an MTV habit, but everything around them has been reimagined as gritty, swinging, improvisational soul jazz.

A Stuck CD and a Long Drive

Like many great ideas, this one began entirely by accident. Back in 2013, the Kansas City organist and arranger Chris Hazelton invited Weeds to the Midwest for a short run of gigs and workshops. The final show was in St. Louis, roughly four hours away, and the two made the drive in a van belonging to Hazelton’s father. The only music available for the trip was a single disc that had become permanently lodged in the van’s CD player: Greatest Hits by Huey Lewis & The News. With no choice but to listen to it over and over, Weeds began to hear something unexpected. Beneath the synthesizers and the shiny pop polish, the songs had sturdy melodies, deep grooves, and a strong foundation in the blues, all qualities that pointed straight toward the classic organ combo tradition.

Weeds was not the first jazz musician to turn pop hits into improvisational vehicles, a tradition with deep roots in the soul jazz of the 1960s, when organists and saxophonists routinely reinvented Motown and pop chart material. His friend, the organist Mike LeDonne, has done brilliant work with the music of Michael Jackson, Earth, Wind & Fire, and The Spinners, and Weeds himself joined LeDonne on the 2017 album Let’s Groove: The Music of Earth, Wind & Fire. Still, he knew that Huey Lewis was not likely to appear on many jazz musicians’ wish lists. Hazelton heard the same potential, though, and quietly began sketching arrangements.

The project went into hibernation more than once over the following decade, until fate stepped in. In 2024, Weeds and Hazelton were both on the road as members of the James Hunter Six, opening for Bonnie Raitt. During a stop at a record store in Portland, Oregon, an employee accidentally bumped into Weeds. When the saxophonist turned around, he found the clerk holding an armful of some two dozen copies of Sports, the 1983 Huey Lewis & The News album that turned the band into superstars. Weeds took it as a sign from the universe, and from that moment the project moved onto the fast track.

No Rehearsals, Twelve Gigs, and a Studio Date

What happened next is a story straight out of jazz’s road warrior tradition. Weeds and Hazelton recruited two New York veterans, guitarist David Rourke and drummer Rudy Petschauer, and booked a thirteen day tour packed with twelve performances. Remarkably, the quartet arrived at its first engagement in Austin, Texas, without ever having played together as a unit or rehearsed the material. Night after night, the band learned Hazelton’s book on the bandstand, tightening the arrangements, discovering new possibilities in each tune, and building the kind of chemistry that only comes from living with music in front of a live audience.

With that hard won cohesion still fresh, the musicians headed straight into Afterlife Studios in Vancouver on November 17 and 18, 2025, to capture the music while it was at its hottest. Weeds and Hazelton produced the sessions together, with John Raham recording and Chris Gestrin handling the mix. The result has the spontaneous crackle of a great live set paired with the clarity of a first rate studio production.

Meet the Quartet

Weeds is generous in crediting his bandmates. Hazelton, he has made clear, is the one who transformed a half joking idea into a complete and convincing book of music, delivering arrangements that went beyond anything the saxophonist had imagined. Rourke brings sharp listening and an understated comedic flair that suits the project perfectly. Petschauer supplies a deep, unshakable groove shaped by years spent touring with Brother Jack McDuff, one of the founding giants of organ jazz, which gives this band an authentic connection to the very lineage it celebrates. And Weeds himself, with a big, warm tenor sound that feels right at home in the great organ combo tradition, carries the famous melodies with a mixture of swagger and affection.

The Huey Lewis Songbook, Reborn

The album opens with six Huey Lewis & The News classics, each arranged by Hazelton. “The Power of Love,” the chart topping anthem that powered the soundtrack of Back to the Future, kicks things off with an irresistible strut. “Bad Is Bad,” a bluesy deep cut from Sports, reveals just how naturally the band’s roots music sensibility translates to the organ trio format. “I Want a New Drug” becomes a showcase for the band’s attitude, a groove that, as Weeds has noted, already carried the DNA of great soul jazz inside it. Strip away the eighties production, he discovered, and what remains is a well crafted composition with a deep pocket and plenty of room to stretch out, so much so that it sounds like Huey Lewis wandered into a late night jazz club.

The title track, “Hip to Be Square,” the playfully self aware hit from 1986’s Fore!, is a natural fit for a band that wears its love of an unfashionable idea as a badge of honor. “Do You Believe in Love,” the song that gave the group its first major hit, and “If This Is It,” a breezy doo wop flavored favorite, round out the Huey Lewis program, each one retaining its singable melody while opening up into stretches of hard bop improvisation and greasy organ grooves.

Boop Bop Bing Bash! The Second Program

The album’s second half exists for a delightfully practical reason. Cellar Music Group receives support from FACTOR Canada, the national fund that backs Canadian music, and its guidelines discourage recording contemporary pop material. Even though the Huey Lewis songs are now more than four decades old, they did not qualify, so Weeds and Hazelton expanded the record with originals and selections from the organ jazz canon. The result is a seven track program called Boop Bop Bing Bash!, which moves through boogaloo, bossa nova, swing, and blues and stands as a satisfying album in its own right.

It opens with “There Arno Answers,” a Weeds and Hazelton original with a double meaning. Its title honors a person who has helped guide Weeds through difficult stretches of his life, while the music channels a period of searching into an earthy, funky organ boogaloo built on a simple, catchy hook. Rourke’s “Meezy’s Back in Town” sounds like the theme song to a lost sitcom from the 1970s or 1980s, while Harold Ousley’s “The People’s Choice” delivers the greasy bossa nova that, in Weeds’s view, no self respecting organ record should be without. “Up in Gavin’s Flat” carries a meaningful Vancouver connection. Weeds discovered it on a rare 1973 album by the group Brute Force featuring saxophonist Gavin Walker, a beloved fixture of the city’s jazz scene who experienced its history as a player, presenter, interviewer, and devoted listener, and the band’s recording serves as an homage to him.

The title track, Billy Gardner’s “Boop Bop Bing Bash,” came to Weeds by way of saxophonist George Braith’s album Soulstream. Weeds admits that his marketing instincts kicked in the moment he saw the title, before he had even heard the performance, and fortunately the tune turned out to be right in the band’s wheelhouse. Vancouver multi-instrumentalist John Lee contributes the easy swinging “At Long Last,” and Jimmy Owens’s “Get the Money Bluze” closes the album on a note of pure, unpretentious fun.

A Collector’s Release and a Label Milestone

Weeds has always been a champion of the physical record, and this release reflects that passion. The album is available digitally in high resolution 24-bit, 96 kHz audio with a digital booklet, as a deluxe six panel CD, and as a 180-gram black vinyl double LP limited to just 500 copies. The vinyl was mastered and cut by the renowned engineer Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed by Fidelity Records Pressing, an audiophile pedigree that makes it a genuine collector’s item. Limited copies of the double LP are available through specialty retailers such as Drowned World Records, while audio previews, liner notes, and digital editions are available on the Cory Weeds Bandcamp page.

The album also arrives during a landmark year for Cellar Music Group, which is celebrating its twenty fifth anniversary. Weeds founded the label in 2001 in connection with his celebrated Vancouver jazz club, The Cellar, and in the years since, it has grown into one of the most prolific independent jazz labels in North America, with a catalog of more than 400 releases and its first Grammy Award, earned in 2023. Through it all, Weeds has balanced his roles as label head, producer, and working saxophonist with remarkable energy, championing both established masters and emerging talents.

Why It Works

The genius of Hip to Be Square is that it takes its music seriously without ever taking itself too seriously. Huey Lewis & The News were always a band of skilled musicians steeped in rhythm and blues, doo wop, and Bay Area bar band soul, and their best songs were built on the same raw materials that fueled the organ combos of the 1960s. By trusting those melodies and surrounding them with swing, grit, and improvisation, Weeds and his quartet reveal a hidden kinship between two worlds that rarely share a record bin. Weeds himself has joked that the project might have been the silliest idea he ever had, yet it turned into a complete and total success. For listeners who love soul jazz, for fans who grew up with Huey Lewis on the radio, and for anyone who simply wants to hear four great musicians having the time of their lives, this album delivers on every level. It really is hip to be square.