Fat Tuesday Records is a small New Orleans music label and editorial project, based on the second floor of a building on St Peter Street in the French Quarter. We were founded in 2019 by two people — Elliott Bienvenu and Marcelle Duvernay — who had known each other through the city's music scene for about a decade and who had, between them, more ideas for how to document New Orleans music than either of us could act on alone.
The label has, since early 2020, been organised around a single ongoing recording programme: the Stellarterm Sessions. Each monthly session is a direct-to-stereo live recording of a single musician or small ensemble, made at our St Peter Street rooms. Sixty sessions have been recorded. A sixty-first is scheduled for later this month. We expect to be doing this, in approximately this form, for some time.
What Fat Tuesday Records is
A small label. An editorial project. A recording programme — the Stellarterm Sessions — and the writing that accompanies it. We put out occasional physical-media editions of recordings from the Stellarterm archive, in small pressings of 100 to 300 copies, through local New Orleans independent record shops and through correspondence with specific collectors. We publish a small number of long-form articles each year on our website.
That is the whole operation. There is no web store, no streaming service, no subscription tier, no podcast, no video channel, no merchandise line, no app. If these things existed, running them would take time away from the recording and the writing, which is where our attention belongs.
What Fat Tuesday Records is not
We are not a commercial booking agent. We are not a tour-promotion company. We are not a music-industry consultancy. We do not manage artists; we do not represent artists; we do not take commissions on bookings made with the musicians who record for us. The Stellarterm Sessions are a recording programme, not a development scheme.
We accept no outside funding. No grants, no corporate sponsorship, no advertising on the website. Our running costs — the room, the microphones, the occasional spool of tape, the website — are met by the two editors personally. This is a small operation and can afford to be self-funded. We prefer the independence.
How the Stellarterm Sessions work
We record on the last Thursday of each month, at approximately seven in the evening, in our room on St Peter Street. The room has a piano, a set of microphones, a small amount of acoustic treatment, and enough seating for the musicians and the two of us. The session runs as long as the evening's music calls for — typically between ninety minutes and two and a half hours — and is recorded in long continuous takes. We do not re-record; we do not patch; we do not multitrack. What happens on the Thursday is what ends up in the Stellarterm archive.
The technical choices behind the Stellarterm programme are discussed at greater length in our feature article on the Sessions.
The editors
Elliott Bienvenu
Elliott has run the editorial side of Fat Tuesday Records since 2019. He is the principal organiser of the Stellarterm Sessions and writes on label operations, recording history, and the working musicians of the French Quarter.
Marcelle Duvernay
Marcelle writes about the living musical traditions of New Orleans — second-line, Mardi Gras Indian chants, zydeco, and the older jazz forms. She holds an MA in American musicology from Tulane.
Our relationship with the musicians we record
Musicians who record for the Stellarterm Sessions sign a simple single-page agreement. The agreement grants Fat Tuesday Records a non-exclusive right to archive the recording and, subject to the musician's separate consent, to issue it on a small physical-media edition. The musician retains all other rights in the recording. No money changes hands in either direction; musicians who record for us do so because they want a document of that evening, not for a commercial fee. If a recording is issued on a physical edition, net proceeds from the edition are split with the musician on terms agreed at the time of release.
This arrangement is unusual by industry standards and is deliberately kept simple. A detailed copy of the standard agreement is available to any musician considering a Stellarterm session who writes in and asks.
Corrections and correspondence
Factual errors in our writing are corrected openly, at the foot of the relevant article, with a dated note. If you have found an error, please write to editor@fattuesdayrecords.com.
We welcome correspondence from readers on questions of musical substance. We regret that we cannot answer: requests for specific Stellarterm recordings; requests to book musicians for private events; requests for industry consulting; requests for tourism-planning advice. For matters of that kind, the relevant specialists are better placed to help than we are.
Reach us
Email: editor@fattuesdayrecords.com. Telephone: +1 504 522 4190 (Louisiana time, weekday afternoons). Post: Fat Tuesday Records, 726 St Peter Street, 2nd floor, French Quarter, New Orleans, New Orleans LA 70116, USA.