High-energy Omaha cover band serves up layered treat for joyful crowds

Music from a local cover band pours off the stage at Omaha’s Harney Street Tavern. Notes of joy and familiarity — Rocky Raccoon, Billie Jean, Lovely Day — waft up the stairs of this semi-subterranean downtown hole-in-the-wall. 

There is no cover charge. Drinks, from Coors Banquet bottles to Manhattans served neat, come out fast. And on stage, a high-energy trio pumps out a range of tunes with soul, gusto and a kind of wink to the audience. 

There’s carefree Nidhal Keddah on keyboards in his bro tank, shaking his head to the beat. There’s energetic Jimmy Cuadros, earrings dangling, hefting a sousaphone while holding a trumpet, bopping to the beat in athletic squats.

And then we see the frontman behind the drum set, a familiar face to any Saturday downtown Farmers Market shopper, old-timey Jordan Smith wearing a dandy boater atop his head and ’70s brown vintage high waters. He seems beamed onto the stage from a bygone era.

And the world’s alright, according to the crowd and the band Parfait.

In a city with a vibrant original music scene and plenty of cover bands, Parfait is unique in visibility. You’ll find one or all members busking on Old Market street corners on the weekends, staged in front of La Buvette on Saturdays when the Farmers Market is in full swing. They play regular gigs at the Harney Street Tavern. They get booked for graduation parties, wedding receptions, club gigs. They have played at the Jewell, Jazz on the Green, and will open for another act at the 3,000-person capacity Steelhouse in July.

Earlier this year, the Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards named the trio the best cover band in Omaha. They didn’t have much time to celebrate at the annual gathering — Parfait was the house band for the evening.

They “kept the groove going” all night at the sold-out event, said Aly Peeler, a singer and vice president of Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards.

Peeler said Parfait performs so often in Omaha that they are a critical part of creating the city’s vibrant creative culture. Plus, she noted, the musicians infuse fun into their performances.

“That’s the magic piece right there,” she said. “It’s refreshing. It’s pure joy.”

Like a parfait.

Smith notes that parfait, in French, means perfect.

But most people know the word as a dessert — a dish of layers often served in a tall glass to show the goodness inside.

In Omaha, Parfait is a three-layered musical treat. 

Layer One: frontman Jordan Smith, a 30-year-old dreamer. He’s a musician, playing drums and sometimes guitar. Along with Parfait, he performs with a swing band, Jordi and the Jitterbugs, and a new funk band called SN*P. He’s a singer, his smooth baritone offering the buffer between the two bandmates. He’s a dancer, long a member of the Omaha Jitterbugs. You’ll often see him in Turner Park on summer Thursdays, stepping, turning and swinging to the Jazz on the Green acts. He’s an actor, a ham in his Instagram reels showing his fit of the day to his more than 13,000 followers. He’s a marketer, promoting the educational nonprofit North Omaha Music & Arts. He’s an old soul, waxing about such influences as Fred Astaire and Nat King Cole.

“I’m kind of a product of what people used to be a product of,” laughs Smith, an Omaha Northwest High graduate.

Layer Two is Jimmy Cuadros. The 30-year-old from Sibley, Iowa, has played the trumpet since he was 10, when he stumbled onto a YouTube video of trumpet virtuoso Arturo Sandoval. A standout musician, Cuadros played in Iowa’s All-State Jazz Band and the Iowa All-State Band before heading to the University of South Dakota. Outside of Parfait, he plays in a local mariachi group, Mariachi Zapata. He teaches private trumpet lessons at Schmitt Music. He taught himself the tuba.

Cuadros followed his friend, Omaha native and bassist Alex Schmer, from South Dakota to Omaha. Schmer, an original member of Parfait, moved to Illinois, but Cuadros stayed, planting roots in Omaha’s music scene, which he described as “really blasting off.”

Then there’s Layer Three, Nidhal Keddah, 29, who started playing piano at age 4 in his hometown of Bemidji, Minnesota. Piano lessons ended abruptly “because my piano teacher made me cry.” Keddah stuck with the instrument, however, teaching himself and playing gigs with bluegrass groups in his teens. (Keddah also sings and plays guitar). He attended the University of Minnesota with the intent to go to law school but “ran out of money and had to drop out — a classic musician story for you.” 

Keddah then got a job at Schmitt Music, a Minnesota-based business with a store at 74th and Dodge streets. When Schmitt needed a new manager of keyboard sales in Omaha, Keddah was tapped for the gig and moved here last year. He soon met Schmer, who connected him with the other two members of Parfait.

When Schmer left Omaha, Keddah replaced him as the third member of the band.

Parfait had launched in 2021, when Smith, Cuadros and Schmer began to jam together. They loved the sound and instrumentalization. But what to call themselves?

Smith pitched “The Three Busketeers.” That was soundly rejected. Too cheesy. Then Cuadros suggested Parfait.

A parfait is sweet. It is interesting. It has layers. And? 

As Donkey told Shrek, Cuadros said, paraphrasing the movie: “Everybody loves parfait.”

Everybody at Harney Street Tavern certainly seemed to on a Friday night in May. As the night wore on, people crowded near the stage to dance. At intermission, they lined up for band merch. Pink T-shirts featuring caricatures of each band member sold out.

“This is just music everybody can relate to,” said Todd Johnson. “They had me at ‘Love Boat.’”

There is comfort in the familiar, but Parfait offered more than nostalgia. The three musicians gave the audience layers of musicality, energy and joy. It was hard to tell who was having more fun — the bar crowd belting out “I Will Survive,” or the members of Parfait, playing that clarion call to the dance floor.

“The right type of music. The right musicians. The right vibe,” is how patron Ramsay Ahsam described it.

The following early May morning, on a mere four hours of sleep, two of the three members of Parfait returned to the Old Market to perform. Staged in the alley near La Buvette on 11th Street, Smith in his boater, vintage blazer and pants and brown Chuck Taylor hightops, and Cuadros in a vibrant turquoise tank top and orange shorts, played their Farmers Market corner as if it were Carnegie Hall.

The usual Saturday Farmers Market goers milled about looking for flowers or rhubarb or lemonade or bread. Sometimes, a person or two would stop, catch a few notes or an entire song and drop some cash into their busker bucket. Most people would linger for part of a song and then walk by, but Cuadros and Smith didn’t seem bothered.

“I try to treat all performances the same,” Cuadros would later say. “It’s just music for the environment. If I happen to grab attention, that’s another plus. I’m just happy.”

Jared Smith, Jordan’s older brother and busking veteran, explained that playing at open-air events is simply a way to share the human heart, “like telling a story.”

Jordan Smith strummed his guitar as he sat on a box affixed with a rhythm pedal. One Converse-sneakered foot pumped the pedal while the other foot, wearing a tambourine strap, jingled with each step. Cuadros, meanwhile, blew into his sousaphone the mournful, low notes of a 1961 Ben E. King classic. 

Taking his lips off the mouthpiece, Cuadros joined Smith in belting out the refrain: “Stand by me, ohhhh, stand by me, oh stand, stand by me.”

It was impossible not to obey.