pt at large

Mardi Gras 2012: King Cake Street Party with Horace Trahan at Meche's Donuts

Sunday, February 19, 2012

 Allons Dancer et Manger Part II (Come eat and dance)
Join us Sunday Feb 19th, 11am – 1pm for some GREAT music by 
Horace Trahan & The Ossun Express! 
(NO admission fee) 
Concert will be held in the parking lot at Meche’s Donuts in New Iberia. 
403 East St. Peter
It’s our “End of King Cake Season” Mardi Gras Celebration!

A street dance at 11 AM? At a donut shop parking lot in New Iberia? And Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express playing? This I’ve got to see.

The first King  Cake “Allons Dancer et Manger” (Let’s go eat and dance) with Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express was so much fun that owners Debbi and John Smith put this little Mardi Gras street party on their calendar this year. Music and dancing, red beans and rice, grits and gravy…around here you don’t have one without the other.

Now we have to add donuts and dancing.

Dances can begin any time between 8:00 AM and 10:00 PM. Some come to listen, some to dance. And a roof isn’t a requirement. Plenty of dances are held in asphalt parking lots and city parks and local streets.

As advertised, there’s Horace and his band on a stage erected in front of Meche’s Donuts. A small happy crowd of friends, neighbors, and a handful of dancers from all over the country who are in nearby Lafayette for the zillions of Cajun and Zydeco dances going on during Mardi Gras fill the small parking lot off the street running right through New Iberia.

Horace is a fine musician and songwriter. His gritty lyrics to songs like "Keep Walking," "Same Knife Cut The Sheep Cut The Goat," and "You'll Never Make It If You Don't Try" are written by a man who's walked down some rough roads. Earnest and talented, perhaps even shy, Horace often seems reserved on stage. Not today. He’s totally relaxed, extemporaneously adding verses to several songs and singing his ‘message’ songs with more amped up passion than I’ve ever heard. (Listen to samples of “You’ll Never Make It If You Don’t Try” and “When Love Takes Over” and “La Reunion” on and you’ll get the idea.)

Horace is feelin’ the love and he’s sending it right back.

And why not? His lovely wife Chantelle is heaving armloads of Mardi Gras beads into the crowd, his guitar player Paul “Cook” Morvant, Jr.’s mom and his family is standing in front of the bandstand, and stellar saxophone/flute player Doug Garb is a home town boy.

Always in the groove, Jean Prejean from down the road apiece in Lafayette is laying down the bass lines. Young Shane Bernard is crisply making percussion and his dad Rodney Bernard from Carencro is deftly rattling on the frattoir (rub board). Oh, and Rodney Bernard is Horace’s father-in-law!

“Chef Sweeney,” an outgoing Meche’s employee (“He’s our mascot,” laughs an employee) dances through the crowd in an outlandishly fabulous Mardi Gras costume, complete with Mardi Gras umbrella, hamming it up and posing gleefully for photos.

Owners Debbi and John Smith have created a Mardi Gras King Cake on a table so huge you could probably land a small plane on it. Their staff will cut it up and pass out big chunks during Horace’s first break. At the other end of the store, customers are lined up at the counter picking up their favorite home-made-that-morning donuts. Meche's is a destination for families after church on Sunday morning. After tasting the King Cake today, I see why they come every other day of the week, too.

The crowd is the usual Louisiana mix of folks enjoying the music from the comfort of the folding camp chairs they’ve brought along, dancers who never sit down and will dance in asphalt parking lots, grassy fields, or streets, and bystanders who’ve come to see what the hell is going on.

As always down here, people are ready to have a friendly chat. Like the former Navy man I talk with who spent some time in New England during his tours and has returned home to Lafayette to care for his dad. We laugh about New England reserve and southwest Louisiana warmth. When you pass someone on the street here, expect a “Good Morning, how you doing today?” Not exactly a hallmark interaction in Boston, where passersby rarely glance at each other, let alone greet one another. Down here, whether you’re at a dance, diner, or festival, people are engaging, helpful, and always ready to strike up a conversation.

Once we arrive, we don’t leave till the shindig is over. As they say here, this a way “to pass a good time.”

I’ve been to plenty of street dances, but one that takes place at a donut shop takes the cake…and since it’s Mardi Gras week, let’s make that a King Cake.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.


Big line for scrumptious King Cake during the first break.

Chantelle Trahan and pt whoop it up with Chef Sweeney.

The band plays on...


Chantelle and Chef Sweeney lead the party by example!

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

POST SCRIPT 1

Horace always finishes his show with an a cappella version of “Lean On Me." The audience sings the chorus, often linked arm in arm. “We’re in tears sometimes by the time we finish that song,” Cook Morvant’s mom says as Horace finishes the set. When Horace says, "Where ever y'all go this morning be careful, be safe, thank you." it’s not a litany. It's the gospel according to Horace Trahan, a man who’s been through hard times and found the road back.

POST SCRIPT 2

Louisiana hospitality: Rodney Bernard, flashes a wide smile when I re-introduce myself after the show. I first met him New Year's Day 2011 at Slim’s Yi Ki Ki Lounge in Opelousas during the Carrier Family Fund Raiser, “Keeping Roy’s Dream Alive.”  I’d written about Horace earlier in the year, sent my story to his daughter, Horace’s wife Chantelle, and wanted to say hello to her dad.

Mr. Bernard took the time to time to talk with me that day, told me about growing up on his grandfather’s farm in Carenco and how his grandfather, who played accordion, started him playing with spoons on the washboard when he was a kid. I was amazed that he’d take the time to talk with a total stranger, a visitor from Boston, and that he’d extended an invitation to call him up another time I visited Lafayette. Where else does this happen?

“Have you met my other daughter?” he says today and introduces me to Sheila, who introduces me to Peter Nelson, her husband, who introduces me to his father!

People ask me why I keep returning to Louisiana. Simply put, the people of the prairies of this state have a claim on my heart.

Food, Friends, House Parties: A Louisiana Way of Life

15th Annual Carrier Family Dance
Lawtell, Louisiana
January 1, 2012

“How you doin’?” says the man as we walk off the dance floor wiping the sweat off our faces. Chubby Carrier and his Bayou Swamp Band is in the middle of a smokin’ set of Zydeco at the Carrier Family Festival in Lawtell so I’m doing pretty damn well.

I launch into the litany of reasons I love this part of Louisiana. High on the list is the all-encompassing sense of friendliness I feel from people here. "When I was in Lafayette last March, a man in a local bar drew me a map so I wouldn’t get tangled up in traffic on Mardi Gras day."

“That’s the way we are down here,” the man says. “We aren’t trying to impress anyone, I don’t even think we know that we do it.” Surely there are random acts of kindness performed by strangers at home in Boston. There is nothing random about the friendly behavior here.

“I first came down here in 2008 and my life hasn’t been the same since,” I say with a grin. "I didn’t know much about zydeco and cajun music. This week I flew down here  from Boston to dance to it for five days straight!" . And I tell him I never tasted gumbo or po boys or shrimp etouffee before then. “I never ever even heard of couchon de lait. Now I can tell whether or not gumbo has okra in it.”

Ricky Norman’s eyes twinkle. “I was raised in an okra patch,” he says,” with chickens and corn and pigs all around. We put up most of our own food. When I was about nine years old, I remember my father doing “boucheries”, slaughtering three or four hogs and making all kinds of food from them. A local TV station came by years ago to record the event and a museum in Lafayette has photos showing the whole process."

A generation or two ago, boucheries were usually held at homes on a rotating basis, a way to distribute fresh food to the families in the area in a time when country folk had no refrigeration. Boucheries were also social occasions in which tales were told, updates regarding romance, good or ill fortune discussed, and perhaps singing and dancing.

The hog's meat, internal organs, brains, and intestines were all used for some kind of food. Gratons (cracklins) were made by frying the skin, and boudin, sausage filled with hog’s meat and internal organs and rice, still are favorites here (and unknown in Boston). It is said that nothing was wasted in the process of butchering the hog except the squeal.

Ricky put two kids through college while working on an oil rig in the Gulf, two weeks on, five days off.

“My kids found jobs in California and Manhattan,” he says. “They warn me in advance that they want some home cooking when they come home to visit. Every time they leave, they take a cooler of food with them because they say their friends want to try some of the food they’ve heard them talk about.”

“Something else that knocks me out are the house parties people throw around here,” I shout over the music. “Parties I go to around Boston might have ten to twenty people. I just went to a house party yesterday that had over 100 people AND a live band!”

Ricky claps his hands together. “I'm 56 years old.That’s one of the first things I’m doing when I retire!” he shouts. “People throw house parties here all the time. I have a big concrete patio. I’m going to put a roof over it, get some lights going and my wife and I will be holding our own house parties.”

I'll bet that if I had asked for an invitation, he’d have put me on his guest list.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Keeping Roy's Dream Alive: 15th Carrier Family Festival Videos

 

 

 

A “Start Your New Year’s Early Party Party” in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana

December 31, 2011
A “Start Your New Year’s Early Party Party” in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana

You didn’t have to guess which house was 116 Van Buren in Breaux Bridge this afternoon. The live music drifting out onto the street told the story. The owner had invited, oh, about one hundred of his friends, and out-of-towners who he’s known from their previous visits, and people like me who he met two nights ago at the Café des Amis.

Maybe it’s the dance community, maybe it’s a Southern Thing, but I’ve no sooner met someone here than they turn to one of their friends and say, “This is Paul, he’s from Boston,” and they bring me into their conversations without skipping a beat. And, damn if they don’t remember me the next time we meet, offer me a seat, a dance, a drink, but above all, a sense of belonging that’s as natural as breathing for them.

My friends Bernard and Rubia, who I met on my first trip here in 2008, told Bart, the owner of 116 Van Buren, that I’d be at the Café des Amis Wednesday night. Bart, the tall guy I’d seen dancing every dance since the minute I walked into the café, walked up to me and said, “You must be Paul,” and handed me a yellow invitation to his house party. That’s the way it goes here.

Al Berard, fiddle, Forest Huval, accordion

I love my hometown of Boston but every time this happens, I feel like Dorothy…”I’m not in Kansas any more.”

In other parts of the world, a steady rain puts a damper on a party. Not here today. We all duck under the roof over the tiny concrete dance floor that also happens to be the patio of Bart’s house. Between the thick rainy air and the density of sixty people vigorously dancing in a space no larger than a living room, I feel like I'm in a school of sardines at a sock hop.

Couldn’t find a baby sitter for your kid? No problem. Bring him/her along. Adults will come by to talk to them and more than likely ask them if they want to dance.

What are the essentials of one of these house parties? A good local band, a covered space attached to or next to your house, tables for the food and beverages (preferably under a little pavilion) the guests will bring, and a portapottie. The guests don’t have to be told to bring lawn chairs – they’re probably stored in the trunks of cars for most of the people who live around here. Yankees take note: these camp chairs have built in cup holders on each arm. Don’t even consider buying one without this feature.

Then there’s the question of dancing. Up north, men are not known to dance at social functions unless under duress from their women or the influence of alcohol. Here a man will dance at the drop of a hat. With as many women as he can find. The women will all say Yes to an invitation. And they will often make a man feel like a winner of Dancing With The Stars. Dancing is one of the languages around here. It’s the way men and women connect. Slow and sultry, peppy and strong, elegant or rambunctious, all dictated by the tempo of the music and the chemistry of the pair.

People here hail from homes two minutes to 2000 miles away. Some of them, like a small group that Breaux Bridge travel organizer Kay Wright has assembled, have never danced a lick of Cajun or zydeco music in their lives. No matter.

No one can resist the infectious beat of Al Berard’s fiddle, and the accordion, drum and guitar player he brought with him today. The new-comers are learning the steps in that happy mass of dancers or are being introduced to Kay’s friends on the lawn. It’s a fair assumption they will be back, perhaps for Mardi Gras.

That would be a fair assumption for me, too.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Al Berard, fiddle, Forest Huval, accordion,Keith Blanchard, drums,Dwayne Brasseaux, guitar

Everybody dances...Bart thanks his guests - we thanked him back, big time!

"Would you tell me the names of the men in the band?" I ask. "Sure, says Dwayne Brasseaux, give me your pen and pad."

A Honky Tonk Merry Go Round at the ARTmosphere in Lafayette

Honky-Tonk Merry Go Round
ARTmosphere
902 Johnson Street
Lafayette, Louisiana

Thursday, December 30, 2011

Last night was the closest I've felt to being bowled over by a dry land tidal wave, a benign force of nature in keys of A or C or D-flat, that washed over a room full of spectators at a little bar called ARTmosphere in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Joel Savoy decided to organize a celebratory end of the year jam. A talented musician and producer for his label Valcour records, the guy knows just about every up and coming singer, songwriter, and musician in the Cajun community surrounding Lafayette. Tonight, Joel had a honky-tonk merry-go-round in mind. What ensued was a kick out the doorjambs night of honky-tonk, country, rockabilly, and certified rock 'n roll.

With the exception of fiddler David Greely, everybody else who paraded to the stage hasn't seen much of this side of 30. Joel Savoy (fiddle), Chas Justus (guitar), David Greely (fiddle), Wilson Savoy (piano), Rose Sinclair (steel guitar), Eric Frey (bass), and Glen Fields (drums), got the show rolling and then it was, ”Move the chaise lounges back from the shore, mama, this wave is coming on strong.”

Rose Sinclair, David Greely, Eric Frey, Chas Justus, Glen Fields, Joel Savoy, Wilson Savoy

Every one of these musicians could carry a show all by her/himself. They play in bands like The Red Stick Ramblers, The Pine Leaf Boys, Bonsoir Catin, Steve Riley and The Mamou Playboys, Girl Howdy, The Savoy Family Band, Lafayette Rhythm Devils… the list goes on.

Although they know each other, they rarely have the chance to rock out together. The result was playful, pedal to the metal, full bore performances.  They let it loose like kids at recess.

Traditional Cajun music may course through their veins but doesn’t limit their inspiration. Local radio stations across south central Louisiana play an astonishing variety of country, rock n roll, swamp pop, rockabilly, blues, and rhythm n blues. The fire these performers breathed into the songs they covered showed that they’ve been paying attention.

Yvette Landry rocks out

From time to time Kelli Jones, Joel's fiancé, and Emma Young, who often sing with The Mamou Playboys, and JP Harris stepped onstage to solo and backup. Singer Linzay Young, country singer extraordinaire Yvette Landry, mandolin player Daniel Coolik, fiddler Courtney Granger and several more whose names I didn’t get stepped on to the crowded stage when Joel shouted their names.

ARTtmosphere was jammed with friends and relatives of the musicians, regulars from town and, since New Year is two days away, visitors who learned about if from the grapevine – in my case from my friends Bernard Ussher and his wife Rubia, who have their fingers firmly on the pulse of the vibrant music and dance scene here. Dancers had a field day with every style of two-step you can imagine, Mamou jitterbugs, waltzes, swing, Cajun gigs, and steps they made up on the spot. It was that kind of night.

This short list of songs I could remember are a fraction of those performed tonight… from honky-tonk to country to rhythm ‘n blues…  for this reporter, a New Year never got a better jump start than this.

“Don’t Stop The Music” Cajun waltz
“Let’s Fall To Pieces Together” George Strait
“It Won’t Be Long Before It’s Crying Time” Ray Charles
“My Shoes Keep Walkin’ Back To You” Ray Price
“She Thinks I Still Care” George Jones
“I Think I’ll Just Stay Here And Drink”   Merle Haggard
“Hand Me A Bottle” George Strait 70s
“Let’s Have A Party” Wanda Jackson
“Hallejullah I Just Love You So” Ray Charles

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr - Photos of pt by Bernard Ussher

 

The musicians were feelin' it...

and so was pt, dancing with Michelle Kaminsky of Magnolia Cajun Band

Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express Rock The Blue Moon Saloon

Blue Moon Saloon
215 East Convent Street
Lafayette, Louisiana 70501

Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express
December 29, 2011
10 PM

Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express are in the midst of their first set. The dance floor is the size of a baby wading pool. About sixty people want to dance on it.  Newton’s Law of Physics - you know... the one about 2 things not being able to occupy the same space at the same time, appears to be disproved as well over 60 people are dancing shoulder to shoulder and are surrounded like a second skin by another sixty pressed against the perimeter. You dance real small, and occasionally tight, which suits me fine. Nothing like a crowd of intense dancers at close range to charge up a band.

This is just another normal night of dancing around here.

“Well, we have a couple here from Washington DC, first time in Lafayette, first time at the Blue Moon. Where else you from?” says Mr. Trahan.

An avalanche response. Washington, Oregon, San Diego, Philadelphia, Florida, Missouri, Wisconsin, and of course, Boston. New Year's Eve is two days away. Once you have a Cajun or zydeco bug, you will travel great distances to dance to the real deal with people who drink the same Kool-Aid.

It is true that some people love the music but keep their feet planted. Their butts wiggle, their heads bob and they listen to the music as if it were a concert. But most have come to dance. Horace puts on a great mix of traditional zydeco, bluesy slow drags, waltzes sung in French, and a couple of hip-hop tinged zydeco numbers. The dance floor stays packed.

Whatever woes might be going on in your life, problems, challenges, fiscal woes, are booted out of your consciousness as soon as the music takes hold of your psyche and your feet. The blues will come back into focus about an hour after you leave the Blue Moon Saloon, but while you're there, honey, they have retreated underground like crawfish on a cold day in January.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello,Jr.

Pont Breaux Cajun Restaurant and Dance Hall

Pont Breaux Restaurant
325 West Mills Avenue
Breaux Bridge, LA
December 29, 2011

Thursday night, December 29, 2011

“Let's do waltz across Texas in the key of D,” says Lee Benoit to his band. The shiny wooden dance floor fills up and here we are, in another universe, on a planet with music at its center, with a sun that nourishes, heals, blows cares away, or sings about them in a way that turns heartbreak into soothing poetry. That planet, of course, is southwest Louisiana, Breaux Bridge, to be specific, tonight at The Pont Breaux Restaurant.

Gen X, Y, and Z are in scant attendance but there is plenty of Gen AARP. They’re rocking, but not in chairs.

Lee Benoit and The Bayou Stompers have a request for the Beatles “Love, Love Me Do,” and they play it in a two-step cadence! It didn’t draw many people to the dance floor but it does give you the idea that the music sensibility here does not stop at the borders of Louisiana - or of the USA for that matter.

The band plays “Jolie Blonde” (considered to be the Cajun National Anthem) - that fills the dance floor in a jiffy. I can't believe this. The next song they play is “I Want To Put On My Boogie Shoes” to a cha-cha beat that one couple manages to dance to with a jig. Arthur Murray would tear his hair out here.  No gold, bronze, and silver levels of dance lessons. Men and women hit the floor and channel the music in whatever way twitches their synapses.

Next comes a waltz sung in French. Damn, these seniors have some of the smoothest moves I've seen on any dance floor. When Mr. Benoit gets into a good ol’ Louisiana Swamp Pop song, “Why Should I Call Your Name,” I wish I had come here with a date.

I digress to the subject of dance halls. In some, like Randol’s and Pont Breaux, if you don't come with a date, the chances are 90% that you'll spend most of the evening in your chair. Go to a place like Grant Street or the Blue Moon Saloon, and you’ll find a partner for every dance all night long. The place is filled with singles and couples but even the couples switch off and dance with others. My kind of place.

A ruggedly built middle-aged man approaches my table. “How you enjoying yourself tonight? My name is Randy LeBlanc, I’m the new owner here.” A man scribbling in a notepad and taking photographs is  someone to check out.

“This place was closing down last October and I decided to buy it. When he was six years old my son Blazien, who’s always loved music, got invited up to the stage by Lee Benoit. The kid had never stepped foot on a stage. I had taught him how to play Mary Had A Little Lamb on his accordion and he did it perfectly. I never forgot that.”

Blazien is 17 now and in high school. “Tonight he’s playing in the band for about 1000 people, and soon he’s going on a cruise to play for a few hundred people.”

Family dance halls like this are where youngsters learn to dance. Don't be surprised to see a teenage boy dancing with his grandmother at places like this.

“I just could not let this well-known family restaurant disappear or maybe become some kind of chain franchise. I wanted to buy this place because of that experience with my son and because I wanted Cajun tradition to thrive. Business picked up since October. Lots of locals have come back and Lee’s band is here every Thursday and Friday for nearly twenty years–it's a very big draw.”

Next thing I know the band is playing a Creedence Clearwater revival song, a souped-up version of “Lodi”. This little quartet of accordion keyboard guitar and drums can cover songs like gravy over grits. Lee Benoit and The Bayou Stompers tonight - Lee, his wife on guitar, daughter on drums, and an electric piano player sitting in for their regular fiddler. They do know how to have fun.

When I return, I’m bringing a date. And I’ll bring the Lee Benoit Band CD that I bought and ask him to autograph it.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

I've met dozens of people who've been so taken by the spirit of southwest Louisiana that they've picked up stakes and moved here... like Janet Wilson, who left Highlands, North Carolina, and closed on a house in Breaux Bridge two days after this night!

The Huval Family Band rocks The Cafe des Amis

Café des Amis
Wednesday December 28, 2011
http://www.cafedesamis.com/
140 East Bridge Street
Breaux Bridge, Louisiana 70517


The Huval Family Band holds court Wednesday evenings at the Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge. With Brazos on fiddle, Jebb on bass, Luke on guitar and vocals, and Chad on accordions, the family (twelve in number and most of them musicians) must make up their own voting block in town.

By the time I arrive at 8 PM the place is packed with the usual suspects, mostly local folks, including a big table with Wilson Savoy, his brother Joel (members of another celebrated Louisiana music family), and a bunch of their music loving friends.  Breaux Bridge octogenarian Floyd LeBlanc, who has an official chair in the place, is leaning against the bar. Then there’s Elsbetta from Denmark, Jennifer from Texas and Mary Lou from Arkansas, Bart from down the street who invites me to a New Year’s Party at his house around the corner, and others I recognize from previous trips here.

The Huval brothers are playful presences. A roomful of people are tapping their feet, smiles spread across their faces. A little boy pulls his auntie to the dance floor to try out his steps.  

There’s something about this place that makes strangers feel at home. Tourists who are clearly envying the men and women having such a grand time are asked to dance by local dancers. In a Breaux Bridge minute, they ease into the rhythm, their tentative grins widen with each two-step they try.

Of all the experiences they’ll talk about when they arrive home, none will be told with more passion than the moments on the Café des Amis’s worn wooden dance floor and the generosity of spirit that permeates the music here.

For this Yankee, it’s hard to beat dancing a waltz with a woman singing the French lyrics softly in my ear as we navigate carefully around the packed tables. Café des Amis, indeed.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.


Dancers find places to dance between tables, three generations enjoy the music...

and Floyd LeBlanc is right at home on is "official" chair.

The Treme Brass Band at The Candlelight Lounge: A Weekly Glow

I'm in New Orleans for the 11th Annual Satchmo Summerfest that begins this weekend. The reason I arrive in New Orleans on Wednesday?...To head for The Candlelight Lounge, and a quintessential music experience you'll get here and only here. People from all walks of life and every social, economic, and cultural strata pack this unpretentious neighborhood bar every Wednesday night - The Treme Brass Band is the reason why.

Yes, that is a short man standing on a chair to dance with a six foot four coed...and yes, those people in the Candlelight Lounge are having as much fun as it looks like they are...and yes, the band's regulars are joined every week by musicians from all over town... and no, I haven't written the story yet.

This party happens every Wednesday night. Benny Jones, Sr.'s band is as predictable as the New Oreans weather - seriously hot but that's the way people down here like their music. By 10 PM the place is packed and Benny's band is locked and loaded. Lead trumpet Kenneth Terry is a soaring, bleating, teasing, high riding force of nature. He sings songs everyone in the joint knows, when he points to them for the chorus, they shout it right back.

I'll finish the story when I get home. In the meantime, this bunch of photos tells the story. I'm telling you, if you only had one night in New Orleans, and it was Wednesday, this is the place to go.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 
 
 

 

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch 4: First Night

Festival International de Louisiane: Dispatch4
Wednesday evening April 27, 2011

The temperature is 91 degrees F and the sky is clear as I drive to downtown Lafayette…a perfect night for dancing, eating, celebrating the first night of Festival International de Louisiane. Six bands will play on two stages tomorrow, then watch out…Friday, Saturday, and Sunday scores of bands from across the world will play at six stages in the downtown festival area.

Tonight, the food and drink stands in the compact downtown Lafayette area are open, the merchandise tents are filled with goodies. Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express are playing Cajun style music at 6:30 then L’ll Nathan and the Zydeco Big Timers hit the Scene Malibu Stage on Jefferson Street stage at 8:15. Downtown is beginning to buzz.

One minute after beginning to thread my way to the big stage with the mega sound system, dance area, I bump into Claire, the Lafayette teacher I met on the plane from Dallas. And a few yards later, Chantelle Trahan, who’s making a video of her husband’s show. The crowd is relaxed, the beer is cold, and all is well with the world.

Horace Trahan is a special performer He reaches out to the audience with his lyrics and his patter. He’s happy to be the first entertainer to kickoff the festival and hundreds of dancers keep filling the asphalt dancing area in front of the stage while the non dancers are parked in chairs behind the dance area and a huge standing audience is behind that, listening, heads and butts wiggling, plastic cups of beer are and cans of beer with those skinny foam holders encasing them . Hey how you doing? Asked by half the people I jostle by, people Ive never seen before, friendly and welcoming, a reminder that Im in a very special part of the world.

Claire and friends    

Chantelle Trahan making video of her husband's set

This is as uncrowded as the asphalt dance floor got all night.

Horace is a message singer. When he sings his original "Keep Walkin’"  he’s talking about the journey over the hurdles of life. If it were a Sunday, he’d be mistaken for a preacher. He reaches out to a youth audience. “You can do better than us,” he says, then invites his young son to sing the final chorus with him. The kid is a natural, and sings it out with conviction. The crowd warmly applauds and appreciates the message.
Ever generous, Horace points out his mom, his dad, his sisters in the audience then sings a Clifton Chenier bluesy style song in memory of a relative.

The Festival is an all ages event...

and the entire street is packed by the time L’ll Nathan and the Zydeco Big Timers play until 10 pm.

pt and Claire

Food is inexpensive and darn good...

Buying Festival merchandise - pins, shirts, mugs,jewelry, CDs, posters -  is one of the ways people underwrite the event. It's free and the amount of entertainment is awesome

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch3: Last Minute Festival Prep

2011 Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch3
Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The lull before the storm… but this storm, unlike the malicious ones attacking the southeastern part of  the US, is benign. Volunteers and professionals are swarming like ants in a very ordered colony around Lafayette’s downtown business district. The Festival Internationale de Louisiane begins at 6:30 pm with two bands playing at the Scene Malibu Stage on Jefferson. Everyone is determined to be ready.

pt at large is spending the afternoon scoping the scene. “You must be some of the 1500 volunteers who help put this event together, “ says I to a group hanging signs at the major stage at the Parc Internationale.

“That’s us!” the four hail back.

“Thanks for doing it and making it free for visitors like me. You know where I can find a brochure with a map of the goings on?”

One of the volunteers fishes a slightly bent copy from his pocket. “Here you go.”

I mention my chance meeting with Claire, the teacher I met on the plane who is returning from her vacation to volunteer.

“You know, we still take walk in volunteers,” the tall young man who seems to be the team leader says. Later that afternoon, I get the scoop from Apiyo, one of the two people in charge of volunteers. The young man who directed me there is Tucker, the head of security for the festival. Who knows? I might take a shift as a volunteer before the weekend is done.

This is how it goes around here all the time. No matter how busy they are, people always have the time to talk, to connect.

"Where'd you get that pocket guide?" a man says just outside the Childrens Museum of Acadiana. “We just had the Boston Brass Band play here for the kids on Saturday afternoon two weeks ago. It's part of our museum program we put on with the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra,"  Tyrus says when he finds out where I'm from. I drop off a pocket guide for him later. It turns out there are nine museums in Lafayette (population 206,000) Impressive!

Professionals set up the infrastructure for the festival.
 

The Pamplona Tapas Bar on Jefferson will be part of the Food Walkabout Friday afternoon. It will be a busy place all weekend long.

Over 1500 volunteers work the event. Inside the tent - cold beverages, air conditioned comfort, chairs to relax on, and directors to answer questions and fill assignments...and their own portapotties right outside the door!

Apiyo, one of the two Volunteer directors, fields a question Wednesday afternoon.

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch 2: On the road to Lafayette

2011 Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch2
Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, 2:30 PM Wednesday afternoon April 26, 2011

“Is this the line for the Lafayette flight?” I ask the young man with the Mohawk hair and black army boots standing next to a tall slender young black man.

“Oui, J’espere,” he says, "I 'ope so."

“Are you playing in the festival?” says I, glancing at the guitar case in his hand.

“Yes, we’re from Montreal, we’re playing Friday night around 7 pm. It’s our first time here.”

“What’s the name of your group?” the woman behind me says, “I’m volunteering at the festival.”

“We’re called Ngabo,” he says, pronouncing it twice so we get the African lilt to it.

So it goes. There are thousands of people from all over the country heading for Lafayette for the Festival Internationale de Louisiane that begins tomorrow. For the next hour, several of them tell me their stories as we sit on the plane waiting for it to take off.

Claire: “My friend Dana Cañedo runs the whole thing. I’m a teacher. I’m coming back early from our school vacation week to volunteer at one of the booths.”
“Don’t even try to drive to the downtown area and don’t take a taxi. Take one of the shuttle buses from the Cajundome that will drop you off downtown.”

With that she punches some buttons on her iPhone and shows me the festival layout.

“Look for Dana in a golf cart whizzing all over the festival area. She’s been doing this for years.”

A woman with her husband one row back. “It’s the largest Francophone festival in the US. There will be upwards of 100,000 people there.”

Claire: “You wont have any trouble writing stories. People down here are really friendly.” Claire and several passengers are Exhibit A.

Claire: “Watch out for the festival punch. It’s sweet and refreshing but loaded with alcohol. They go down easy, not so easy going out,” she laughs.

The woman across the aisle concurs.  “Go easy on them. We've all learned.”

Claire: “Don’t’ miss the Walkabout on Friday afternoon, food demonstrations in several locations. You can eat your way through it!”

Woman one row back: “We never miss it, we used to take our kids there every year to the Place des Enfants. There’s a big fountain near Vermillion Street where the kids love to frolic. One of the best years was when the Burundi Drummers organized an impromptu parade down the street. Our girls got right in! It’s a good family festival. Local people love it, people from all walks of life take it in.””

A young woman in the seat across from me pipes up “Will there be dance lessons?” Recently engaged, she’s bringing her California fiancé to her hometown to meet her parents. The fellow looks slightly nervous. It’s one thing to meet your future in-laws. It’s another to do it while learning to dance and eating food you’ve never seen in California.

“Just watch everybody else,” says the woman in the row behind her. “It’s a syncopated dance, listen to the music and move your feet!”

On the jetway as we exit the plane I walk with the white fellow with the Mohawk and the big excited smile. “What’s your name? I’m Andrew, “ he says.

“How did you get invited?”

“Zach Richard heard us play in Quebec and invited us to come for the festival. We’re really not known around here at all. We pay our own way but are happy to be part of the experience. Our music is electronica with African influences,” Andrew says.

The tall young black man turns out to be the singer Ngabo. He doesn’t say anything but if his smile is any barometer, he’s happy to be expanding his horizons way beyond Montreal. And like hundreds of other musicians here, he’ll make new friends and he’ll absorb every note and style he hears. There’s no telling how the cross pollination of musical styles will show up in each musician’s creative future…but it will.

And that fellow from California, he’ll be fine. If ever you want learn a dance or to make a friend by the time you can finish a beer or plate of red beans and rice, Lafayette is the place.

I am Exhibit A for that one.

Festival International de Louisiane: Lafayette and The Francophone World

Lafayette, Louisiana
The Festival International de Louisiane April 27 – May 1, 2011
…bigger than Mardi Gras, with the French accent of southwest Louisiana stamped all over it. 

If you want a colossal helping of Louisiana’s version of the cultural melting pot, this is the place for you. If you can’t make it, pt at large is here for you. Stay tuned for dispatches and photos.

The Festival International de Louisiane is an annual five-day festival held during the last full week of April.  The community of Lafayette, Louisiana, joins hands to transform their historic downtown district into an entertainment complex with six music stages, food court areas, street musicians, arts and crafts boutiques, art galleries, food and beverage stands, cultural workshops, international cooking demonstrations and a world music store.

The festival celebrates the cultural heritage of southwest Louisiana, referred to around here as Acadiana, and reflects the French, African, Caribbean, and Hispanic influences that are part of that heritage. The emphasis is on connecting Lafayette’s ties with the Francophone world. The event will draw over 100,000 people to Lafayette.

Louisiana Cajun and zydeco musicians Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band, Steve Riley and The Mamou Playboys, Jeffery Broussard and the Creole Cowboys, Feufollet and many other bands will share the stages with performers from the ‘world music’ scene.

The world flavor includes bands and singers like the Remesha Master Drummers of Burundi, JJ Grey & Mofro Rootz Underground, Soul Rebels Brass Band, Balkan Beat Box, Umalali, Ngabo, Elage Diouf, and Locos Por Juana. The five day lineup is spectacular.

The festival was the brainchild of the citizens of Lafayette. What they began as a modest vision in 1986 has become a world-class event. The festival is free, family friendly (La Place des Enfants), and shows off two aspects that make southwest Louisiana special: food and music. There will be over 100 free concerts over the five-day festival. Over 1500 volunteers and scores of community enterprises help to make the event work.

The whole gig is FREE. People like pt at large help keep the festival free by showing up, buying festival pins, posters, paraphernalia and spending dough for food, and beverages. Did I mention shopping?

There are two huge outdoor markets. The Marché des Arts showcases over 90 artists and craftspeople from Louisiana to Maine.  This is where the good stuff will be - ceramics, pottery, jewelry, sculpture made by hand by working artisans.

Want to get going on your holiday shopping? The Marché du Monde will have a whopping 109 commercial, import, and arts vendors selling sculptures, African art, clothing, jewelry, ceramics, paintings, photography, baskets, and instruments.

Ahh, yes… and food everywhere. Twenty-six vendors tickling your taste buds with everything from vegetarian to seafood. Local restaurants will host free cooking demonstrations in their premises and in festival sites. Personally, I’m on the lookout for an Alligator Shake at the LUS (Lafayette Utility System) Pavilion de Cuisine.

Stay tuned for pt at large’ s dispatches and photos or hop on a plane and c’mon down.

Mardi Gras in Iota, Louisiana: Five Sketches

If you look down to fiddle with your radio dial, you might drive right through Iota, Louisiana, and miss it. With a population of about 1400, it certainly is appropriately named. But if you go there to witness their Mardi Gras celebration, you're going to behold a rootsy event that captures the spirit of the celebration as it's evolved for the past 200 years.

Tee Mamou Mardi Gras, 300 Duson Avenue, Iota, LA 70543-6018
Large Wood Dance Floor
9:00AM to 5:00PM
Food, beverages, vendors. Bring a chair
9:00AM Festival Opening Ceremonies
9:30AM St. Joseph's Choir
10:00AM Corey Ledet and his Zydeco Band (LA Zydeco)
12:15PM  Megan Brown and Tepetate (LA Cajun)
1:00PM Les Tous Petite Mardi Gras (Children's Mardi Gras)
2:30PM  Scotty Pousson and the Pointe aux Loups Playboys (LA Cajun)
2:30PM Tee Mamou Iota Mardi Gras Parade Through Town

Part One: Sketches from Iota

These past few days have been some of the best times I've spent in southwest Louisiana...but I've said that before. This part of America is not exempt from the worries covering the country like a fog that some days seems so thick it'll never end. But down here during Mardi Gras, CNN takes a back seat to FUN...about a week or two leading up to Fat Tuesday - Mardi Gras Day.

The best part of Mardi Gras down here is that it's celebrated everywhere. People in tiny towns sprinkled over the prairies don’t pack up the car and head for New Orleans.

People in Basile, Church Point, Duralde, Elton, Eunice, Crowley, Gheens, Mamou, Soileau, and Iota, drive or walk down to Main Street where I guarantee you there will be a parade, live Cajun or zydeco music, booths selling home made jambalaya, etoufee, red beans and rice, and fried shrimp, along with home made arts and crafts. That's exactly what happened in Iota yesterday.

Every time I say, "How you doin' this morning," seems to be an invitation to a conversation about history, food, music, a funny story, or a way of life. If any one of the Cajuns or creoles I've met down here felt I was interested, and appreciated their towns and culture, I swear they'd give me the shirts off their backs if they thought I was in need. Modern self-absorbed life simply hasn’t found a hospitable environment down here.

If this were up a baseball game, Mardi Gras on March 8 would have been called off because of rain. Down here, tourists and locals packed umbrellas along with lawn chairs - they knew it would take an act of God to bump a Mardi Gras celebration.

   

 

Part Two: Sketches from Iota
10:30 AM
All I knew is I wanted to begin Mardi Gras in a small Louisiana backwater town. Iota, population a tick over 1400, is perfect. Way out in the middle of rice and crawfish flatlands, Iota is a self-contained package of Americana – no chain stores, no malls, just an unassuming and authentic place that could probably pass as a “living history” installation in the Smithsonian.

Under leaden skies and scudding clouds, I slow down when I see cars parked along the road and down side streets, and families toting umbrellas and lawn chairs. Park. Shut down the GPS. Follow the crowd. A few hundred yards down Duson Avenue, the thumping beat of Corey Ledet’s Zydeco Band comes into range. So do rows of little concession stands on both sides of the street selling food, crafts, and memorabilia.

Little clusters of locals exchange greetings in the street. This might be their twentieth, thirtieth, fiftieth or seventieth Mardi Gras on Duson Avenue. Not much has changed. There’s a parade, music, dancing, food, and that sense of place particular to belonging to a locale for generations.

Some cultures thrive on identity but are reluctant to allow others inside. Not here. Cajuns are willing, even eager, to share what they have with outsiders who appreciate it, who might have come long distances to witness it. Music, dancing, and a steadfast sense of identity lures the tourists and dancers but so does the friendliness of these Louisianans who sense the outsiders’ respect for their culture.

 

  

 

Part Three: Sketches from Iota

Amidst the concession stands and storefronts along Duson Avenue is an elevated plywood dance floor and a covered bandstand. Spectators surround the staging area. Many bring chairs. The truly foresighted bring umbrellas. Corey Ledet and His Zydeco Band have been playing since 10 AM. For spectators, this is a free concert. For dancers from near and far, this is nirvana. The only thing that clears the stage is an occasional five-minute soaking from the heavens during which everyone ducks for cover or pops the umbrellas. The musicians under cover of the stage just keep on playing. (VIDEO)

Music is as much a part of prairie culture as rice and beans.  As a genre, Cajun music is bulletproof. The tail has never wagged the dog.  Early musical influences from Africa, Spain, Haiti, Germany and later ones from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas, melted into Cajun music like a roux into gumbo. Add R&B and the same thing happened to the Creole zydeco music being pounded out by Corey Ledet this morning.

Maybe it’s the unique sound of the music, maybe it’s the friendliness of the people who love dancing to it, maybe it’s the welcoming attitude of the natives of the prairies – whatever it is, Cajun and zydeco music has a huge following. Local men like Antoine Melancon from St. Martinville who’s been featured on regional billboards, Leon and Nancy who invite me to Sawdust Days in Wisconsin, Kay originally from Birmingham, Janet from North Carolina, a trio of women from Denver, Mohammad from Boston, Frieda from Providence – and a bunch more I’ve seen at dances the past few days plus locals share the elevated dance floor. This is one happy place.

 

 

  

Part Four: Sketches from Iota
12:15 PM
Mother Nature isn’t in the mood to throw beads today. Maybe the celebrations the past few nights have kept her awake. She covers Iota with bursts of rain that last about as long as one good waltz…just to remind us we can take Mardi Gras for granted but not her weather.  I need shelter. Some kind of music is streaming from somewhere inside the American Legion Hall. I head in – and for the next two hours witness the past, the present, and the future of Cajun music.

Smack in the middle of a band of grown men on a tiny stage to the right of the entrance playing Cajun two steps is a blonde headed boy staring intently at his music stand, his fingers dancing accurately up and down the frets of his fiddle. On the other side of the stage to the right of the door is a girl playing an accordion.

Just about every member of a Cajun or zydeco band in Louisiana has a relative who plays music in one or more bands. I’ve seen little boys playing the rub board alongside their fathers or uncles at zydeco dances.  This is the first time I’ve seen youngsters playing with their elders in a Cajun band. (They played on a small stage in the street earlier today.)

James, Alex, and Bobby Caswell are well aware they’re passing the torch. Eric and Elizabeth Kelley are well aware they’re next in line. These two kids from Port Meches, TX have been playing together for a few years. They sing the traditional songs in Cajun French. Under the radar here in Iota, they’re in an apprenticeship, absorbing not just the musical notes but the social vibe that connects them with their audience. One can only hope these kids are in it for the long haul.

Then there are the Caswells. Guitar player James from Jennings, his cousin 62 year old guitarist Bobby from Vinton, LA, or “anyplace my RV is parked;” and Alex Caswell, the singer in the blue cowboy shirt.

For the first few minutes, I stand a few feet away from the band beside a fellow with a serious camera.
“Where you from?” says I.
“Sweden,” says he.
“How the heck you end up here?” says I.
“Boy meets girl story,” says the man, who is the editor of the Welsh Louisiana Citizen. Great. A Swede, living in a Louisiana town named Welsh and married to an American wife (sick today, can’t come).

The American Legion Hall at 109 Duson Avenue is a small wood frame building that probably looks like hundreds of others across rural America. One large multi purpose room, a small bar in the far corner, a little stage in another corner, folding chairs that can be arranged theater style or, like today, in a perimeter to permit people to dance. Families and couples sit, listen, and buy drinks at the bar or paper plates of red beans, rice, and boudin. Farm ball caps advertising feed or seed outnumber the ones with LSU.

It’s pouring outside. The food, music, and the ordinariness of the goings on inside here feel right.  Somewhere out there in the rain, a town Mardi Gras parade is going on. I’m happy to sit here and talk to a couple from Iowa and a photographer from Memphis, who are also foregoing the parade. There is something special going on here.

I sit down next to a woman and a man keeping time to the music with his foot. Over the sound of the music I get talking to Farland Henry. “I was born here and moved to Orange, Texas. The man in the blue shirt is Alex Caswell, he’s the retired water works supervisor in Orange.” 

By the time he’s done giving me the low down on the Caswells, I learn he’s a Korean War vet, loves the music, and can’t dance because of a bum knee. He gives me a thumbs up every time I hit the dance floor and salutes when I get into waltzing and two stepping with the graceful photojournalist from Memphis. When I walk over to say goodbye, he reaches up and gives me a big hug. “Glad you have such a good time with our music,” he says.  Special.
 
Then there’s the edgy Bobby Caswell. During a short break, I approach him to tell him how much I enjoy the time here. He offers to buy me a beer. “What have you learned?” he says.

I start with the trinity of music, food, and people - Bobby stops me in my tracks. His steely blue eyes fix on mine. “You don’t know music until you feel it. We feel it. We sing songs like ‘Les Flammes d’Envers (The Flames of Hell).’ Our music is about heartbreak and hell and we sing it so it sounds like heaven.” With that, he strides back to the bandstand.

The declaration is from the man who stood on the band stand a few minutes ago and said, with no small amount of fervor, “Put your right hand on your hearts, we’re about to sing The Cajun National Anthem,” then proceeded to unleash a heartfelt version of “Jolie Blonde.” Every time I passed that little bandstand I moved my hand from my dance partner’s back and placed it over my heart. I don’t take that degree of fervor lightly.

Two hours have passed. I’ve chosen to stay here during the Children’s Mardi Gras Parade (VIDEO) and the Tee Mamou Iota Mardi Gras Parade Through town at 2:30 PM. This is as close to an old fashioned ‘bal de maison’ (Cajun house party) as I’m likely to encounter but perhaps closer to a religious ceremony in which music is offered to the Maker, a harmonic burning of incense, it’s smoke rising to the heavens buoyed by the chords produced by young acolytes and venerable priests. 

Music has bound this community together for 200 years. Maybe Bobby Caswell was right. This music is a temporary experience of heaven on earth.

Part Five: Sketches from Iota
2:30 PM
I’m halfway to my car, heading to hear Chubby Carrier play at Crowley’s Mardi Gras. A   downpour sends everyone for cover. Ten quick steps away is the Iota -Egan Lion’s Club tent. The way things have been going today I should have known the choice would present me with another dose of Louisiana pride.

Donald Smith has been here since early morning and is still full of energy… and a hamper of sandwiches that need to find homes in celebrants’ tummies.

“Y’know, every bit of food sold on this side of the street has to be home made. The bread on these sandwiches, home made. The pork, home cooked.”

I’m still smiling, in my reportorial mode, taking in the scene, scribbling notes, and doing my best to stay dry under the edge of the Iota Lions Club’s tent as rain sweeps Duson Avenue.

“We’ve been doing this for 24 years. Every penny we take in goes to charity. One of them is the Lions Club Eye Foundation that buys eyeglasses for the elderly around Iota. The other is the camp for crippled children that the New Orleans chapter runs every year.”

This is not salesmanship talking. It’s pride, the old fashioned kind that believes in good works, with no reward except the pleasure of giving.

A few Q and As later, Donald learns I’m a big fan of music and dancing.

“Larry Miller lives right down the street. He makes accordions. Every Sunday before Mardi Gras he has a big jam fest, puts on a pig roast in his yard and invites everyone. People from as far as Costa Rica, Germany, and France come here. They play everything from bluegrass to Cajun, and they’re all friendly people.”

There’s a cultural glue that holds this part of the country together. If you ask a Cajun or creole man or woman who their folks are, I’ll bet the concept of six degrees of separation could be whittled down to three or four. For example, as I do some googling while I write this story, I discover that Blake Miller, the young man I heard playing accordion with The Red Stick Ramblers on March 3 at The Blue Moon Saloon (scroll down "News") in Lafayette, is Larry Miller’s grandson.

The rain has abated. Those pork sandwiches on homemade bread are looking mighty good. My hunger for food has finally trumped my hunger for information. Donald Smith sells me one of those pork sandwiches. He’s already sold me on Iota.

Mardi Gras in Lafayette: Two Stars, One Legend - Riley, Delafose, Menard

Lundi Gras at Outlaws Saloon and Dance Hall
Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, D.L. Menard, Terry Huval, Geno Delafose and French Rockin’ Boogie
4607-B Johnston Street

Lafayette, LA 70503
Monday (Lundi), March 7, 2011


At some point along the way, people around here began to give a special name to the Monday before the Tuesday of Mardi Gras. Since Mardi Gras translates as Fat Tuesday, they decided to get a head start for Tuesday by giving Monday its own title: Lundi Gras, Fat Monday.

Lord knows where this could end. Dimanche Gras. Samedi Gras. Vendredi Gras…you get the idea.

One of the big Lundi Gras parties in Lafayette this year was at Outlaws Saloon and Dance Hall. The main attractions were Steve Riley and The Mamou Playboys and Geno Delafose and His French Rockin’ Boogie, the former Cajun, the latter Creole, two of the best established bands in the state.

A cavernous main dance hall with half a dozen pool tables at one end, two bars in easy reach, and one raised dance floor with a dais for the band, this place has something for everyone.

Outlaw’s sound system could be the backup for a Civilian Defense early warning system. It’s the kind of sound that deaf people could dance to simply by hitting the beat when the bass player’s notes vibrate through the bones in their bodies. With 13,000 feet of space, any fewer than three hundred people would feel like a bowling team sitting in an empty major league baseball park. Not to worry, over 700 paying customers are in the house.

The dance floor occupies 900 square feet.  On a night that draws a huge dance crowd, it’s a bumper to bumper entertainment area in which men are expected to dance small and protect their women from the occasional bandito who tries to rustle more space than he’s got. Organizer Bill Simmons has asked Outlaws to lay down another 400 square feet of temporary dance floor to the left of the stage and they've complied. Most dancers prefer to wade into the mosh pit of a dance floor in front of the band. In this part of the country, a crowded dance floor is looked at as an invitation, not a challenge.

Simmons, a Baton Rouge native and veteran dancer, has been putting together a great Lundi Gras package for about seven years. Dancers from around the country put it on their Mardi Gras calendars and show up in droves. The fact that it's a "No Smoking" event is increasingly popular with dancers.

Tonight, there's one bittersweet taste in what’s normally an unfettered joyous occasion.

This is fiddler David Greely’s final concert hall appearance with the Mamou Playboys. Greely co-founded the Playboys with Steve Riley in Baton Rouge in 1988. His hearing is shot from the effects of amplified music- his doc has told him give up amplified performances or risk more loss of hearing. Greely will continue his career on acoustic stages.

Many an eye focuses on Greely, standing in his usual place to the right of Riley. A wistful smile on his face, the man is taking in as much of the moment as his heart can manage.

The train is going on without him, a successor has been named, and after tomorrow, Greely will become “the former fiddler of Steve Riley and The Mamou Playboys.” Toward the end of the set, Greely briefly addresses the crowd, says his farewell. Goodbye adoring fans, goodbye camaraderie of the road, goodbye the synergy produced by a tight band and a floorful of dancers, many of whom know the words to every song in their catalogue.

A sweet, counterbalancing reason to celebrate tonight is that Simmons has scheduled the appearance of D. L. Menard, Cajun icon, the man who penned and sang “La Porte Dans Arriere (The Back Door)” in the 1960s, a song that many swear should be “The Cajun National Anthem,” (which, for the record, is “Jolie Blonde”).  If you’re Cajun, D. L. Menard had more crowd appeal in the 1960s than Elvis.

Menard, craggy face, playful, with a wry smile beneath a cream-colored cowboy hat, is introduced to a giant wave of applause. Admirers flock to the front of the stage, usually a no no on a floor that by custom belongs to the dancers. No one presses the issue. It’s a natural instinct to want proximity to a legend.  

Born in 1932, Menard is a living link to Cajun music history. He’s toured the world with legendary players like  Dewey  Balfa, Marc Savoy, and Eddie LeJeune. Menard received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1994 from the National Endowment for the Arts—America's highest award for excellence and achievement in the traditional arts. In 2009, Menard was inducted into the Louisiana Hall of Fame. These days, he mentors up and coming musicians like Horace Trahan of Ossun, Louisiana.

Menard owned the stage before he launched into “La Porte Dans Arriere “ sung in French, of course. By the end of that song, he owned the building. The nearly reverential smiles on Riley and his band say volumes about where Menard’s place is in the Cajun universe. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call this a love fest. The guitarist finished the night with another classic, a cover of a sweet Johnny Rogers country waltz.

VIDEO sound is poor but gives you a sense of the man and the vibe here tonight. Menard was clearly having fun. So was Sam Broussard, Playboys' lead guitar, who improvises a sweet solo at the two minute mark.

Sharing the stage with Menard is fiddler Terrence Huval, leader of the popular Cajun band Jambalaya (and Director of Lafayette Utilities System, but that's another story).When Huval, Riley and Menard get into it during the last song onstage, it sounds like a musical jambalaya covering three generations.

"This was the world premiere of DL doing a Cajun and a Zydeco version of "Back Door " the same night and on the same stage with the best Zydeco dance band and arguably the best Cajun band. Besides Terry Huval joining in the vocals, DL was backed up by his granddaughter," Simmons says.

Geno Delafose finishes the night with two hours of his blend of zydeco, country waltzes, and smoky blues. By this time, Lundi Gras has officially become Mardi Gras.

 Riley's Mamou Playboys band had fun playing with Menard...

and Menard's admirers packed the dance floor to get a good look at the 79 year young legend.

Geno Delafose and French Rockin' Boogie played till past midnight as Lundi Gras became Mardi Gras.
 

The dance floor was  packed for every song - so dancers got together on the carpet just outside it.

Mardi Gras in Lafayette: A Zydeco King Cake Party

King Cake Party
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Geno Delafose and French Rockin’ Boogie (Louisiana Zydeco, Creole)
Gerry Spanger's House, 321 Baldwin St, (1 Mile From Cafe Des Ami), Breaux Bridge, LA
Large Smooth Concrete Dance Area
Event Hours 12:00PM to 4:00PM
Coolers are welcome and feel free to bring food to share and a chair if you plan to sit down.

THIS PARTY IS FOR THE DANCE COMMUNITY, ALL DANCERS WELCOME.
No admission, however any donations will be gratefully accepted.
There is a covered dance floor so this event is held rain or shine. 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


This is the way people do things during Mardi Gras in Louisiana.
 
Big.
 
The above notice was published at www.arnb.org, one of the most widely circulated Cajun/Zydeco online bulletin boards on earth. If it weren’t for the fact that around fifty other parties, dances, and parades were going on within a forty mile radius of Breaux Bridge, a thousand people would have descended upon and possibly sunk Jerry Spanger’s makeshift dance shed in back of his house.
 
As it was, over two hundred dancers showed up during Gerry’s annual shindig. Geno Delafose is one of the most popular musicians in Louisiana. Geno and his French Rockin' Boogie… free…for four hours…on Mardi Gras Weekend?
 
Friends, we’re talkin’ beatific visions here. VIDEO
 
Here I am in a little residential neighborhood in Breaux Bridge, one-story frame houses all the way down to the end of Baldwin Street, cars parked bumper to bumper down this street and several adjoining streets. Who needs a GPS? Just follow the people ahead of me, the ones with the bounce in their step, the gaudy shirts and hats, the umbrellas, the coolers, and the lawn chairs slung in handy carriers over their shoulders.
 
 A hundred yards from 321, I hear the back beat of the Geno’s bass player. Walk past the house, turn down the driveway, and there it is. A gloriously informal covered shed , a concrete dance floor somewhere under all those happy feet, and the usual camp of people reclined on blankets or lawn chairs, with coolers of every shape and size strewn about the lawn.  

Every so often, it pours for ten minutes. People duck under trees, each other’s umbrellas, the edge of the food tent, or just keep dancing. Many of them are so soaked with perspiration the rain  must feel like a fresh water cooler.
 
Geno and his French Rockin’ Boogie Band are playing their usual mix of zydeco, waltzes and slinky blues. Geno is pumping his accordion, the principal driver in zydeco music, to calibrate with the substantial energy being unleashed in the shed. Just outside, soda, water, chips, pretzels, m&m’s, and hot pasta are stacked on a table.
 
I’m welcomed by people I’ve seen at dances during the past two days. The zydeco diaspora ranges from coast to coast and into Canada. The two most likely times they’re likely to head for Lafayette are Mardi Gras or The Festivale Internationale de Louisiane in late April. San Diego, Baltimore, Philly, Denver, Portland ME and WA, OshKosh (I’m not kidding) and Madison, Houston, Austin, Providence, Boston, Tallahassee, San Francisco, the list goes on an on.

The woman I danced with in Opelousas last November, the one who said, “Where you from?” then told me to move my feet more, tells me I’m getting to dance like a local. I think I’m getting pretty damn good.
 
Dancers have radar down here. If it looks like you’re having a good time, you fit right in. Music is in the air but so is joy - a deliriously playful do re mi fa so la ti do kind of expression that gets under your skin and clings to it the way the smell of fried chicken or catfish from a Cajun or Creole kitchen will do. The beat and the heat and feeling of the contours of your partners’ bodies stay with you on the drive home… or to the next dance.

This is why we come here. The music feeds our souls, the camaraderie binds us, the positive energy swirling around between people has magnetic resonance that can probably be imaged by a satellite in outer space.
 
As usual the dance floor is unimaginably packed - solid as albacore tuna in a can.  A novice would take one look and stay seated on his cooler.  A new veteran like me takes a woman by the hand and wades right in. In Louisiana, there is always room for one more couple on the dance floor.
 
If you were to measure the smiles on people’s faces, you could cover the distance from Breaux Bridge to New Orleans. Music generally puts people in a good mood around here, add Mardi Gras and you have euphoria. I’m in heaven…again.

 
 

Geno Delafose introduced Murphy Richard, a legendary accordion player, to the delight of dancers and Geno's band. pt meets Michael Seider, creator of the Whiskey River Jitterbug (Lake Charles Slide).

Dancing breaks out inside and under the shed...

 

and the rain doesn't slow things down one little bit.

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr.  

 

Mardi Gras in Lafayette: Krewe de Canaille Parties On

The Krewe de Canaille Mardi Gras Party
Friday, March 4, 2011, 7 PM
La Poussiere
1215 Grand Pointe Ave
Breaux Bridge, LA 70517
(337) 332-1721 ‎

You’d have to take a trip to Buckingham Palace to be in the company of so much royalty. Krewe de Canaille Kings and Queens from the past decades, decked out in royal finery, are presented to the assembled Krewe and their friends, many, like Marion, from Chicago, and Dave and Mohmammed from Boston, and others from Baltimore to San Diego, stand elbow to elbow with locals and cheer lustily.

This year’s King and Queen, their identities traditionally a secret until tonight, are introduced and stroll down the smooth wooden dance floor: Rosa B. Henry and her husband Chester of Lafayette.

“I love your hat!” says I to a ruddy cheeked observer in a wheel chair. 

“I’m the auntie of this year's Queen,” she says with no small hint of pride, “and I’m going to be here until they close the place down.” And Lilly Langlinais, about to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, does just that. By closing time, she's more wide-awake than many who are decades younger and hasn't missed a thing that's gone on around her.

The two operating principles of the krewe are dancing and having fun. Not surprisingly, those are two guiding lights of the krewe’s founder, Lafayette native Janine Dugas (left), who organized the Krewe de Canaille’s first party at her house in 1987. As she says, “The only two requirements for membership are a love for Cajun dancing or being canaille – a member of the rabble.”

The Krewe de Canaille got a good running start for Mardi Gras – they’ve been having theme parties for the past 8 weeks at Randol’s, a convivial restaurant dance hall in Lafayette.

Tonight, the Malfecteurs play traditional two steps and waltzes all night long, the highlight being a second line dance in which every Canaille breaks out an umbrella and parades jubilantly around the dance floor. The party ends at 11 pm. If you have the urge to keep dancing, there are at least a dozen places within a half hour of La Poussiere, a family owned dance hall that’s been operating in Breaux Bridge for over thirty years, you can head for.

Yes sir, if you’re looking for an authentic Mardi Gras experience, Lafayette is the place to start.

 
2011 Krewe de Canaille King and Queen Chester and Rosa Henry (L), a former king and his court (R)
 
Loosely translated, 'canaille' means scoundrels or rabble... so here are some happy rabble rowsers
 
 

Chester and Rosa Henry in the Second Line dance, pt  and Rosa's auntie, Lilly Langlinais 
 
Rabble rowsers on parade and in photo opp mode

Mardi Gras in Lafayette: Red Stick Ramblers Light Up Blue Moon Saloon

Red Stick Ramblers
Blue Moon Saloon, Lafayette, Louisiana
March 3, 2011

If you’re gonna kick off Mardi Gras week in Lafayette, Louisiana, the Blue Moon Saloon and The Red Stick Ramblers would be a good place to start.

Add Mardi Gras spirit to the normally bodacious southwest Louisiana music scene, and you’re gonna have to call the local fire department. The Red Stick Ramblers were the matchstick that lit up The Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette last night. If the fire code allows 200 people inside the saloon, which is fronted by an old fashioned front porch with wicker chairs and is full of warrens and patios and small bar in the back, 175 of those patrons were jammed onto the tiny dance floor in front of the tinier stage located in the middle of the local hangout.

From above, the dance floor must have looked like a net a Gulf Coast shrimper had just pulled from the deep, a wriggling, writhing mass all moving to the beat of a Neptunian band high on Tabasco sauce.


The Red Stick Ramblers are a youthful bunch of rockers steeped in the values of Cajun culture…the music, the food, the traditions, and the desire to spread it around. They’ve been regional favorites since they began playing at LSU in Baton Rouge in 1999. Their arrangements are tight. They don’t coast. Their music hurtles, careens, croons, and cries, all with an energy that captures mood and a sense of place that has the evolving sound of southwest Louisiana stamped all over it.

Their catalogue of music isn’t limited. As lead guitarist and puckish front man Chas Justus says, "Lafayette is really the upper tip of the Caribbean."

I was too busy dancing to write down the titles of the two long sets of their music tonight, but I’m here to tell you it was refreshingly varied – sounds of the Caribbean via Creoles who live in Louisiana, Cajun influences via the band members' family roots, honky-tonk, Texas two steps, country waltzes, country swing, sultry blues –much of it (not including what I believe was one George Jones song!) sung in French.

“Mardi Gras has been canceled. Anyone found with Mardi Gras beads will be cited for a misdemeanor…if you want this ordinance to be repealed immediately, let me hear it!” shouts the irrepressible Justus. Dancers from San Diego, Birmingham, Providence, Austin, Vancouver, and god knows where else who’ve flown into Lafayette for Mardi Gras like homing pigeons holler with the locals on cue.

I’m in heaven. I’ve been coming here long enough so I’m greeted by fun loving local dancers who make me feel right at home. And there’s the woman I met on the plane from Dallas/Fort Worth. There’s the young woman who dances with the shake and bake power of an Amazon and asks me to dance several times. There’s the college girl who blows me a kiss on her way out the door plus women of all shapes, sizes, aspirations, intentions, and dancing skills just waiting to join the mosh pit. I am one very happy man.

This is clown car dancing. It could be a Guinness Book of Records night for most people on the dance floor at one time. And we love it. By we, I mean dancers from the college kids to people their grandparents' ages. Except around here, the grandparents party as hardy as the kids. I woke up this morning feeling like I just ran the 26 mile Boston Marathon…and I’ve got five days worth of parades and dancing to go.

Lord have mercy. By the time I fly home, I’ll feel like I ran straight across Louisiana. And will have adored every damn step along the way.

Linzay Young, fiddler and vocalist
Chas Justus, rhythm guitar
Kevin Wimmer, fiddle, vocals
Eric Frey, standup bass, vocals
Glenn Fields, drums
Blake Miller, accordion, guitar

The Red Stick Ramblers latest CD is “My Suitcase Is Always Packed” on Sugar Hill Records
The Blue Moon Saloon carries this story on their web site

 
 

Downstairs bar...
 

the band plays on...

and enjoys every minute of it.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Roy Carrier Tribute: New Year's Day Dancers, Opelousas, Louisiana

“A Tribute to Roy Carrier” (1947 - 2010)
A Fund Raiser To Rebuild Roy Carrier’s Offshore Lounge
At Slim’s Y Ki-Ki Lounge, Opelousas, Louisiana
Saturday, January 1, 2011

Cajun and Zydeco dancers from the east coast to the west coast and everywhere in between homed in on Louisiana from New Orleans to Lafayette and its surrounding towns for days of dancing and celebrating right up to New Year's Day.

These people, and the bands that power the music, seem to have no limits on endurance. The dancers might collapse for a few days when they get back home but while they're within a drive of a bandstand, they're pounding it out on the dance floor. The bands might play two or three gigs a day and they make it sound fresh every time they hit the stage.

The proceeds of today's love fest of a dance will help Roy Carrier's family rebuild Roy Carrier's Offshore Lounge.

 

Top left -this whole group partied together for days, top right at right, Dick Brainard, who helped organize the event - Dick's a long time friend of Troy Carrier.

 

The dance floor was full from 2 PM until around midnight.
 

pt and friend, mother and daughter (R)
 

Dick Brainard (L), and a group from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut on a rare break (R).
 
 
Clifton and Mona Broussard (top L) were King and Queen of Opelousas First Friday in November, 2010
 
Dancers take a breather as day turns to night, others stay inside and party...
 
so does pt!

Roy Carrier Tribute: New Year's Day, Opelousas, Louisiana

“A Tribute to Roy Carrier” (1947 - 2010)
A Fund Raiser To Rebuild Roy Carrier’s Offshore Lounge
At Slim’s Y Ki-Ki Lounge, Opelousas, Louisiana
Saturday, January 1, 2011
http://www.roycarrier.com/biography.htm

The 14th Annual Carrier Family New Year's Celebration, this year subtitled “Keeping Roy’s Dream Alive,” was a high-octane event fueled by a dozen of the best zydeco bands (fairly complete list below) in the country.

The timing was perfect. Dancers from Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston, Austin, Madison, San Francisco, Nashville, Birmingham, Portland and beyond had come to Louisiana to welcome the New Year in a staggering amount of venues from New Orleans to Opelousas. Hundreds of them wanted to come to Opelousas to put an exclamation mark on several days of dancing.

They came as an act of love for one of zydeco’s crown princes, the late Roy Carrier, who died in May 2010. Roy Carrier knew how to have a good time and he was intent on growing the zydeco community. He was a mentor and cheerleader to many aspiring musicians. He also owned Roy Carrier’s Offshore Lounge, Louisiana, which is in desperate need of repair.

They know the members of the bands, their songs, and their histories. Many women I dance with softly sing the lyrics of their favorite songs as we dance. Dick Brainard of Vancouver, a friend of Troy Carrier, convinced him to organize this tribute concert today, New Year's Day, while hundreds of dancers who knew Troy's father Roy, were still in Louisiana. That's the way it worked.

“Keeping Roy’s Dream Alive” was a fundraiser Roy Carrier’s family, led by his son Troy “Dikki Du” Carrier, organized to raise money to repair and refurbish Roy’s legendary dance hall in nearby Lawtell, Louisiana.

Family members took the stage between acts to thank patrons for showing up. They exhorted us to buy Roy’s CDs, commemorative T-shirts, and posters piled up on a table near the door. We did.

Every band played for free. Roy Carrier was one of their own. In this part of the country, you don’t turn down a friend in need.

Dancing began at 2:00 PM. I arrived at 2:45 PM. I left at 9:30 PM.  I don’t remember sitting down. I do remember eating a huge bowl of red beans and rice. In southwest Louisiana, if there’s a dance, there’s food. It might be sold inside, it might be sold on a truck or a stand outside the premises. It will be home cooked. It will be good.

There was a box for donations at the food table. After paying $4 or $5 for gumbo or red beans and rice or jambalaya, people dropped fives, tens, and twenties into the box to help Roy’s family rebuild his rickety dance hall.

Dancers I talked to today say Roy’s Offshore Lounge really could use an upgrade. The biggest complaint, especially from women, was acknowledged several times by Troy Carrier - “Fix the bathrooms!”

Dancers’ descriptions of the flimsy interior of Roy’s Offshore Lounge underscored the fact dancers went there because they loved Roy more than his dance hall. From all accounts, it sounded like the place would collapse in a huff and a puff of a Louisiana thunderstorm.

A woman from Connecticut commented on her first visit. “I stepped out of the car and went up to my calfs in muck… totaled my brand new dance boots.”

Music is a tough business, even in Louisiana where it’s a way of life. Many musicians have day jobs to make sure the mortgage gets paid and the groceries bought. Roy worked on an oil rig offshore and played his music in his “offshore” lounge when he got home.

Roy’s sons Troy and Chubby are in the music business. They believe that if they get Roy’s Offshore Lounge up to modern building code, the dancers will show up again. It will be hard – but it would be harder to walk away from a father’s dream.

In a thank you speech to a hundreds of dancers who kept pouring into Slim’s Yi Ki-Ki all day long, Roy’s daughter recalled his favorite saying: “What you gonna do with a man like that?”

Answer: Rebuild his dance hall.

Partial List of Bands –

Lil’ D & the Zydeco Allstars (Dikki Du’s son).
Dexter Ardoin.
Horace Trahan & the Ossun Express
Corey Ledet Zydeco Band
Dikki Du & the Zydeco Krewe
Chubby Carrier/Earl Washboard Sally.
T Broussard & the Zydecdo Steppers.
Jeffrey Broussard & the Creole Cowboys.
Lil’ Malcolm & the House Rockers.
Koray Broussard & Zydeco Unit.
Curley Taylor & Zydeco Trouble.
Plus a Brass Band from the French Quarter showed up around 6 pm and blew the crowd away with its funky trumpet trombone tuba percussion performance.

A  few of the bands

 

 


 
 

New Year's Eve: Cajun Country Style

New Year's Eve
Vermilionville in Lafayette, Louisiana
December 31, 2010

New Year’s Eve. Geno Delafose and French Rockin’ Boogie. Vermilionville.

Those three phrases won't mean much to the average human being. To a zydeco dancer, they are a trinity that transcends time and space, creates a joyous zone in which the outside world, all of it, simply vanishes for three hours, replaced by a joie de vivre incomparable on this planet.

On most days of the year, the big  ol’ barn-like building in which the dance is held is part of Vermilionville, a historic village in Lafayette, Louisiana, that recreates Cajun life between 1765 and 1890 – eighteen structures, six restored homes, and costumed interpreters demonstrating traditional crafts. Tonight Cajun and Creole music radiates, transcends, and transforms the barn.

A pilgrim discovers the Holy Grail. A seeker pulls Excalibur from its stony base. A dancer enters a fourth dimension in which energy is generated by swiveling hips, fancy footwork, spontaneous stylings, and goofy grins that don’t stop till well after midnight.

I have fallen in love half a dozen times. Every dance ends with a hug, some with a kiss. I have danced so seamlessly with several women that I’ve felt their DNA.

William Blake has written:
“To see the world in a grain of sand,
and to see heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hands,
and eternity in an hour.”

I have held infinity in my arms and tasted eternity tonight. And I wasn’t the only one.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Geno and The French Rockin' Boogie love to play...and dancers pack every centimeter of the floor.
 

 
By midnight, we've raised the rafters in the old barn...and welcomed in a new year!

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr.

Geno Delafose at The Rock 'n' Bowl, New Orleans

Mid City Lanes Rock 'n' Bowl
3016 S. Carrollton Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70118
Geno  Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie
9:00 PM to ?
December 29, 2010

Any dance night at the Rock ‘n’ Bowl is good. Geno Delafose and the French Rockin’ Boogie on stage two nights before New Year’s Eve is downright splendid.
http://genodelafose.net/

The iconic place on South Carrollton is packed – this is the only place in the known universe in which, if you stand in just the right spot, you can hear live zydeco, Cajun, swamp pop or swing music on one side and small thunderclaps of ten pins being crashed into by a massive bowling ball speeding down a perfectly smooth bowling alley on the other. Only in New Orleans would “Laissez les bon temps roulez” include bowling balls in the “roulez” part.

A few hardy bowlers are intent on their game tonight but the big action is on the expansive oak floor in the middle of the place. Dancers from every corner of America have come to New Orleans to celebrate New Year’s Eve (I meet women from Seattle to Boston). This being Louisiana, the celebration begins several days early.

Grammy nominated Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie play non-stop. The tidal ebb and flow on the dance floor lasts two minutes. Dancers glow with the joy of partnering up to channel the music.

The band plays the customary blend of sturdy zydeco with the driving back beat, waltzes, and fabulous bluesy songs that, with the right partner, can make a pair of dancers feel like Fred and Ginger at extremely close quarters. I doubt Fred and Ginger perspired as much and I’m just about positive they didn’t have as much fun.

The Rock 'n' Bowl is a fine place to end a year, begin a year, or celebrate anything in between.

 

Geno and the band always have fun.

  

So does everyone else. A view of the stage and dance floor from the bar (R).

  

A few hardy bowlers - the bowling lanes are in the background of photo on right).

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Grant Street Dance Hall: Horace Trahan and The Ossun Express

  Grant Street Dance Hall
113 West Grant Street
Lafayette, LA  70570-7035
Friday, December 3, 2010035 

 Want a definition of a down home roadhouse dance hall? The Grant Street Dance Hall in Lafayette, Louisiana is on the ballot. Three steps inside the door, the faintly sweet smell of stale beer rising from the hard as nails black stained plank floor is a prime indicator. But, when the humidity is just right, you just might pick up the scent of Louisiana grown Satsuma or Washington navel oranges, lemons, grapefruit, or kumquats that used to be stored here in Grant Street’s pre-1980 incarnation as a fruit warehouse.

More prominent at the moment, every piece of wood in the place – cedar rafters, joists, roof planks – have absorbed enough cigarette smoke to startle the Surgeon General. A chestnut brown thirty-seat bar runs down one side, the bandstand is on the other.   High cocktail tables with stools are situated around the dance floor… a prairie sized dance hall big enough to double as a touch football field.

Southwest Louisiana is a magnet for talent. Roadhouses from Mamou to Opelousas have pedigrees. Albert King, Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Los Lobos, Buckwheat Zydeco, and Irma Thomas have played at Grant Street.

9 PM The sound check Horace Trahan puts his band through might have loosened the nails from the roof shingles.

The volcanic rumble of the bass transmits from my butt on the wooden stool all the way through my torso and makes my teeth buzz. Talking is out of the question. The regulars drift in, wave to each other, hug, and begin to chat, mouths close to the ears of the other.

10 PM The Ossun Express’s guitar, rub board, and drums settle on stage with Horace and his accordion in the middle alongside his sax/flute player and bass player.

Horace hits the first song and 30 dancers make a beeline for the dance floor.

Horace sings most of the songs on his latest album, “Keep Walking.” It’s a rare night in Lafayette that dancers have room to really strut their stuff. Tomorrow night will be a different story.

 

 

 

Horace Trahan,accordion, vocals
Daniel Sanda, guitar
Phil Slim Washingon, guitar
James Prejean, bass
Doug Garb, saxophone, flute, harmonica
Rodney Bernard, scrub board

 

Grant Street's dance floor is huge...
 

The building still has the faint smell of drying fruit.
 
 
It's not unusual for a band to play for well over an hour a clip. 
 
 

Ten hours in New Orleans

Ten hours in New Orleans
Sunday, October 17, 2010



2:00 PM Lunch at the popular Camellia  Grill on South Carrollton Avenue...

where  my bacon and cheese omelet is fluffy, the fries crisp...



and the clientele is from all over the country (we chatted with a woman from Kentucky who was visiting her daughter and grand-daughters).

Biking in New Orleans can be a serious style statement...

and so can fern-luscious balconies at the corner of Dumaine and Royal Streets in the French Quarter ...

where some establishments...

specialize in hangovers...

and marriages happen at 5 pm in the middle of Jackson Square.

Dance time at 5:30 PM: Bruce Daigrepont plays Cajun two step and waltzes at Tiptina’s from 5:30 to 9:00 PM

and pt dances up a storm...

and socializes - in this case an Oklahoma native who’s come to New Orleans to volunteer for two weeks, pt, pt’s friend Rebecca, a Ph.D from Washington, D.C. who showed up at Tip’s because she read about it in a guide book, and a local musician we met right here last year...

who takes us to Figaro's Restaurant where his friend is performing at 9:30 PM...

after which we drive down to the corner of Esplanade and Decatur, at the edge of the French Quarter, to catch Gal Holiday’s last set at the Balcony Music Club (BMC)

and dance to some great country swing...

that ends at midnight, when we drive 70 miles back to home base for this trip, Baton Rouge

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Part 6: Sunday, May 2

The 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival:
Part 6: Sunday, May 2

April 24,25,26 & April 30, May 1,2,3, 2009.
The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival takes place at the Fair Grounds Race Course, centrally located at 1751 Gentilly Boulevard, 10 minutes from the French Quarter. Hours are 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.


MARDI GRAS INDIANS, SOCIAL AID AND PLEASURE CLUBS

By tradition, Mardi Gras Indians  come out to play twice a year - Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest. Mardi Gras chiefs spend the whole year designing and sewing together their extraordinary costumes. By hand, bead by bead, they assemble huge head dresses and suits. They were on the Jazz & Heritage Stage today, strutting and performing with the brass band behind them.

 
The men who make up most of the second line social and pleasure clubs take a cue from these “Indians” and wave elaborate feather standards as they lead their parades through neighborhoods nearly every season, but that’s another story I’ll tell when I witness my first second line parade .

New Orleans writer Deborah Cotton has worn out several pairs of shoes chronicling Second Line parades for years. She has ideas about what elevates a second line parade from an uplifting event to an exceptional one.

 
 
 
 

 

 

The 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Part 2

The 41st Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
Saturday May 1 and Sunday May 2, 2010
 
Overwhelming. All of it. The sprawl of the 145 acre Fairgrounds Race Course on the outskirts of New Orleans, the hundred thousand plus size of the crowd each day, the scores of food concessions selling exotic southern food, the huge stages and music tents strategically placed around the vast grounds, the vendor stands selling arts, crafts, clothing, hats, shirts, boots, programs, and the wildest collection of people I’ve ever seen in one place. Even the hundreds of bright green port-a-potties strategically grouped around the perimeter were impressive.
 
The real deal blew away the hype. An ear to ear grin spread across my face and stayed plastered there until well after I left on each day. There were moments when I didn’t know whether to cry with joy or shout hallelujah or amen or right on or aaiiyyeee or just let my mouth stay agape at the monumentality of 12 stages featuring the sounds of jazz, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, blues, R&B, rock, funk, African, Latin, Caribbean, folk, and much more floating through the air.
 
The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is the biggest music festival in the world as I know it. Some in the crowd have been coming here for years - some, like me, are here for the first time. One universal theme on all our minds as we leave – we will be here next year even if we have to be borne in by stretcher.
 
Music goes on from just before noon until about 7 pm each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday both weekends. Triage by the hour is what it feels like to choose who to see since there are so many great acts playing at the same time in different areas. No matter. You’ll hear fabulous music wherever you are. The list of acts is as wide a swath of the music universe as the Milky Way. 

 

The event is carefully orchestrated. Order is maintained as much by self-regulation as by blue-shirted agents of the law unobtrusively walking the grounds. I didn't witness one incident of loutish or drunken behavior. Demonstrations of unfettered joy, however, erupted like roman candles. In front of the big stages, the area closest to the stage is for standing room and the huge expanse beyond is designated for people to set up chairs and blankets.
 
Thousands do what we did. Plunk down a chair near your favorite stage by noon and use it as a base of operations. The chair, plus your umbrella, poncho, cooler, picnic basket will be there when you return. No matter how packed the area gets (think of Jones Beach with music), there’s always a kind soul pointing out a path for you to get back to the little piece of territory you staked out.
 
Video crews project terrific crystal-clear images of the performers onto billboard sized screens next to the stages. Roaming crews project video of people having fun in the crowd. pt at large and the twenty-three year old daughter of his dancing partner got a couple of their fifteen minutes of fame as their cool dancing was projected to the multitude while they styled to the music of Clarence “Frogman” Henry.

For a music lover, going to The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is like stomping your foot down on warp drive and shooting into another dimension. It’s a gumbo of fabulous food, friendly people, good vibrations, volcanic energy and the best music on the planet. There are moments during this weekend when you think if someone lit a match the whole place would explode with joy.

Photo top  of page: Rebirth Brass Band rocks the crowd.

 

Where's the Gospel Tent?

  Aaron Neville sings in the Blues Tent.

 

Bird's eye view of the Fairgrounds Race Track  

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Big Sam's Funky Nation: One Anthem, Under Abita, With Funk For All

Big Sam’s Funky Nation
Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant and Music Club
17 Holland Street
Somerville, MA 02144-2730

Thursday February 4, 2010

Sometimes a really good thing suffers if it is only that really good thing, with no variation,  for a whole set. The night might have peaked at the twenty minute mark but it was a mighty peak indeed.

 Big Sam’s Funky Nation barreled through Johnny D’s last night. Sam’s Funk Train left the station at about 7:40 and careened around the last corner at 9:20 pm. Think of James Brown as a large man performing with a big assed brass slide trombone and you get the general idea.
 
When he gets going on that ‘bone, Sam’s notes can shake the shutters of any joint he plays. He didn’t waste any time telling the full house that this was going to be a participatory event. Even in places like JDs, getting Bostonians, even Somervillians, to get up and shake their booty requires more than good-natured browbeating from the bandstand. Once you go ahead and ask for it, you gotta go full tilt to get’em off their seats and onto their feets.
 
Well, Sam’s tight band - trumpet, lead guitar  (New Orleans icon Walter "Wolfman" Johnson) and bass guitar, and drummer - applied the muscle from the get-go. Within one New Orleans minute the dance floor filled up with the damndest assortment of people I’ve ever seen on the floor at the same time. Ball capped college kids, gray ponytailed hippies, down dressed middle aged brokers from the suburbs, and one mom and her eight year old daughter all fought for some wiggle room.
 
If they needed any further motivation than the pulsing funky chicken rhythms, there was Big Sam struttin' twistin’ turnin’ whooping shimmy shakin' moon walkin' who datting on the bandstand.
 
“We need everyone on the dance flo’ gettin’ low,” Sam says in the middle of the second song. Well, you could have shot a laser beam across the floor and not hit a living soul. There was this multi-generational crowd down on their haunches. Even Sam seemed amazed at the transformation. Clearly, this crowd had been saving up their funkatude for a while. Sam was the lighting, the dancers were the clouds, and Johnny D’s the rod. BAM!
 
The man is a 235-pound hydroelectric plant. Each song is about ten minutes long. By the end of the second number Big Sam was Big Sweat. So were many on the dance floor.

As talented as the big man is, the show began to seem like one unvarying rhythmic song after another. The solos became longer as the other members of the band took a breather. The dancers tended to lose steam during the extended solos.

What was needed was a change of pace, maybe a ballad that a bunch of sweaty dancers could use to get close or a funky version of a Professor Longhair song. This was the kind of music that prompts free styling. Most of the dancers were on their own groove. But after a while even the most die-hard funky chickeneer needs a change of pace.

Big Sam’s Funky Nation would come across as more diverse if they could have more than one national anthem.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Ride Shotgun With The Coachmen

The Coachmen
Rosebud Bar & Grill
Behind the Rosebud Diner Car
"Rare soul, 6Ts, Funk and Northern"
381 Summer St., Davis Square
Somerville, MA, 02144-3203
Sunday, December 27, 2009

Assuming you can admit your gut instinct was totally wrong, it can be disarmingly enlightening to see how reality gives you and your assumptions a wedgie. You’ve been told by a reliable source that this group is talented, fun to listen to, and dance-friendly. You listen to a couple of youtube clips and are not convinced they’re your cup of tea. You go to the venue anyway, girded with low expectations. A group with the name of The Coachmen? Not inspiring. Retro. Acoustic folk? Michael Rowed The Boat Ashore?

Two songs into the set, you feel your jaw drop in surprise. Good grief, these guys are setting this place on fire.

The above scenario would describe yours egg-on-face truly. I am talking about The Coachmen, a most unassuming name for three guys who can deliver 12-gauge honky-tonk, country swing, rockabilly, rock & roll, and a touch of bluegrass. The trio appeared at The Rosebud Bar and Grill, another unexpected surprise in the equation. The decision to leave my pad, pen, and camera at home, since I was likely to stay for one set then light out for home, deserved a whack on the knuckles from a wise Zen master.

These guys have talent as opposed to flash. They may have started as teenagers practicing in somebody’s basement but they’re studio quality players. Lead electric guitar Jerry Miller has a muscular Les Paul sound with impossibly nimble picking fingers. Lead singer and rhythm guitarist Allen Sheinfeld has a gorgeous voice that can slide from a Johnny Cash baritone to a rich, deep bass that sounds like it’s coming from the back of a cave. ”John Sciascia’s one of the best upright bass players I’ve ever heard,” says one aficionado of Boston’s rich musical heritage.

Their arrangements are spare and crisp. They don’t need to showboat their talent with extended solos. They pack their musicality into each three or four minute number, pause, and go on to the next. Sheinfeld’s stage patter is unselfconsciously droll.

In between songs, I learned who these guys were from a group of enthusiasts who’ve  heard them before and were smart enough to show up with their dancing shoes. About forty other appreciative listeners filled the Rosebud’s well laid out interior. The Coachmen have a following.

Sciascia and Miller are mainstays in the Eilen Jewel band; all three of them play in a band called The Spurs. Sheinfeld is from West Roxbury, Miller from Somerville, and Sciascia from Waltham.
 
Google “the Coachmen” and you can find several youtube video clips of their songs, some of which The Coachmen played tonight (they have no website). Google ‘unprepared journalist’ and you might find pt at large, who resolves to eliminate acts of laxity in 2010. The Coachmen play again at the Rosebud Bar and Grill on January 10, 2010.

Whiskey River Landing: Flooded With Music

Dancers in Louisiana will drive through hell and high water to get to a good shindig. We were driving through a flash flood ten minutes after we left one in Henderson.

Geno Delafose and his French Rockin’ Boogie were probably still playing back there. The place was jammed when we left around 7 pm, since we’d heeded the warning of locals that during the rain, four wheel drive was the best bet to climb the steep, muddy levee road we drove down to get there. We heaved a sigh of relief when our rental Chevy sedan slippy slidey-d up to the top of the levee, the lights from Angelle's Whiskey River Landing disappearing in the mist. Little did we know.

The rain pounding on the car roof was deafening. The wipers lashing at full speed gave split second views of the road before the windshield blurred again. It was pitch dark. We missed the turn for Interstate 10. A few minutes later, the road looked more like a bayou. The headlights played atop black water rolling over the flat country road stretching before us. The only evidence or the road’s location was light from a loose string of houses stretching to our left and right. It's unnerving when your car suddenly feels like a pleasure craft.

 
Our previous reassurance, a trickle of cars coming from the opposite direction, meaning the road ahead was manageable, had stopped. The car behind us, a Jeep, turned off and headed back. There was no way to tell whether the situation was better where we’d been or where we were headed.

The front of the car was pushing a bow wake. I opened the door to check the height of the water. Dumb. One inch below the doorsill. The terrain was flat. No high ground visible. We were making about two knots. Louisiana’s annual rainfall is 59.74 inches. It felt like most of that had fallen in the past hour.
 
The sweat from dancing for three hours in Henderson, somewhere back there in wilderness, had evaporated, replaced by the sweat from a sense of impending danger.  The tone of our voices as we plotted our course was measured. Panic would be useless. Not uncalled for, but useless.

How long before water would seep through the doors? How long before it would drown the engine? What then?

Water gurgled underneath the car. After twenty tense, slow-mo, surreal minutes of driving through a nightmare, we reached higher ground and found our way to I-10 and Baton Rouge. It took three days for the rental car to dry out. The car’s grill was clogged with flotsam. My nerves were shot. It was worth it.

Monday through Saturday Whiskey River’s an overgrown fishing shack sandwiched between a thirty-foot earthen levee and the shore of the Atchafalaya Swamp, the largest river basin in the continental United States. Come Sunday, it’s the Taj Mahal of Creole music.

It’s Cinderella trading in her glass slipper for jeans and a pair of cowboy boots - and her pumpkin carriage for a pickup truck. The hell with the Ball. She’ll find plenty of princes to dance with in the tumbledown flat-roofed addition/dance hall that juts fearlessly over the swamp.

(Below, the early crowd dances to music provided by the band preceding Geno Delafose. The Atchafalaya Swamp is visible through plate glass windows right behind the stage.)

The best Cajun and Zydeco bands in the universe find their way there from 4 pm to 8 pm.  Day of rest?  Nope. This is holy rolling rapture, as close to a religious experience as you’ll have rhythmically moving your body around with a partner of the opposite sex in playfully pagan ways. 

 

Geno Delafose brings something special to the music. Two tall Texans told me they came all the way from Houston to hear him play. After every song, friends and admirers pushed up to the bandstand to say hello. Delafose, neatly pressed shirt and jeans, big cowboy hat making him seem seven feet tall, greeted everyone with a genuinely appreciative smile, then cranked up another song. His energy is as vast as the swamp behind the dance hall.

 
Hundreds of pairs of booted feet were pounding the bejesus out of the plywood dance floor. College students, businessmen, farmers, cowboys, accountants, tourists, carpenters, you name it, of every race and age stood around the worn dance floor or leaned against the bar that runs the length of the place, which was packed.
 
Energy pulses through the place, People smile, laugh, hug. Most are regulars, “Where you from?” they ask. When Boston is the answer, eyebrows arch as if to say ‘What do Yankees know about zydeco?’ My companion, born in Baton Rouge and apparently secretly raised in a dance hall, and we do a pretty good job of answering the question on the dance floor.
 
Whiskey River Landing was rebuilt after having its roof torn off by Katrina in 2005. Louisianans would sooner go without grits than without dancing.

The Atchafalaya Swamp is visible through a plate glass window behind the stage. Paneled wood walls are pinned with posters. Groups cluster around folding chairs and small tables, many of which are topped with a pail full of ice and bottles of Abita Beer.

When I stepped outside between rainfalls to photograph the place, egrets were beginning to roost in the swamp. And Floyd LeBlanc, whom I'd interviewed the day before in Breaux Bridge, came out to show me where he set up his duck blind for the little business he had going on after WWII.

 Next time I go to Lafayette, I'm renting a pickup truck with four-wheel drive, a good stereo, and a rudder.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

Synchopated Creole Thunder

Short of sex, there aint nothing as powerful as a pressed-together-sweaty-zydeco dance with a woman who channels the music as if your two bodies were having a particle physics convention.

It felt like Andre Thierry, zydeco king accordion player from Lafayette brought everything with him in his band’s van except the snakes and the crawfish. The Louisiana music blasted through the dance pavilion like syncopated Creole thunder. The joyous accordion, guitar, bass, drums, and wash board frottoir set the two hundred dancers packed under the tent to vibrate like tuning forks in the densely humid August afternoon. This was hollerin’, hip shaking, who cares about anything except the eight beat here and now zydeco nirvana.
 
The air was thick with perfume soaked perspiration, smoke drifting from the grill, and music from just this side of heaven. The crowd had been dancing for nearly four hours, the band had lifted off with the refracted energy, everything felt slippery, clothing stuck to dancers, sweat ran like rain off bodies and nobody gave a damn. These were the last two dances and everyone concerned had one thing in mind. Totally incinerate every last molecule of dance energy and leave it smoldering on the dance floor.
 
Neurons and synapses locked in the eternal moment my partner and I touched. Every molecule locked and loaded. After sixteen beats the five six one twenty five pounds of her was molded against me like a second skin. Scent of her brown hair in my nostrils, her breath hot against my neck, her arms pulling me tight, corporeal fusion underway.
 
The preceding three and a half hours of dance was a launch pad for this one glorious fit yourselves together, become one eight count organism doing everything but mitosis on that dance floor, her Molly Bloom smiling eyes saying Yes, I’m loving this, Yes, keep it going, and Yes, I did, body parts emulating call and response, the thigh to thigh contact that had the charge of sex the sweat of sex the uninhibited moves of sex but no sex, this was a sex no sex dance, a yin yang dance real and fanciful, intimate and distant, we dance independently but totally in synch, defying Newton, tucked into the same space at the same time, “What’s your name?” she shouts as music ends, "You’ve got the best firepower I’ve felt all day!” She’s still feeling that dance as she sips her coffee this morning, jesus that dance was special, I wonder what would happen if we dance again.
 
And Im thinking that dance was a gift, a present the day after blowing out a few score candles on my birthday. This was going to be a good year.

The Radio Kings

The Radio Kings at Sally O'Brien's in Somerville,MA
October 27, 2009

There are two things you can be assured of when The Radio Kings hit the bandstand. They’ll surprise you with the breadth of their catalogue and they will play music that begs you to get up and dance.

Last Tuesday’s gig at Sally O’Brien’s was a case in point. Brian Templeton and Company - Mike Dinallo/guitar, Andy Plaisted/drums, Dean Cassel/bass and Templeton wielding guitar and mouth harp, got into a first set groove that veered from swing to blues and ballads.

I’ve known The Radio Kings as a killer blues band that covers Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Slim Harpo and adds their own originals. Tonight they went country, with grit and finesse. When they play a song by Luke the Drifter, a pen name Hank Williams used early in his career, you know they're inquisitive, adventurous, and willing to stray from the well trodden path.

Perhaps incongruous to country-averse listeners or listeners of highly commercial playlists on country radio stations, this genre is a rich source of dance music. The handful of dancers tonight polished their moves in country swing, west coast swing, two step, and slow hold-her-tight ballads.
 
Templeton can croon and growl then pick up his harmonica and stake out the boundaries of the song. Dinallo, innovative and playful, takes up where Templeton left off. Veterans Plaisted and Cassel keep the train on the tracks with steady drum and bass beats.
 
The Radio Kings are right at home in Sally O’Brien’s in Somerville and Toad in Cambridge, two of the best funky neighborhood bars in the area. The regulars respect the music, and the great beer and ale on tap in both places is as rich and varied as the music performed there.
 
First set partial list:
“Hello Trouble” - Hank Williams
“Lovesick Blues” - Hank Williams
“Six More Miles” - Luke the Drifter, (early Hank Williams pen name)
“The Shelf “(Hard To Love Somebody When You Can’t Love Yourself} - Brian Templeton
“Run With The Blues” - Dave Clarke
“Can’t Go On Without You”-  Fats Domino
“Nervous Breakdown” -  Eddie Cochran

 

From cradle to dance hall in Southwest Louisiana

 
When’s the last time you saw six-year-old kids on the dance floor? Or little girls or boys being whirled around the dance floor in their daddy or mommy’s arms?
 
If you lived in Louisiana that would have been last Friday or Saturday night at Randol’s in Lafayette or Saturday afternoon at The Coffee Break in Breaux Bridge.
 
Music and dancing is a huge way of life in southwest Louisiana. Who needs Arthur Murray when you can learn from everybody in the dance hall?
 
Friday night, a young brother and sister alternated sitting in the dining room with their parents and grandparents and skipping hand in hand to the dance hall in the next room.
 

The Cajun band Jambalaya (which played in the Lowell, MA Festival a month ago) kicked out one joyous song after another, all in Cajun French. Some kids sat on one of the wooden benches that surround the hall, visible through the glass partition between the dance hall and the dining room, and watched the adults styling to the music.

A shy blonde eight-year-old girl was busy taking digital photos of every couple that passed by - until her grandfather leaned over, took the camera out of her hands, and led her around the floor in a waltz.

On Saturday night, a pair of six and seven year olds stole the show. Got right out there and did their version of waltzing and two stepping. Adults applauded the two kids as if they were contestants on Dancing With The Stars. They beamed with the attention.
 
Earlier that day at The Coffee Break, the children who came to the Pont Breaux Jam, the weekly Saturday 11 AM to 2 PM celebration of Cajun music, were treated royally. While little brother was being danced around to the Cajun music by his dad, little sister was getting an impromptu waltz lesson by one of the men who’d come in from the Café des Amis.
 
Maybe that explains why places like Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, Angelle’s Whiskey River Dance Hall, McGee’s Landing, and Pat’s Fisherman’s Wharf, all in Henderson, and many more places throughout the parishes of southwest Louisiana, are so popular.
 
If there’s a zydeco or Cajun band on the stage, you can bet there’ll be a roomful of men and women working up a lather two-stepping, waltzing, and slow dancing for hours at a time.
 
Music and dance are the glue that holds towns together all over southwest Louisiana. Some day, these little shavers will grow up to be the adults teaching their own kids to dance at Randol’s or The Pont Breaux Jam, or a facsimile thereof. 

Goin' To New Orleans: Tipitina's

TIPITINA'S

501 Napoleon Ave.

New Orleans, LA 70115
September 27, 2009

In the words of Fats Domino, "I'm going to New Orleans….". Yes, pt at large has landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport and his priorities are in order. At the corner of Napolean and Tchoupitoulas Streets is Tipitina's, going strong with a rainbow of musical styles for the past 32 years.

Are we having fun yet?

For music and dance, this place is a mecca. The Sunday night Fais do do (link) brings in a a crowd of people from around the block to around the country.

Bruce plays, dancers twirl.

The ages of people who are two-stepping and waltzing around Tipitina’s well-worn wooden dance floor range somewhere between Tulane students and Grandma Moses.

pt and Grandma Moses

The legendary Bruce Daigrepont revs up his diatonic accordion and cranks traditional Louisiana Frenchmusic with original Cajun and Zydeco material. Everyone who is capable of standing upright is on the dance floor. Abita beer flows from the taps at the chest high mahogany bar. Backed by a fiddle, bass, and drums, Daigrepont has been playing the Sunday Fais do do from 5:00 to 9:00 pm here for nearly sixteen years.

pt at large and Bruce Daigrepont

The bust of Professor Longhair in entryway to Tipitina's is a bronzed pedigree of the beloved place. Longhair, born Henry Roeland Byrd, all but invented the rolling rumba boogie-woogie, blues and southern R&B feel of  the music in this town. He wrote Mardi Gras music for the Tchapatoulas Indians and his own brand of dance music. The former neighborhood juke joint was named after one of Professor Longhairs songs.

Professor Longhair and friend

In 1977, says the burly fellow who took our $7 cover charge for the evening, Tipitina’s was formed from the 501 Club and Longhair, an African American, was given an ownerships share and became one of the first integrated dance clubs in New Orleans.

Performers as disparate as Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, the Meters, Cowboy Mouth, the Radiators, Galactic, Better Than Ezra,  Wilco, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Lenny Kravitz, Bonnie Raitt, James Brown, Widespread Panic, and Stevie Ray Vaughan have made music here.

Dancers with spectacular spins and moves made up right on the spot share the dance floor with people who’ve never danced a two step in their lives. As the night progresses it isn’t at all unusual to see one of these high powered dancers take a newcomer by the hand for a turn around the dance floor.It's just the kind of shared exuberance Dr. Longhair wanted his music to inspire in people.

Rhythm & Roots Festival:Dance, Listen, Dance Again.

12th Annual Rhythm & Roots Music and Dance Festival
Ninigret Park, Charlestown, RI
Labor Day Weekend, September 4-6, 2009

If you had a zydeeelicious bone in your body, and if you didn’t have an excuse, like, you were getting married or your house just burned down and your car with it, I know where you were last weekend. The 12th Annual Rhythm ‘n Roots Music and Dance Festival in Charlestown, RI.

Spectator umbrellas and tents at rear, seated audience in front of Main Stage (center), and 4000 sq.ft covered wood dance floor at top right

Thousands of music lovers thronged to sun splashed, sprawling, Ninigret Park to hear some of the best zydeco and Cajun bands in the land play their hearts out. Dance-aholics headed for the two huge,  covered dance floor pavilions and sweaty-wet two stepped and waltzed all day long and well into the night.

There’s something about the Red Bull jolt of a zydeco band that cancels out muscle fatigue. You head for a seat to take a breath after a zippy two-step, an accordion starts up on the bandstand and you turn right around and scan the floor for a partner. Trust me, you don’t have to look far.

Variety abounds. It ain't nothing to see college aged girls dancing with silver haired gents or AARP women dancing with men young enough to be their grandsons. This is one of the only places in the dance world where age is just a number.

A few bluesy and country acts were booked, but for the most part you were listening to the crème de la crème of bands straight out of Louisiana. And to prove how sweetly insidious zydeco has become, a few homegrown bands from New York and Rhode Island/MA got thrown into the mix.

Listeners arrive early to stake out territory on the one-acre grass as close as possible to the outdoor Main Stage. And there are rules. Spelled right out in big print on the second page of the free program. As in “No standing in front of the Main Stage. Standing is permitted at the sides.” And “Sunshades, Umbrellas, etc. must be at the perimeter of the concert area. Please do not block the view of others.” It’s environmentally conscious, too. “Help us RECYCLE by disposing of trash and recyclables in designated containers.”

Louisiana musician Tab Benoit plays on the Main Stage

No rowdies, either, unless you count over-energetic people on the dance floor.  For the record, I saw only one clearly intoxicated person from 1 P.M. till I left at 10 P.M. The festival is extraordinarily well thought out. Need first aid? To find the Lost Child Center? Lost and Found? 24 Hour Security? It’s all clearly marked. Staff members were visible all day long.

What kind of a festival would this be without merchandise to tempt you? African baskets, hand crafted jewelry, beads, fragrances, T-shirts, and my personal favorite, a “temporarily air brushed tattoo” parlor are lined up on one stretch.

Ethnic and regional foods along with all-American homemade ice cream are on another section. Pulled pork, seafood chowder, red beans and rice, blackened shrimp, Greek and Thai foods, and vegetarian stuff - they’re all here. 

Another convenience, all food and beverages (including beer and wine) must be purchased with script (dollars called “bayou bucks”) sold at Food Ticket Booths. The music vibe is strong. People chat like NBFs in the occasionally long lines. One couple danced in the line waiting to dig in to regional food at Chili Brothers. The man would have been me.

 Music pouring from the Main Stage is amped via seriously large speakers into one huge, 4000 square-foot, wood floored tent, Dancers occasionally step out to watch the band play. Another band plays directly to dancers on the floor of the Red Hook Ale Brewery and Newport Vineyards Dance Pavilion several hundred yards away.

 I stumbled upon Cajun dancing in 2006.

“Do you dance?” Chris Ash, fiddle player for The Magnolia Cajun Band asked me after I’d interviewed her for a feature story for the The Dartmouth-Westport (MA) Chronicle.

Within a Lafayette minute, she had Dewey Balfa singing on a tape in her home office and I was learning the two-step. “I think you’ve got it,” she grinned, “We play next month in Seekonk, MA. Come on over and dance.”

Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole play at Red Hook Dance Ten

I did show up for that dance - got hooked then and there. Which is why it wasn’t a stretch to drive two hours each way to dance, eat, and dance some more for nine hours today. If you have that zydeelicious bone in your body, this kind of music and dancing is worth driving alot farther than that.

Rhythm ‘n Roots Music and Dance Festival Bands
Great Big Sea(Sun) • Hot Tuna(Sat) • Asleep at the Wheel(Sat)
Jerry Douglas Band(Sun) • Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole(F/S/S)
Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys(S/S) • Tab Benoit(Sat)
Lee Boys(Fri) • The Travelin’ McCourys(Fri) • The Duhks(F/S)
Mitch Woods & His Rocket 88s(Sun) • Eilen Jewell(Fri)  
Keith Frank & the Soileau Zydeco Band(F/S/S) • Papa Mali(Sat)
Nouveaux Honkies(F/S) • Corey Ledet & HisZydeco Band(S/S)
Big Sandy & theFlyrite Boys(S/S) Preston Frank (F/S/S)
Ed Poullard(F/S/S) • Magnolia Cajun Band(S/S)
Occidental Gyspy Jazz Band(S/S) • Li’l Anne & Hot Cayenne(S/S)
Hot Tamale Brass Band(S/S) • Len Cabral(S/S) • Marc Levitt (S/S)

Want to listen to the concert music? Consider making a donation to mvyradio if you like what you hear.

Ninigret Park Festival Features
Main Stage with Huge Covered Dance Floor • Workshops • On-Site Camping • Dance Pavilion
Dance Lessons Daily • Fun Family Stage • Unique Vendors • Nightly Fais Do Do • Ethnic & Regional Foods
Bike Trails • Swimming Pond • State-of-the-Art Playground • 5th Annual Kids Cajun Academy (pre-register)
Easy access! Just off US 1. Ninigret Park Exit. Entrance half mile ahead.
Minutes from Ocean Beaches & Accommodations

Photos: Paul Tamburello

The Blue Suede Boppers Rock For Tom Taylor

Johnny D's Uptown Restaurant and Music Club
17 Holland Street
Davis Square
Somerville, MA
The Blue Suede Boppers and Tom Taylor
9 P.M.
September 3, 2009

You never know what you’re going to get when you head for Johnny D's but this was a first. A political fundraiser.

You gotta love Tom Taylor. The alderman from Somerville’s Ward 3 kicked off his campaign by inviting The Blue Suede Boppers to put some gas into his drive toward Election Day in November. A ton of his supporters waded into the free food he supplied and the Boppers added the razzmatazz to the event.

Congressman Michael Capuano and Somerville Mayor Joe Curatone supplied the bon mots on Taylor’s behalf. Taylor introduced us to everyone in his family except the dog and to a host of fellow aldermen who’d come to spread the love for him. The guy’s been toiling in the fields of public service for over twenty years. Based on what his brethren said, you’d be hard pressed to find a more earnest public servant. He’s just the kind of guy the late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Tip O’Neill was thinking about when he said, “All politics is local.”

The Blue Suede Boppers are one of those hark-back -to-the-days groups that specialize in the sound of the fifties and sixties. What is great about them, besides the fact they do fine covers of classic songs of that era, is that several of them lived through adolescence during that period. Real vintage music played by real vintage musicians.

They play rock’ n roll, honky-tonk, rhythm’ n blues, rock-a-billy, and doo wop. This was music to dance to - and in the old days, many a Saturday night the only glow in a car parked on a secluded lover's lane came from the car radio that was playing these songs.

Back then, as musical tastes were changing so abruptly, this was teenager music that adults of the era just didn’t get. It belonged to us then in real time. It belongs to us now with nostalgia bands like The Blue Suede Boppers. We can still dance to it. And we can still think of stuff to do on Saturday night.

The band - electric guitar and bass, electric piano, drums, saxophone - proved their pedigree with some blistering saxophone work and creditable four part harmonies - you had to love the sax man prowling the dance floor wailing on his saxophone then dashing back to the band stand. The Boppers showed versatility when they lit into a version of “I Know,” that had a unique New Orleans rolling rumba beat and the sax player taking up a trumpet and blowing serious smoke in the chorus.

An unexpected treat was the appearance of three members of the Somerville High School Music Program staff, two sax players and electric piano (Rick Saunders the music program’s director), who sat in for the last three songs. The event was a fund raiser for the Music Program, too. Alderman Tom Taylor, bless his heart, has a lot of irons in the fire - he initiated the effort to find funding for the program when he found out it was in jeopardy of folding.

 A fourth guest, Kevin Leppman, one funky trombone player, romped with the style of a veteran second liner. No surprise. Leppman, Saunders, and Bopper drummer Reebee Garofalo are members of The Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band. The band hosts HONK!Festival in Somerville - this year in Davis Square, October 9-11.

Somerville High School students would have been pretty amazed to see their teachers rock out. Good show. Good music. Good Dancing. And any politician who hosts events at Johnny D's and supports high school arts programs deserves your consideration.

Blue Suede Boppers personnel:
Howie Tarnower, guitar; Pam Swift, bass; Mitchell Kossak, keyboards; Dick Lourie, sax, trumpet; Reebee Garofalo, drums.

Partial Playlist first set
“Run Around Sue”
“Rockin’ Pneumonia”
“Come Go With Me”
“CC Rider”
“Kansas City”
“Let’s Do The Twist”
“I Know (you don’t love me any more)”
“Choo Choo Cha Boogie”

Photo: P. Tamburello

Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys: Honky Tonk Heaven

Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys
Sally O’Brien’s Bar and Grill
335 Somerville Avenue
Somerville, MA 02145
617-666-3589
Open 11 AM -1 AM
Here’s a clue about the vibe of this place - on the “music” tab of their site - that tells you all you need to know.
“NO COVER. Remember your bartender. We hope you dance.”

Question. What’s a remedy for these last dog days of summer, hot and humid, that are sucking the marrow out of Boston’s bones? If you pointed your pony over to Sally O’Brien’s in Somerville last night you’d have found an answer.

Honky Tonk and cold beer. Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys were in town for a night of light-hearted, story-telling, twangy, ultra danceable country western music.

Practitioners of the under-appreciated genre of Hill’s Honky Tonk style don’t get to town often. If you’re a dancer, you get ready to ride hard and get put away wet. If you’re a listener, you order a long neck Corona, pretend it’s Lone Star Beer -‘The National Beer of Texas’ - and feel like you’re in a Lone Star watering hole.

My friend Luster says this place and its music comes as close to Galveston as it gets around here - minus people packing guns in the pickup, attitude, and a reason to tell you to step outside. There is zippo pretension to this sweet pub.

Sally’s isn’t a far cry from the Cheers -Where Everybody Knows Your Name - kind of establishment. Friends hang out at the bar for solace, self-expression, and suds. The occasional loner watches a plasma TV on the wall behind the bar with the same sense of contentment he’d have in his living room, sort of like having company without needing to engage them in conversation.

And of course every night there’s the music and people who come here for the release. Short of confession, music is the best way to let go of your sins or at least forget them for a few hours. I guess we could rename this place Saint Sally’s of Somerville.

Arty Hill writes songs that mine heartbreak, longing, love lost, love found, and rowdy-fun-times that come across as two step operettas. You probably don’t have the twang but I’m betting you’ve felt the ups and downs Hill narrates in his three or four minute musical novellas. Hill’s covers of Hank Williams (“You Win Again” and “Lovesick Blues” complete with yodeling!) and Ray Price (“Crazy Arms”) underline how closely his own songs hew to the tradition set by the masters of the genre.

There’s an uncomplicated honesty in Hill’s honky tonk music. No bubble gum, no syrup, and, thank God, no string section - just straight-up intelligent lyrics. In case you’re wondering, this is not the high-pitched, nasal kind of singing and banjo music you heard on the soundtrack of Deliverance. Just Arty Hill on electric guitar, and the Daddys on a standup bass, drums, and a laptop steel. The chain without the saw.

Hill's well-crafted songs, from uptempo "It Ain't Workin'" to ballad "Hall Of Fame Of Nothin'," are layered with that gritty sense of playful energy and survival that make you tap your feet or take a sip out of that longneck in solidarity with the people he's singing about.

There were a bunch of dancers there last night who only sat down because Hill and The Long Gone Daddys took a set break. I was one of them. At the end of each dance, I had the choice of rushing back to write song titles and tidbits into my pad on the bar or staying out on the dance floor. Full reportage suffered a bit.

The term honky tonk, first used in print in an Oklahoma newspaper in 1894, referred to rough-around-the-edges establishments that offered alcoholic beverages, piano music and occasionally women plying the world’s oldest profession, to miners, cowboys, cattlemen, and laborers. The Galveston Daily News used the term honkatonk in 1892 to describe an establishment in Fort Worth. The music in these honkatonks was more upbeat than classic blues and was and still is rhythmically suited for dancing.

Honky Tonk music eventually influenced ragtime, boogie woogie, rock ‘n roll, hillbilly, country, and in turn was influenced by them. It's now in its present incarnation as western swing. You don’t have to be on a road trip through Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, or Montana to hear honky tonk influenced music these days. It seeps into country stations around America.

In case I haven’t made it abundantly clear, if you have a dancing bone in your body, it will begin keeping time when Hill and the Long Gone Daddys rev up the music. If you know how, you'll dance a Texas Two Step, or any kind of swing, or anything else you think you can imagine leading with a partner.

When I asked a woman who was swaying along with the music if she'd like to dance, she smiled, reached for my hand and said, "I don't know a thing about dancing, can we just make something up?" We did just fine, thank you very much, with a bunch of other happy dancers on the Persian rug sized dance floor at Sally O'Brien's last night.

And yes, Sally, I remembered the bartender.

The Long Gone Daddys (based in Baltimore, MD) who played tonight
Standup Bass - Steve Potter
Drummer - Ed Hough

Special guest
Mike Castellana of Framingham, MA, on pedal steel

PLAYLIST first set partial list
Unless noted as ballads, these were all country swing or two step songs  of varying tempos and singularly danceable to anything else you could make up on the dance floor.

“Living On The Road Again” Arty Hill original, uptempo
“Driftin’ In” Arty Hill original with lines like “Every bar’s a harbor when she comes driftin’ in…” mid tempo
“You Win Again” Hank Williams ballad
“White Lightning” ? not verified, uptempo with big time guitar and laptop steel
“Julie Don’t Get Married” slow tempo with Framingham’s Mike Castellana’s pedal steel wailingly weeping all the way through the lyrics like “Julie, wait for me because someday I’ll be free…”
“I’m Thinking It’s Better This Way” Arty Hill, mid tempo
“Church On Saturday Night” Arty  Hill original
“It Ain’t Workin’” Arty Hill uptempo original
“If You See Me Comin’ Around” Arty Hill original, uptempo
“Make My Wishful Thinking Come True”

Second Set: partial list
“Lovesick Blues” Hank Williams two-step with yodeling!
“Crazy Arms” Ray Price mid tempo
“Hall Of Fame Of Nothing” Arty Hill ballad
“It’s All Your Fault” Willie Nelson
“The Race Is On” Arty Hill
“Bar Of Gold” Arty Hill
“Me And My Glass Jaw” Arty Hill
================
The band played on but ptatlarge had an uncharacteristically early curfew.
Try going to http://www.artyhill.com/v3/ or
 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ahlonggonedaddys
to hear some audio clips

===============

To be investigated soon: “This place has the best burgers and fries around ” - from a regular patron, who spoke with great certainty.

The Family Jewels: Doo-Wop - Alive and Swell

The Family Jewels
Sally O'Brien's Bar and Grill
335 Somerville Ave.
Somerville, MA  0214
Monday August 10, 2009

If you’re of a certain age, listening to your first live Family Jewels concert can suck you down the rabbit hole and deposit you bam into the midst of memories of sock hops, Clearasil commercials and a type of mellifluous harmonic convergence that poured accelerants into adolescent firestorms that free-ranged through your smutty teenage one-track mind. We’re talking “Doo-Wop,” a style of music that style left a vapor trail that’s still visible. And in this case, audible.

Look in the right places and you can still find evidence of that glorious white contrail. Sally O’Brien’s was the right place last Monday and The Family Jewels band was flying high.

The vibe vivified memories of the Friday night Boys’ Club Dances in my hometown, boys on one side of the gym floor figuring out how, as damn cool as possible, to cross the no man’s land in the middle of the floor to ask a girl to dance, then determine exactly how close to dance the slow ones, many of them dreamy doo-wop songs that ionized hormones already in danger of exploding out of the dancers’ pores.

The 1950s was the music industry’s Big Bang. By the middle of the decade, one form of popular music was draining out of the country’s kitchen sink and other forms, like visitations from alien planets, used radio airwaves to penetrate the country’s homogenization shield with a mix of rootsy, country, rhythm ‘n bluesy, rockabilly sounds.

Gurgle, gurgle gurgle…Teresa Brewer, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, The Mills Brothers, Patti Page, hell, even Ol’Blue Eyes Himself began falling off the charts. Up into Billboard’s Top Ten floated unlikely artists like Billy Ward and His Dominoes (Sixty Minute Man, 1951), The Spaniels (Goodnight Sweetheart, It’s Time To Go, 1954), a supernova named Elvis Presley in 1955,  Sam Cooke (You Send Me,1958), The Platters (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, 1959).

Elvis Presley took the mix of gospel, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, he grew up with and went one way. Others, vocal groups primarily from big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, added pop music, a cappella, ballads, jump blues and swing into an alchemy that threaded in and out of mainstream music from the 1950s to the early 1960s.

This would be the form of smooth, tight-harmony, vocal music called Doo-wop that had its roots in African American communities in the 1940s. The so-called “race music” bubbled through cracks in the mainstream around the time Elvis blew the hinges off the doors of popular American music.

If you want evidence of this peppery genre, there’s the Family Jewels fronted by vocalist Fred Griffeth. These guys channel close-harmonied, dance-friendly, heart-on-sleeve, neighborhood-boys-standing-on-the-street-corner music that’s at the heart of doo-wop.

By the time I reached Sally O’Brien’s at 8:07 PM, they’d just cranked into their first set and the dance floor was full. These five guys can sing as well as they play. Asa Brebner, guitar, Andrew Mazzone, bass, Steve Sadler, laptop steel, Kevin Shurtleff, drums, are all miked up and deep in harmony with an uptempo “Oh Gosh, Oh Gee.”

Griffeth is the impish spark. He growls, hoots, banters, and teases. Occasionally all you can see of him is the top of his straw snap-brim hat as he winds his way through the dance floor proclaiming, “Monday is the new Saturday night!”

He’s been known wade onto the dance floor to tap a guy on the shoulder to "cut in" and dance with a woman for a few bars then hop back to the bandstand for his turn at the mike. Nothing forced about it. His rich baritone would have put him at the center of any street corner doo-wop group of the fifties and features him as the gemstone in the Family Jewels setting.

Brebner and Mazzone first hooked up with Griffeth to play for a friend’s wedding in 1990. The show rocketed off so well that Griffeth founded a group called Blue Heaven which still plays locally.

The Family Jewels was born in the early 2000s. Brebner and Mazzone have a huge catalog of rhythm ‘n blues songs. Local laptop legend Steve Sadler and drummer Kevin (Spider) Shurtleff round out the group.

These guys are masters of their instruments but the Family Jewels' main focus is singing those harmonies together. Griffeth puts his own vocal stamp on the songs and The Family Jewels hand-delivers them with five-part harmonies loaded with raw zest and playful energy.

 “Our music has, over the past three or four years become a rich American gumbo of styles and I'm delighted. Sometimes the R&B numbers are more Rockabilly, the gospel tunes get that swampy New Orleans feel in them and the country oftentimes will swing into something jazzy and citified!” Griffeth says. That energy has deep roots.

Niche music, yes. Limited audience, maybe. But happy, rich and rootsy music, definitely.

For more info, check http://fredgriffeth.net/index.html
and click on “You’re So Fine”
http://www.asabrebner.net/index.html
http://www.myspace.com/familyjewelsboston

=======================
Partial Set List
Oh Gosh Oh Gee,  uptempo, sort of rockabilly
You're So Fine, mid tempo, swing or whatever you kind of dance you want
Why I Love That Girl,  uptempo swing
I Saw Her Standing On The Corner,  mid tempo swing or groove
Your Precious Love, ballad (Whew)
It's Time To Rock, Don't Let Go uptempo swing or whatever you kind of dance you want
Oh I Love You Forever, great ballad, Johnny Ace?
Pretty Little Girl ?
Crazy Little Mama, Come Knock Knock Knockin', uptempo swing
Yes Im A Fool Falling In Love With You, ballad i think,
Fine Wine, uptempo swing
Waa Waa Baby, I Aint Gonna Let You Go, uptempo swing

CJ Chenier: Zydeco Royalty Visits Johnny D's

CJ Chenier and The Red Hot Louisiana Band
Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant
17 Holland Street, Somerville, MA 02144
First Set
July 16, 2009

When a lean, lanky black man wearing a two-piece magenta outfit and wielding an over-sized gleaming white accordion steps onto the stage, you can rightly expect the man has attitude to go along with the ensemble. If this apparition didn’t knock you out, the music was about to.

Straight outta Louisiana, CJ Chenier proceeded to light up the stage at Johnny D’s in Somerville last Thursday night. What his Red Hot Louisiana Band - washboard, percussion, guitars - lacked in their own colorful fashion statements they made up for in energy. They played in technicolor.

Know this about zydeco and Cajun music. It’s upbeat and infectious. Even when the songs are in Creole, jubilant or lachrymose, you understand the sentiment and feel compelled to dance to them - whether your’re wiggling in your chair or dancing jam packy on Johnny D’s little dance floor.

You sweat, you begin singing in Creole, you dance with every partner you can find. That ain’t hard because it seems like every zydeco fan in a hundred mile radius has shown up. They’re party people of the first order. The hell with the fact it’s a Thursday night - we’re talking CJ Chenier. We’re talkin’ zydeco  royalty.

Most of these zydecoholics will get home in the wee hours and show up late for work or on time and shuffle across the parking lot in a Chenier beat since the music has a shelf life of several days.

Another thing to know about zydeco and Cajun music. Zydeco is a syncopated eight-count partner dance with lots of room for improvisation and self-expression. You don’t have to be a champ to get out and dance to it. The beat is so insistent that you move with it, sort of like being in the second line in a New Orleans parade. I danced with two women who didn’t know zydeco from zabaglione. And we had fun.

 
Zydeco is a form of American roots music that evolved in southwest Louisiana in the early twentieth century. Accordion and washboard (Frottoir) were all that was needed to produce waltzes, two-steps, blues and rock and roll. Since then, drums, guitars, fiddles and such have been added to the bands but the tang of Louisiana is at the core of the music,
 
The bang tonight comes from the guy with the big grin, one gold tooth prominently glinting in the spotlight as he sings and shouts out to the crowd. CJ (Clayton Joseph) is the Creole son of the late Grammy Award winning Louisiana musician Clifton Chenier, the man who brought zydeco from rural Opelousas, LA to nationally broadcast programs on PBS.

Before accepting his father’s 1978 offer to join him, CJ spent his early years in Port Arthur, TX playing his saxophone to everything from James Brown to John Coltrane to Motown. By the time he took over for his ailing father in 1985, he’d learned accordion. He can squeeze the daylights out of it for a joyous two-step and caress it slowly for a hold-on-tight smoky blues number.

The next time the little 300 capacity Johnny Ds wants to fill the house, all they’ve got to do is invite CJ Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band. The local zydeco community, along with people who just want to ‘laissez les bon temp roulez,” will do the rest.

The White Owls: Blues With Bite

The White Owls
Toad
Live Music 7 Nights a Week, Never a cover!
1912 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02140

With a name like “The White Owls” you might expect this band to be playing oldies in the recreation room of senior citizen centers. Nope.

Last night they played their bi-weekly gig at Toad, the mighty, mini, bandbox of a saloon in Porter Square, Cambridge, MA.

There was Dennis Brennan, singing his heart out with the “stormy, husky, brawling, city of big shoulders” Chicago style that Carl Sandburg would have loved. Brennan's catalog of blues songs is prodigious. His all-out style can pin your ears back.

Brennan’s crew tonight, Steve Sadler (laptop steel), Milt Friedman  (guitar), Dean Cassel (bass), and Andy Plaisted (drums), are no pretenders. They are intense.

Brennan sets up most songs with a growl and riff of his harmonica, lights into the lyrics, and nods at Sadler, who gives the song the sonic treatment of a jet melodically breaking the sound barrier. Friedman captures Sadler’s licks and bends them into his own. Cassel’s steady bass lines and Plaisted’s precise percussion wrap like a vise around Brennan’s slinky, sexy, or rollicking blues.

In the hands of singers and players who feel it, blues has no expiration date. The group of five college-aged girls perched on barstools and Gen Xers, Yers, and who knows what-ers are as plugged into this band as the sizeable group of Boomers scattered about. A few of the Boomer Fems standing in back are grooving as unselfconsciously - and provocatively - as they might have before receiving their AARP memberships in the mail.

The White Owls rip through a bluesy Willie Dixon song, a slow tempo "Blues With A Feeling" by Little Walter, and a growling version of "Don’t Lie To Me," which Sadler, the Alpha Dog of Laptop Steel Artists, plays like a freight train fueled by grits.

Brennan’s quite a sight, sort of a less craggy Keith Richard face, a porkpie hat cocked atop an explosion of curly brown hair. The music comes from some steaming pit in his guts. No stage posturing or engagement with the crowd on this night. Just fabulous covers of traditional blues, sung like he meant it and felt it. No way his sidemen can do anything but bring their own A game to the party - and they do.

Brennan’s been playing around Boston since 1992.  His Dennis Brennan Band plays roots and indie rock, much written by Brennan, at The Lizard Lounge on Wednesday nights. Different style and musicality but the same intensity. His most recent album, “Engagement,” studio and live tracks, met with critical acclaim. He’s already a local legend. He deserves more.

If you’ve never heard him before, check out the Toad calendar for the White Owls next show.  It’s a great way to get your first dose of Brennan washed down with a heaping platter of Blues.

Partial Set list - First Set
 (Dennis didn’t introduce any songs. I could only figure out three of seven !)

I Love The Life I Live by Willie Dixon
Blues With A Feeling by Little Walter (Marion Walter Jacobs)
Don’t Lie To Me by Chris Bell, Alex Chilton

Photo courtesy of Brennan's website

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade: Atwood's Tavern

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade
Monday, December 29, 2008
Atwood's Tavern
877 Cambridge Street  Cambridge, MA

ptatlarge pulled open the door at Atwood's Tavern on a chilly January night at 9 pm and walked into a wall of sound with about the same decibel level as the right field stands at Fenway Park in the seventh inning.

Everyone in the narrow space leading from the packed long bar down toward the tiny stage at the far end of the tavern had to shout to be heard over everyone else. Midway between Christmas and New Year, everybody had something to shout about.

No way, I say to myself, are Miss Tess and the Bon Ton Parade going to claw their way through this din.  During the next hour, I decide that Tess could have attracted a crowd on the heeling deck of the Titanic.

If you’ve played in places like the Dogfish Head Brewery in Rehoboth Beach DE, or Callaghan's Irish Social Club in Mobile AL, or Lee’s Liquor Lounge in Minneapolis MN, or the Town Pump Tavern in Black Mountain NC, you’re probably used to having to earn attention from the audience.

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade bust out of the gate with a groove that will last nearly an hour.  The saxophone wails, and Tess belts out a swinging  “Baby Wontcha Please Come Home.” Hell, this little parade is gonna do some shouting of its own. The thirty or so people in the scattering of tables and long wooden banquette applaud. By the end of the first set, patrons halfway to the front door have noticed there’s something special going on back here.

The first set is filled with vintage Tess, a mix of jazz standards and original songs. Her style is rooted in the past without a whiff of sentimentality. This woman can sing the daylights out of a song.

Miss Tess embellishes one chorus of the swing tempo “Saving All My Love For My Baby” by pursing her lips and producing what for all the world sounds like a muted trumpet solo.  The growing slice of audience cheers lustily.

She sings Hoagy Carmichael’s lyrics to Johnny Mercer’s  tune “Skylark” with a take that is as fresh as when the song was first recorded in 1942. The Bon Ton mix of saxophone/clarinet, upright bass, drums, and tonight's guest guitarist Bruce Millard lights the place up with their solos. Miss Tess scats a verse or two with a voice as silky as a young Ella. 

Tess follows up with Duke Ellington’s "Sophisticated Lady," the sax grooving and upright bass thumping along with her playful timing and exquisite alto voice.

By this time you realize what an appetite there is for Miss Tess's interpretations of jazz standards from the 30s and 40s. She then launches into her original compositions, many of them from her 2nd CD “Modern Vintage,” an apt description of her repertoire and style.

“This Affair” is a sly little rumba tempo and the thought is to stick around a minute, pull up a deck chair, and look for the lifeboats later. By the time the band dives into “I Don’t Need That Man,” a few intrepid members of the audience find tiny islands of floor space to dance to the groove. The rest of the crowd is tapping feet and swaying in their seats.

Tess’s musical sensibilities and her band’s versatility are a combustible mix. You’ll hear everything from Django Reinhardt gypsy riffs to ragtime rhythms to country swing to some low down Besse Smith blues.

None of it would mean a thing without the anchor of Miss Tess’s voice - “Stormy Baby” satin, or “I Only Really Miss You When I’m Stoned” sassy, or  “Child Of The Devil” earthy - Miss Tess crosses genres with exquisite  pitch and respect for the music.

So who is this woman?

Miss Tess’s childhood lullabies were the sounds of her father’s big band rehearsing in the family’s cellar right under her bedroom. After studying classical piano as a kid in Maryland, she started on the guitar as a teenager.

To our lasting benefit, she discovered Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaugh and something clicked. She moved to Boston, and formed The Bon Ton Parade - Miss Tess, guitar and vocals; Alec Spiegelman, sax/clarinet; Paul Dilley, upright bass; Gillian DeLear, drums (Rob Rudin tonight) - in 2005. Spiegelman covers an impressive range - Clarence Clemmons growl, Benny Goodman bop, and isn't afraid to go free-form Charlie Parker once in a while.

Miss Tess at 27 is on an upward trajectory. Her music is unique, her talent rich, and her hunger for success great. When’s the last time you saw an artist work the room with a sign-up sheet for her email list, talk up the patrons during a break, then attend to a problem with the sound system before the next set ?

Take my word for it, she won’t have to do this much longer. She was named a "Local on the Verge" for 2008 by the Boston Globe and recently received a 2008 Boston Music Award for "Outstanding Folk Artist of the Year.”

Whether you call her folk, roots, or jazz stylist, you’ve got to call her talented and ambitious. Check out Miss Tess's tour date schedule for proof. You wont be seeing her have to fiddle with the sound system or see her in the back room of Atwood’s Tavern for much longer.

First Set (partial  list)
"Baby Wontcha Please Come Home" - swing standard mid tempo
"Saving All My Love For My Baby" - swing standard mid tempo
"Skylark" Hoagy Carmichael lyrics, Johnny Mercer music - ballad
“Sophisticated Lady” - Duke Ellington standard
"Train' Ride to Caroline" - original uptempo
"I Dont Care If The Sun Don't Shine" - cover of Elvis Presley first Sun record, uptempo swing
"Stormy Baby" - original ballad

Second set (first five songs)
"Bye Baby" - midtempo swing standard
"What they call the Door"- original
 "Drink My Whiskey With A Straw" - original mid tempo swing
Pokey McMumbles, - original
 "Child Of The Devil" - blues standard, down ‘n gritty

Amanda Shaw, Chad Huval Play Cajun at Johnny D's

The Rice and Gravy at Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant and Music Club last week was found on the stage, not the plates of the patrons. And that was just the appetizer. Chad Huval’s Rice and Gravy trio opened for Amanda Shaw and The Cute Guys. The two bands filled the funky Somerville club with warmth of southwest Louisiana, an antidote to Hurricane Gustav’s nor’easter swirling down the streets outside.

Both bands played the bouncy Cajun, Creole, and zydeco dance music that was born in the bayous west of New Orleans. None of this music is authentic without a fiddle or an accordion. Chad Huval and his beautiful squeeze box sat center stage for the first set flanked by veteran Martin Grosswendt and Chris Ash, of Magnolia Cajun Band fame.

 Ash sat in for fiddler Darren Wallace, who injured his elbow, and had about two hours notice to pack up her fiddle and head from Westport, MA to Davis Square in Somerville. “She’s playing on adrenaline and fear,” joked her husband from the bar. And talent, of course, which is why Huval reached out for her in the first place.

Martin Grosswendt, playing guitar for over thirty years, is one of the country’s premier interpreter of Delta and Piedmont blues. He’s renowned for his blues singing, and slide guitar and finger picking expertise. All three took turns singing the French lyrics and playing sweet solos.

It didn’t take long for Huval’s cheery band to coax the audience to their feet. Several adventurous men and women who didn’t know two-step from tango got out on the dance floor to join veteran dancers. The idea of Cajun music is to have fun. By the time Rice and Gravy finished their set of two-steps, sweet waltzes, and snappy zydeco, the crowd had an idea of the music played somewhere in Lafayette, LA every night of the week.

After a quick break, it was Amanda Shaw’s turn. Amanda Shaw is a twenty-year-old fireball of a fiddle player. The five-footer is Cajun to the core. With the first few driving beats of the drums and Shaw’s slashing fiddle, the energy level and decibels got dialed up a few notches. Her band, The Cute Guys, often consists of local musicians she finds for the gig. Joe Ferron, bass, Stuart Star, drums, Greg Mayo, guitar, were able sidekicks this night but Shaw is the show.

 Her stage patter voice sounds disconcertingly like a teenybopper’s but when she sings, you imagine her kicking up sawdust on the stage of the Grand Old Opry, sort of like a young Brenda Lee with attitude. For the dancers in the crowd, the set was a blend of slow and fast swing, waltz, two-step, boogie-woogie, and zydeco.

Shaw drove through a non-stop first set with most of the tracks on her 2008 CD “Pretty Runs Out.” Shaw thinks nothing of transposing pop lyrics over her country roots music. It works. A zippy “French Jig” is followed by a slinky cover of The Clash's “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.”  When she introduced the traditional “Acadian Waltz,” her voice was filled with reverence for the traditions into which she was born…and was born to play.

If you combined a go-go dancer with a fiddle prodigy, you have some idea of how Shaw delivers her music. Bow slashing, brown ponytail switching, she’s a whirl of elbows, knees, hips. The rosin she vigorously applies to her bow between songs keeps it from catching on fire.

She wore her Louisiana heart on the sleeve of her white blouse when told the heartfelt back story about the bluesy ”Chirmolito,” (co-written by Shannon McNally) inspired by Mexican workers who sang to themselves at night after helping to rebuild Shaw’s Katrina-damaged house in New Orleans during the day.

When Amanda was 14, Academy Award nominated film maker Greg McGillivray was searching for four established and up and coming musicians to narrate and add music to a documentary sounding a warning to the accelerating loss of wetlands in the bayous, the buffer between the coast and New Orleans. Shaw was the youngest chosen. The IMAX film explores the natural environment and cultural treasures of Southern Louisiana. The result was “Hurricane on the Bayou.”

“Wetlands are a speed bump against storms,” she said in the documentary and on the stage on Johnny D’s. On August 1, 800 people (including ptatlarge, who shares the same birthday) packed Mid City Lanes just outside New Orleans, to celebrate Amanda Shaw’s 20th birthday. She sent the $8000 raised at the door to “Voice of the Wetlands,” a coastal restoration advocacy group founded by Houma, LA guitarist Tab Benoit. Until those wetlands are restored, Shaw and other like-minded musicians are speed bumps with fiddles, accordions, and guitars.

The audience was made up of dancers who think nothing of driving an hour or two to step out to the sounds of Louisiana music and the curious who wanted to expand their musical horizons. By the time they left Somerville, everyone inside had a whiff of the Gulf Coast.

Radio Kings Rock TOAD

The Radio Kings returned to Toad last night and anybody wandering by the little bandbox of a neighborhood bar in Porter Square could hear the big vibe going on inside. These guys are your basic down and dirty bar band. They can cover country, R&B, folk, and rock. When they barrel into blues territory, it’s lights out ferocious. They opened last night with a hard rock version of George Jones’  "Who Shot Sam”, covered folk with The Band's “Long Black Veil,” tucked in their original “Money In Her Pocket,” then switched to a twangy, country “Six More Miles” by Hank Williams.

When Brian Templeton reached down to pick up his mouth harp to play “Evil Love,” the night’s groove got seriously primal. Two women eased off their stools and danced sinuously to the beat. There was a good deal of butt wiggling happening on the bar stools. Cupping the harmonica and mike in his hands, Templeton poured his soul and body through its little pipes, a fire breather one song, a keening wailer the next. The big guy channels his idol Howlin’ Wolf but he’s at home in his own skin.

Guitarist Mike Dinallo and Templeton were the two founding members of Radio Kings in 1991. The band, occasionally dormant, has been experiencing its next incarnation.  The supporting personnel tonight were local stalwarts Steve Sadler on laptop steel, drummer Andy Plaisted, and Mark Hickox on bass.

Any time you put Sadler and Dinallo on the program, you’re in guitar heaven. These guys never lay down the same lick twice. Sadler flashes a Cheshire cat grin when Dinallo busts an impressive riff that answers one Sadler laid down before him. In Toad’s tiny confines, you can feel the music in your bones.

The rest of the first set careened between an upbeat Five Royales cover of “Buzz, Buzz, Buzz,” BB King’s “And Like That,” and gritty, smoky covers of Fats Domino’s  “Every Night About This Time,” and Little Junior Parker’s  “I Feel All Right Again.” This was classic harmonica-guitar call and response blues, underpinned by insistent bass and drums, and dared you to sit still. Or tempted you to join those two women enjoying the hell out of the music in the narrow aisle at Toad.

To remind you they have range, The Radio Kings finished the first set with Sugar Boy Crawford’s “No More Heartaches,” a groovy little swing-tempo feel-gooder that left us tapping our feet more than wagging our butts. These guys got game.

Susan Huppe: Dancer With A New Orleans Cause

When Sue Huppe learned to speak French, it didn’t occur to her that it was the first step on a winding road that would lead her to help organize a fundraiser to rebuild New Orleans.

A Watertown resident for the past 9 years, she’s been dancing since not long after her first wobbly steps out of her playpen in Delaware. Her day job as a Certified Holistic Nutritionist and Herbalist pays the rent but dancing feeds her soul. One of her first thoughts after listening to a few bars of music is, “What kind of dance can I do to this?”

Twenty years ago, Ms. Huppe drove down to the Cajun and Bluegrass Festival (now called the Rhythm and Roots Festival) in Charlestown, RI. To her delight, much of the music was buoyant, infectiously happy, and sung in the Acadian brand of French spoken in southwestern Louisiana. She was hooked.

In time, she traveled to New Orleans and Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country, to absorb the culture, learn Cajun and Zydeco dance styles, and listen to music that just about everyone in southwest Louisiana knows how to dance to. When she returned, she was eager to keep on dancing. Believing that Cajun Two Step would find an audience in the snowy North, Huppe decided to make it happen by teaching it to others.

The world of dance began to unfold for her. While teaching her specialties of Cajun and Zydeco, she branched out to learn and teach ballroom, latin, and east and west coast swing at Adult Ed classes in Newton, Cambridge, and Boston and at Springstep in Medford. She taught several of these styles at Dancing Feats for 14 years.

“Each kind of dance has its own flavor and allows you to express yourself in different ways. The most important things are to have a feel for the music and feel the connection between you and your partner,” she said.

When Baton Rouge native and Needham resident Rebecca Wilson decided to create a fundraiser to help the post-Katrina rebuilding programs in New Orleans, she knew who to ask for support.

“I took my first zydeco lesson from Sue four years ago. We connected right away because of our shared appreciation of all things Louisiana,” Wilson said.

Wilson knew that Ms. Huppe was acquainted with the organizers of large events since Huppe had taught at the Williamstown Jazz Festival, Swingin’ New England, and Strawberry Park’s Blast From the Bayou. Ms. Huppe is now one of the core group planning an event to raise $10,000.

 “The great contacts she’s made as a dance teacher helped us put this event together,” Wilson said. “She knew which venues would suit our purposes. Some of the organizers she knew offered tickets to their events for our raffle and linked our web site to theirs.”

The “Help ReBuild New Orleans” fund raiser will be held at Springstep in Medford on Sunday, October 5, from 5 - 9 pm. Proceeds will be donated to Common Ground Relief, a small volunteer based non-profit organization whose office is in the heart of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

The non-profit group partnered with a licensed general contractor and is rebuilding homes destroyed in Katrina’s wake, and offers legal assistance to homeowners who do their own work to cut through red tape involved in applying for building permits and inspections.

Common Ground Relief has also begun a job training program, placing locals with professional carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who are volunteering their time. One of the members of Wilson’s planning group volunteered his plumbing and carpentry skills to the organization several times in the past two years.

The fundraiser will feature the same vibrant music that first attracted Ms Huppe. Two local bands, Slippery Sneakers and The Chili Brothers, will perform a mix of New Orleans style funk, blues, Cajun, and zydeco. The bands and vendors offered discount rates since they realize every penny will go toward building houses in the Lower 9th Ward. Tickets are $25.00 in advance and may be purchased through the Help ReBuild New Orleans web site www.rebuildneworleans.net.

“What is fun about teaching dance? Everything!” Sue Huppe said. “Remembering what it is like to be a beginner and seeing the joy it brings to people, in fact, seeing how it can change people's lives!”

The "Help ReBuild New Orleans" fundraiser is a testament to that.

Boston Dance Raises Roofs in New Orleans

Music and politics are unlikely dance partners, but Needham’s Rebecca Wilson is determined to match them up. The Baton Rouge native has been dancing to the music of Louisiana for as long as she can remember. A Mardi Gras dance at Ryles in February, with its infectiously happy music and outlandish costumes, captured the indomitable spirit of Louisiana’s “Let the good times roll” for Wilson. It also reminded her of the dark cloud of uncertainty hovering over some quarters of New Orleans.

“As a native of Louisiana, I go back fairly often, so I’m acutely aware of how New Orleans is struggling to fully recover. Many people haven’t come back yet because they have no homes to come back to. I want to harness the New Orleans spirit that I felt that night at Ryles and use it to make people aware that the recovery is ongoing,” she said. 

As a tourist, Wilson’s friend, Somerville attorney Phil Woodbury, had also been mesmerized by the music, food and vibrant street life of New Orleans before Katrina.

“Like many, I watched in horror the pictures of flooded homes and helicopter rescues, and was shocked to read of the slow and chaotic federal response,” Woodbury said. He heard about Common Ground Relief, a small volunteer based group dedicated to immediate cleanup and long-term relief. He packed his bags. His first two trips were in February and April 2006.

Since the group had several legal projects, including eviction defense and police brutality issues, he thought his legal background would be tapped. “But when the v olunteer coordinator noticed that I had put ‘plumbing’ on my list of skills, I got an immediate call, and reported to a house used by the health clinic staff for offices, overflow exam rooms, and sleeping,” he said. By the time he left, there were two functioning bathrooms and a score of grateful volunteers.

A well-timed letter from Woodbury, who happens to love dancing, sent sparks flying in the local zydeco community. His appeal for money, prior to his return to New Orleans in 2008, saying, “Common Ground’s goal continues to be to help restore the Lower 9th Ward by rebuilding homes and by helping bring back the schools, churches, and cultural events that make community possible,” arrived around the same time as February’s Mardi Gras dance. 

It’s hard to tell what synapses need to be triggered to transform a person from a spectator to an activist. Wilson knew that Fats Domino, Irma Thomas, and other musicians lost their homes in the Lower 9th. She felt that government agencies had been slow to aggressively support rebuilding there. She had witnessed New Orleans musicians play their hearts out in spite of the pain of being displaced. She vowed to make some music of her own.

  Wilson and a core of music lovers created "Help ReBuild New Orleans" to raise awareness and money for the rebuilding effort in the Crescent City. They’re soliciting donations and selling tickets to a music event slated for October 5. Two bands playing a variety of Louisiana based music - blues, New Orleans funk and zydeco - and a great dance floor are all in place. Now they need to fill the hall and raise the money.

Wilson and her cohorts have been bitten by the grass roots bug. They hand out flyers and talk it up with every dancer, band member, club owner and just about anyone else they encounter. Good promotion is the only way they'll reach their goal of raising $10,000.

After research, they decided to send the proceeds to the spunky Common Ground Relief organization whose office is situated on Deslondes Street, in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, a few hundred yards from the levee that was breached in 2005.

Seven days after Katrina devastated New Orleans, four activists launched the Common Ground Relief Collective. It was a grass roots effort and has stayed true to its mission. Short term, the goal is to rebuild. Long term, the goal is to address social and political inequities that the organizers believe have plagued the area long before Katrina put it on the national map.

The ambitious outfit is entirely staffed by volunteers. Rebuilding homes and repopulating the neighborhood with its former occupants is just one part of its mission. Its initiatives are a gumbo of socially progressive programs, including toxin removal, legal assistance, and restoration of the wetlands that have historically protected Louisiana. It’s also one of the 10 organizations in Lower Ninth Ward Community Coalition with the “Make It Right” Foundation begun by Brad Pitt.

Wilson visited Common Ground Relief’s headquarters in August. She talked with Operations Director Thom Pepper, who arrived from Miami to help with the relief operation in 2006. He’s watched the focus change from relief work to rebuilding.

Their assortment of muddy rooms filled with cardboard filing boxes, folding chairs and scrounged desks, has been supplanted by a modest two story building in the heart of the 9th ward near the Industrial Canal. The compact structure contains small rooms for meeting and planning, computers wired to the internet, space for a few office staff volunteers, a shower, and cots for the weary.

 “At the end of 2007 spring break, we were having 500 volunteers a week coming here gutting houses and we were cooking 11,000 meals every week on propane stoves in a tent,” Pepper said. Volunteers distributed food and water, set up a legal clinic, a power tool lending library, a clothing center, tested soil and did massive amounts of house gutting.

By October 2007, the house-gutting program was mostly completed and the process of pulling house permits began. Common Ground Relief turned its attention to the rebuilding process.

“We partnered with a licensed general contractor here in Louisiana to build houses. We’ve begun a job-training program, hiring local people and training them in construction skills, and they will be hired to build and do interior finish work here,” Pepper said. Volunteer professional plumbers, electricians, and carpenters help in the training program.

If Pepper can hire and train 60 to 80 local people this year, he estimates that Common Ground Relief could build a house every three months. In spite of a sense of urgency, obstacles exist. City Hall is open weekdays 9am to 4pm, not convenient for working people.  Pepper has lobbied for satellite offices with longer hours to make it easier for people to pull building permits. It hasn’t happened.

Pepper emphasized that this is a long-term project. “Eighty percent of New Orleans was in six feet or more of water. This house we use as our office was under 18 feet of water for three weeks, as was most of the Lower 9th,” Pepper said. “To put this in perspective, it took Miami 10 to 15 years to recover from Hurricane Andrew.”

   Common Ground has benefited from the help of 20,000 volunteers since 2005. At the time Wilson visited this summer, Pepper said there were 30 volunteers, a half dozen of them long term, who get room and board for their efforts.

 “We don’t accept federal, state, or United Way money. All our funding is from foundations and individuals,” Pepper said. "The money allows us to go out to the wetlands and plant trees and grass, do soil testing and bio remediation, and allows us to keep people from having their homes foreclosed. It allowed us to put an 80 year old woman back in her house a hundred yards from here."

Common Ground Relief has agreed to use money raised by Help ReBuild New Orleans exclusively for rebuilding homes. Every penny from Wilson’s Help ReBuild New Orleans fundraiser will be spent on lumber, sheetrock, roofing and the like.

Wilson’s planning group loves the potent culture of music and dance that makes New Orleans vital and irreplaceable. By the time their fundraiser is held at Spring Step in Medford on October 5, they intend that a few hundred New Englanders will become honorary Louisianians for a day.

“I want to capture the joy New Orleans generates and to remind people that this unique city is still suffering.  New Orleans needs a rebirth. Pull out your wallets and put on your dancing shoes. This is an opportunity for all of us to help with the baptism,” she says with a smile.

Cafe des Amis: Morning Thunder on the Dance Floor

From brass bands playing on street corners in the French Quarter to Cajun bands playing mixes of zydeco, blues, swamp pop, and country in roadhouses all over southwest Louisiana, you're never far from music - and a place to dance to it.

“And Saturday morning, we can go dancing from 8 until 12 over in Breaux Bridge,” says my traveling companion.

“You mean Saturday night,” I reply.

People don’t dance at breakfast time. It’s just not done. I mean, you might be dancing Saturday morning at around 1 AM but that’s really Friday night. Saturday morning you’ll be bagging a few extra hours of sleep, and upon awakening you’ll listen to the quiet gurgling of hot water dripping through a filter basket of fresh ground coffee and stare at the large print of the morning paper, confirming that war hasn’t broken out somewhere. Somehow or other, dancing, which requires energetic motion and hip-torso coordination, doesn’t come to mind until well after noon.

Not so, Bucko. You’re in southwest Louisiana where zydeco dancing and coffee are as common a combination as red beans and rice.

By the time we arrive in Breaux Bridge, the outer walls of the Café des Amis are twitching from the happy sound of Cajun and Zydeco music and god knows how many feet pounding on its floor. One step inside is as unlikely a world as this Yankee has ever witnessed.

The five-piece band on a makeshift stage is deep into a two-step, a hundred people or so are packed onto a dance floor created by removing half the tables and chairs in the place, and another hundred or so are either watching the action from the bar on one side of the room or from the handful of tables jammed up at the rear of the café.

 The smell of coffee, bacon, and biscuits hangs in the close air. If you could roll it into cigarette papers, you’d be high on it all day. It felt like the whole place had been struck by an errant lightning bolt of energy.

The joyful music seems to create a “One World” vibe in which truckers and tourists, motorcyclists and accountants, blacks and whites, rub elbows and wise-crack with one another. A school of sardines couldn’t pack themselves any closer onto the dance floor and definitely wouldn’t be having as much fun.

If you’ve ever wondered how so many people can squeeze out of one of those clown cars at the circus, you’d conversely wonder how you and your honey could possibly squeeze into the dense pack of people on the dance floor.

By the time the song is over, you feel like you’ve been dancing in a crowded elevator with miraculously friendly people. No one’s feet have been stomped and you don’t feel jostled. And that person hollering with joy as the fiddle and accordion match solos is you. Cajun music was made for this. And you haven’t even had lunch yet.

 “Those people sitting at the tables are the tourists,” one guy in a cowboy hat says to me. I’ve apparently acquired a stamp of approval by squeezing onto the dance floor with my partner for every song since arriving. The sweat running down our faces, not to mention our goofy grins at the utter joy of finding this place, has elevated our status. Plus the fact that we’re pretty good at dancing, if I do say so myself.

Other than one break Leon and the Zydeco Flames took to sit down and eat breakfast (photo right), the music lasted till exactly noon. It was about that time we became card-carrying honorary citizens of Southwest Louisiana.

Cajun Country: The Beating Heart of Southwest Louisiana

Southwest Louisiana breathes music. pt at large spent the past ten days sampling gumbo, Dixie Beer, red beans and rice, and spending nights and one memorable morning dancing to Cajun music. The fiddle, accordion, bass, and drums that comprise most bands capture a range of joy and heartbreak with a rhythm and levity that displace every thought but one...find a partner and step out on the dance floor.

Forget about Louisiana as a state. It’s a state of mind. Full of crawfish po' boys, gumbo, and shrimp, what really holds the state together is music. Nowhere is this more evident than in bayou country.

Southwest Louisiana breathes music. It exhales from radio stations, juke boxes in restaurants, and bars and dance halls in places like Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, and Henderson. Zydeco, Cajun two-step, pretty little waltzes, Whiskey River jitterbug, and swamp pop at close quarters so you can taste the sweat on your honey’s cheek when you pull her close and move as one to the rhythmic beat, and oh yes, the absolute joy of inhaling that music.

This is roots music. No fancy clothes or shoes necessary. Just the ability to open your heart for a couple of hours to music born of sunshine, toil, and the displacement of the Acadian people two centuries ago. Now it’s the music of fishermen, farmers, truck drivers along side college kids, smooth-shaven lawyers, young professionals, and more gray haired grandparents than you’ve ever seen within a country mile of a dance floor. Women wearing cut offs and cowboy boots, sundresses that stick to their perspiring bodies, and tank tops with black jeans are just as down as any of the bluejeaned men in the dance halls. When a woman is of a mind to dance, she marches straight to the first man she sees who’s shuffling his feet in time with the music and pulls him to the dance floor.

There may be some mating games going on amongst all the happy hip shaking couples, but the custom is four or five minutes of whirling to the sounds of accordion, bass, fiddles, and drums then look around for another grinning partner with whom you can spend the next few minutes on the dance floor. Sitting down is out of the question until the band decides to take a break. Hell, you’ve got all week to sit down. This is the weekend in Cajun country. There’s a possibility that you’ll catch up on some sleep, there’s a likelihood that you’ll do some laundry and stop in at the local grocery store. But there is no doubt whatsoever that you’re going to find a place to dance.

There’s the big ol’ Whiskey River Landing dance hall in Henderson tucked between the levee and the shore of the Atchafalaya Swamp where there’s dancing on Sunday afternoon from 4 pm to 8 pm. An 82 year-old farmer dances with his wife, his weathered face wearing a devilish grin that just might have been responsible for his wife saying “I do” five or six decades ago. The man’s been up since 5 am feeding cattle and here he is wearing his wide brim hat, clean jeans and pounding the floor with his leather boots just as vigorously as any young buck in the crowd. From the jammed dance floor to the walls lining the building, the place was packed. Jeffery Broussard The Creole Cowboys made sure of that.

“You don’t come from around here, do you,” says Jean Prejean, a wiry man with a shaved head and one gold earring, as I’m taking photos of the band stand and the swamp just beyond one of the huge picture windows that line the rear wall of the Whiskey River Dance Hall. My T-shirt and shorts don't look out of place but only a tourist would want to take that photo. For everyone else the place was as ordinary as a 7-11.

Prejean is a 56 year-old carpenter who lives three miles down the road. “I used to truck up to Boston, still know some people there from when we kept track of each other on our CB radios,” he says. Dressed in his black T-shirt and jeans, the man has some of the most original dance moves I’d ever seen. “I’m self taught,” he says proudly, “been dancing since I was a baby. I’m the man who laid the dance floor at Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge,” he says.

Any zydeco dancer within a hundred miles knows the Cafe des Amis is the place to go for live music and dancing from 8 am till noon on Saturday. This is not a typo. Let me put it this way. When the band begins playing at 8 am, most of Louisiana might be on their second cup of coffee; the people at the Café des Amis are on their feet dancin'.

For people down here dancing isn’t recreation, it’s a way of life. Saturday night in Lafayette, Randol’s was full of men and women and their children, couples, singles and exactly two tourists- this writer and his dance partner. The restaurant has a sprawling dining room, a small bar and a pine-paneled dance floor surrounded by a low wooden railing. Two fifty apiece, “for the band,” got you a wristband to enter the dance floor.

The band was kicking up a storm of zydeco, waltzes, and Cajun jitterbugs. Over the hand-lettered sign proclaiming “Salle de danse” was a shelf loaded with pieces of parade floats and Mardi Gras costumes. Two giant fans whirred cool air onto the dance floor to neutralize the 90-degree humidity that sat like a fat cat on the countryside just outside the rough-hewn pine paneling.

This is the kind of place Jean Prejean probably had his first dance. Amongst the couples nearly every dance you’d see a mommy or daddy whirl around the perimeter with a toddler in his/her arms. Grade school kids sat with their parents tapping time to the music. Every so often Parain and Marain (grandpa and grandma) or mom or dad took a turn leading one of them through a dance.

There was nary a shred of self-consciousness from the children. They were as at home on the dance floor as a catfish lazing around the bottom of the swamp. The kids’ eyes were bright with excitement. This music was more than happy notes coming from diatonic accordions and ancient fiddles. This was birthright, a sense of belonging that would never be erased by distance or profession.

Music floats lazily over the whole of Southwest Louisiana. Like the Spanish moss cascading over cypress trees in the Atchafalaya Swamp, it’s fed by nutrients floating naturally in the hot, humid air. Hurricanes, floods, and man-made assaults may affect what is on the ground. They will never still the music in the air.

Re-Build New Orleans with a wiggle and your wallet

You can take the girl out of Louisiana but not the Louisiana out of the girl. It’s been 27 years since Rebecca Wilson left behind the magnolias, festivals, and gumbo, but her soft Louisiana accent remains. Wilson grew up in a culture in which music and dancing were akin to eating and breathing.

For as long as she can remember, just about anything worth celebrating was done to music. Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, church events, births, and a few other things best left unmentioned. In New Orleans, tears were shed when someone died but the trip to the local cemetery might have been made with the assistance of a bumptious brass band. Nothing, not even death, could muffle the music or deter the spirit there.

That is until Katrina, an unwelcome guest that barged into New Orleans with mayhem in mind. The hurricane wreaked havoc on a city, a culture, and a musical heritage. We saw photos and video of the devastation, people holding on for dear life on their rooftops, then the aftermath of displacement and despair.

It was by far the costliest hurricane to strike the United States - at least 81 billion dollars in property damage. One in 25 people in New Orleans are homeless, double pre-Katrina statistics. FEMA still pops up in the news as do stories of inability, perhaps incompetence and indifference, in rebuilding the hardest hit wards of New Orleans.

The storm swallowed the most vulnerable parts of New Orleans then puked them out in a mass of fetid muck, wooden debris, and sodden dreams. Along with livelihoods, homes, and neighborhoods, Katrina tore at the heart of New Orleans - the music scene. Fats Domino lost his home in the ninth ward and everything in it, including his Steinway piano. Irma Thomas lost her home and her nightclub was a shambles. Marva Wright lost her wedding rings, her mother’s photographs, and the home which housed them. The list goes on.

Wilson’s a dancin’ girl. The sound of funky blues, zydeco, or Cajun music gets her looking for the closest piece of real estate she can find to dance to the music. She’s been known to pull off the road to haul her companion from the car, turn the car radio up to ten, and dance to her heart’s content.

The still-unsettled future of New Orleans gnaws at her. A Mardi Gras party at Ryles in February jolted her into action. “There were three different bands playing various types of music that originated in New Orleans. All that joie de vivre came from the love of all things New Orleans – the music, the outlandish celebration of Mardi Gras, the let-the-good-times-roll spirit, among others.  I felt a pang of sadness at what a treasure New Orleans is and how it’s struggling to fully recover and get its mojo back.”

“I’ve attended the benefits organized by New Orleans musicians. Their sadness is palpable,” she said. “Many shed tears as they performed. They told of losing prized instruments, music awards, and their sense of community.” Money, always tight for musicians, is scarce, and many have yet to rebuild. Their community, once close, is now spread over several states.

From her frequent visits to New Orleans, Wilson knows the devastation was widespread and that musicians and the poor weren’t the only ones to be displaced. “A couple of middle class neighborhoods were hit hard too.  My niece has friends who lost everything, because everything they had was tied up in their homes.  Some people have established lives for themselves in other parts of the country, but many simply can’t go home because there’s no home to go back to.  With no or not enough money from their insurance companies and in many cases no way to reinsure their homes, they’re stuck in limbo,” she says.

A successful interior design consultant, Wilson is a self-starter. She believes the plight of New Orleans has dropped off the radar screen. She intends to do something about that.

Wilson is the point person for an October fund-raiser “Help Re-Build New Orleans.” All money raised, after event expenses, will go directly to Common Ground Relief to be used specifically to repair and rebuild housing in the areas of New Orleans hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to capture the musical heritage of New Orleans for people who want to help and to remind people what’s at stake.” she says. Two local bands, Slippery Sneakers and The Chili Brothers, will perform a mix of New Orleans style funk, blues and zydeco.

New Orleans has given the country much. If you've ever shuffled your feet, taken your love in your arms, and just felt the cares of the world lift momentarily from your shoulders as you've listened to The Big Easy’s music, it is time for you to give something back.

Here’s where to start: http://www.rebuildneworleans.net/

New Orleans photo credits:  Areas in New Orleans still suffering from the effects of Katrina
photographed in January, 2008 by Dr. N.C. Briggs and D. Brower

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade:Modern Vintage at Toad

Chita Rivera: A Dancer's Life

Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life
Written by Terrence McNally, with original songs by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty
The Colonial Theater, Boston, MA
May 1 - May 6, 2007

She’s 74 years old, for god’s sake. Seventy-four. And when her name is Chita Rivera, she can fill up a theater on the recognition of her name alone. Standing at five feet four inches on great gams, she’s one of the rare legends who knows how to trade on her fame without losing her dignity. Her feet don’t move like Latin lightning any more but she has stage presence, enormous poise, a surprisingly rich alto singing voice, and a terrific storyteller’s sense of timing.

Photo: http://www.thedancerslife.com/downloads.php#

 All of which she puts together in this national tour show, “Chita Rivera: the Dancer’s Life” - the story of her life, a history that practically defines musical theater in the last half of the twentieth century. She’s had her feet bandaged by George Balanchine, been taught to sing by Leonard Bernstein, and danced with the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century - Jack Cole, Jerome Robbins, and Bob Fosse. You don’t have to be a dance junkie to have heard of musicals like West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman. Rivera starred in twenty-five musicals in over fifty years.

The 2002 “Kennedy Honors” award to Rivera is the springboard writer Terence McNally used to propel the show and allow Rivera to look back on her career. Her stage arc may be in eclipse but her spark, well, that’s another matter. Sitting on a chair stage center, Rivera opens the show reminiscing about being raised in Washington, D.C. as a first generation Puerto Rican American. It’s not long before she’s dancing on a table on the set behind her (her mother sent Rivera to ballet school not long after she broke the family table while dancing on it).

Rivera and her company of eight top tier dancers stunningly executed two dozen song and dance routines that reprised her roles on Broadway. Rivera has lived musical theater from the TV Ed Sullivan Show to the post AIDS world.

Photo from http://www.chitarivera.com/productions/dancerslife.htm

The secret is that Chita has learned to do more with less. A sideways glance, a lowering of the voice, a well timed swivel of the hips, an sporadic burst of fancy footwork, and an occasional high kick to the rafters, remind us she’s still on fire. What keeps the show balanced is Rivera’s willingness to complement, not compete with, the extraordinary dancers in her troupe. They clearly adore her.

“Looking back doesn’t have to be painful,” she says at the top of the show. Rivera certainly had her share of pain - shattered leg in an auto accident, denied movie roles for dance roles she created on Broadway - but she always soldiered on in a Darwinian environment in which talent, luck, and grit were her constant dance partners. 

Here, she’s content to remind us of her greatness not to prove it. She never forgot the advice given to her by her first dance instructor before her first big audition, “Conchita, stay in your lane,” dance language for ‘Don’t worry about the dancers around you, just be who you are.’ Rivera is still stoked with stamina, talent, and attitude but, simply put, she hasn’t forgotten that she’s seventy-four.

Great singers and dancers like Rivera instinctively embrace their audience. One isn’t surprised to hear her say softly near the end of her show, ”When you drag yourself to the theater on a rainy afternoon and the matinée is less than half full, you are there for that one person whose life might be changed by what you do.” When she looked into the audience, I felt she was looking right at me and I’ll bet someone thirty rows away felt the same thing.

“Passing The Torch”, the last section on the program, features Rivera and her dancers in an exuberant, full throttle rendition of “All That Jazz” (Chicago). Under the combustion, one feels Father Time tapping his feet to the music, a poignant reminder that all shows, Rivera’s and ours, have a finale.

Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero knows what she’s got left in the tank and drives accordingly. What an instructive lesson to those of us not too far behind her in the parade.

Massachusetts Magnolias major in dance hall music

Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

To some, the word "magnolia" conjures up an image of the fragrant ornamental trees that flourish along the Gulf Coast. For dance enthusiasts of the southeast coast of Massachusetts, the word summons up the sound of the Magnolia Cajun Band, a seven piece group whose music has been thrilling Cajun music fans from Nova Scotia to Louisiana for almost sixteen years. They’re one of the feature bands playing at the Westport Art Council’s “Come Out and Play in Central Village” event at the Town Hall Annex on July 8.

The band’s roots trace back to a small lane off Drift Road in Westport,MA, where Chris Ash and her husband Dan George moved in 1985. Chris discovered that Maggie Moniz, another new arrival to the lane, was a guitar player and fellow music lover. Before you could say Woody Guthrie, Chris broke out her own guitar and the two began playing favorite folk songs, bluegrass, and gospel music.

Ash and Moniz were serious enough to form a “girl band” and played locally. Before long, Maggie’s husband Richie Moniz, a fine singer and a natural presence on stage, began to appear with them. It is quite a sight to behold the burly Moniz by playing his teensy triangle and the washboard. By that time, Ash had begun playing the fiddle, a birthday present from her husband. It was a case of love at first sound. “I heard this fiddle music on the radio and thought , I’ve got to play this music. It speaks right to my heart,” she recalls.

The inspiration to play Cajun music was one of those random events that unalterably change one’s life. “You’ve gotta hear this music,” a friend exclaimed to the three of them and packed them in his van headed for the annual Labor Day Cajun and Bluegrass Festival in western Rhode Island. The music pinned their ears back, seized their hearts, and by 1990 they began to play it.

“Soon after, people who danced like crazy at the festival then had to wait whole year to dance again to live music recruited us to play for them. They didn’t mind that we were just learning the music.” Chris Ash said.

Between 1990 and 1996, the Magnolia Cajun Band began a growth spurt. First, Rhode Islanders Alan Bradbury, accordion, and Michele Kaminsky, fiddle, joined the group. Next, Martin Grosswendt, bass, and Jack Ezkovich, drums, who both had a loyal Dartmouth following in a country/western band called the OK Corral, joined.

“We’re like a family by now,” Ash says, “We travel together, cook and eat great food together, and have a lot of fun.”

Learning the traditions of Cajun music is part of the fun. If a Cajun band from Louisiana plays within driving distance, you’ ll find members of Magnolia backstage after a concert picking the brains of the old time musicians. They’ve even visited their role models at their Louisiana homes, literally sitting at the feet of the masters to learn the nuances of the music and traditions.

And then there’s summer camp at the Augusta Heritage Center in Virginia. The Magnolias learn the finer points of playing their instruments, the history of their music, and have the joy of playing with new and experienced musicians.

“In the week we were there, I took classes in Cajun culture and language,” Maggie Moniz said. “My ancestors are from Nova Scotia and Quebec and I wanted to learn about the Cajun French language. “

The mentors, the camps, and the practice pay off. “Our early music sounded like nice folk music. When we listened to our latest CD. we thought, wow, we’ve come a long way,” Ms. Moniz said.

Acadian music and culture had original roots in the maritime provinces of Canada as French settlers migrated there in the 1600s. In a time of political upheaval between Britain and France in the 1700s, the French were harshly driven out of Canada. Over time, many of these French-Canadians, called Acadians, found a place to start over within the French speaking regions of rural southwest Louisiana. Music became the vehicle for the Acadians to express the sentiments of loss and separation brought about by the experience of being wrenched from their homes. “’Cajun”, short for Acadian, music was born. Over time, the music became a Louisiana “gumbo” and reflected the German, Native American, and African-American cultures that lived in the region.

“We play dance hall music, mostly two step and waltzes,” explains Ash.

“Our music’s got drive, it lifts you off your chair gets you on your feet,” Richie Moniz adds.

When the Magnolia Cajun Band fires up its two fiddles, accordion, guitar, triangle/washboard, bass and drums for the “Come out and Play” concert, it will be the Northern equivalent of a good ‘ol Cajun “fais do do,” a concert for all ages.

“Today if you go a restaurant with a live band in the Cajun area of southwest Louisiana you’ll see all ages of dancing with one another, 8 year old kids dancing two-step with their mother or grandfather or with each other. Everyone knows how to two-step and waltz. It’s part of the culture, ” Ash said.

You don’t have to schedule a lesson with Arthur Murray to learn the basic two-step. If you think you can take two steps to the right, pause, take two steps to the left, pause, and do it to the beat of the music, you’ve got the makings of a two-step beginner.

When they play between 8 and 9 PM next Saturday, The Magnolia Cajun Band hopes to see an inter-generational crowd stepping out to their music.

“When you play for your own town it’s a bonus,” Richie Moniz says. “You perform for people you know on first name basis and you can show them the musician and the singer side of you as well as, in my case, the guy who’s run Thad’s Auto Salvage in all my life.”

There’s another bonus. “The last song we play at the end of each concert is ‘There’s no place like home.’ That will have special meaning to Maggie, Chris and me at the Westport concert next week. We will truly be home,” Mr. Moniz said.

Southeast Massachusetts has been fertile ground for the Magnolia Cajun Band to flourish. Their concerts on the first Saturday of the month in Seekonk attract dancers from New York to Maine. Some of the dancers have been coming since they began in 1990.

“Playing for dancers has a wonderful energy to it. The better we play, the more fun the dancers have, the more fun the dancers have the more adventuresome we get in our playing,” says Ash.

It wouldn’t be surprising to find some new converts arriving from Westport when The Magnolia Cajun Band resumes their concerts in Seekonk in September.