pt at large

Festival International de Louisiane: A Sample of Sunday's Bands

Festival International de Louisiane
Lafayette, Louisiana

Sunday Bands April 29, 2012

Canailles (Quebec- Québec Roots), Scene Malibu, Fais Do Do Stage

I didn’t think I could be surprised by anything after hearing the Middle East band Lamajamal and the Slavic Soul Party on Saturday but in the midst of the 1:30 PM Canaille show one of the guys yodels ("J'l'hais" from http://www.myspace.com/bellescanailles)! When they patter with the audience, their English has a heavy Quebecois accent and inventive syntax.  Canaille means "scoundrel" in French and these kids fit the bill with their ragtag blend of country blues cajun and a big shot of garage rock played with guitars, accordion, banjo, standup bass, percussion, washboards and at least one kazoo!).

Most of their songs are originals.The girl lead singer has great pipes, has one style that sounds like Grace Slick who swallowed sandpaper ("Becik"  http://www.myspace.com/bellescanailles). The eight musicians (self-taught no less, which may account for their eccentric style) began jamming together  by chance in a Montreal park in 2009. Their set still has the feel of spontaneity. The music is raw, full of twenty something energy, feels like it could fly off the rails at any time and they'd laugh at the result.

Canaille VIDEO

Savoy Family Cajun Band (Louisiana- Traditional Cajun), Scene TV5 Monde Lafayette Stage
The Savoy Family Band - what a pile of talent on one stage. Marc and Ann Savoy should donate their DNA to the Smithsonian - their sons Wilson on keyboard and fiddle and Joel on fiddle  are immensely talented as are Marc on accordion (he builds them), Ann on guitar. Red Stick Rambler drummer Drew Simon is on percussion today. This is one of the royal families of Cajun music.

Marc's "Savoy Music Center" in nearby Eunice is considered holy ground by visitors from all over the planet. The brothers Wilson and Joel got into great fiddle duels that had Marc, usually pretty phlegmatic, whoop once or twice. This is the best kind of sibling rivalry. Listening to any of them tell anecdotes about a song they're about to sing is a treat. What's in store might be an old ballad they breathe new life into or a barn burner of a two step.

VIDEO
Dancing to the Savoy Family Band
The Savoy Family Band on stage

Chico Trujillo. (Chile – Cumbia/Punk/Ska/Chilean Folk), Scene Popeye International Stage

Today Chico Trujillo is working their magic at the biggest stage in town, Parc International, a permanent stage with a ton of paved space in front for people to dance and set up their camp chairs. Music and dancing happens so often around here that the city fathers and mothers realized it needed a public space in the middle of town to  accommodate it.

Today's music, like Friday night's, has a distinctive Latin flavor and the crowd is eating it up. The instrumental mix of trumpet, trombone, saxophones, drums, accordion, guitars, is a great platform for the singing. It may be in Spanish but scores of spectators have no trouble interpreting it in to dance moves. Judging by the size of the crowd, Chico Trujillo became a crowd favorite this weekend.Dancing to the Savoy Family Band

VIDEO: CHICO TRUJILLO

LeroyThomas and The Zydeco Roadrunners (Louisiana-Zydeco), Scene Chevron Heritage Stage

Five Louisiana acts perform at various stages today, the last day of the festival. Bands like the Savoy Family Band (Cajun), Andre Thierry (Zydeco), and Leroy Thomas (Zydeco) play for large crowds. The University of Louisiana/Lafayette Jazz Combo and the Destination Gospel Choir make happy music, too. Toward the end of Leroy Thomas's set, the last of the festival, Leroy steps up to the mic. Leroy's cousins are zydeco band leaders Geno Delafose and Keith Frank.

"I want to introduce one of the last living legends of zydeco. Along with Buckwheat Zydeco, my father, Leo "The Bull" Thomas are a couple of the only ones left."
Leo makes a statement standing still. His performance suits are electric pinks, royal blazing blues, and percussive purples and I mean from hat to shoes. So when Leo gets into his hit song, "Why You Gonna Make Me Cry?" dancers grab partners and dance anywhere they find room. He's earned his status as a living legend.
 

The Festival International de Louisiane was selected as Best World Music Festival in the 2012 About.com WorldMusic Reader's Choice Awards. The average attendance over the five day festival is 350,000. The fact that the festival is free, supported by the sale of festival pins and merchandise, and honors the region's Francophone roots, is a matter of great local pride. Spend just one afternoon or evening there and you'll feel it.

VIDEO: LEROY THOMAS

Photos and Videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Festival International de Louisiane: A World of Shopping, too!

Saturday April 28, 2012
Lafayette, Louisiana

If you wanted to shop till you drop while you weren't enjoying world class music, the Festival International de Louisiane obliged. Vendor space in both market areas was sold out.

The Marché des Arts featured arts and crafts chiefly from Louisiana: jewelry, sculpture, woodwork, photography, ceramics, original paintings and more.

The Marché du Monde featured African folk art, instruments and clothing; banana leaf art, baskets, seagrass hats, handbags, hammocks, purses, paintings, tapestries, dresses and a wild range of women's clothing and more.

Saturday afternoon, sunny, temps in the eighties, the vendor area was crawling with shoppers. I'm not sure how much they bought, but they were looking real hard.

  

 




   

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Festival International de Louisiane: Gigantic crowds

Saturday, April 28, 2012
Lafayette, Louisiana

By 3 PM, you can probably see Lafayette from the space shuttle.

Lafayette's population is a shade above 120,000. There's a fair chance most of them are crammed into the heart of the city (above) and the spectator areas in front of the four major performance stages within a half mile of each other. Walking down Jefferson Boulevard the only difference from feeling like you're packed into a sardine can is that you're moving… sort of, in a crab-like sideways, forward, stop, shuffle, step, step, stop dance like a giant amoeba high on Bud Light.

You could probably extrapolate the socio-racial-economic profile of Lafayette by observing the shoulder to shoulder crowd. It looks like any midsize city's range of teens just emerging from the chrysalis of childhood to couples and families  of every demographic on the city's census form.

After a few minutes, you realize the island of empty space over the shoulders of the people ahead of you contains someone in a wheelchair, or a stroller, or a little red cart with a two or three little kids in tow.

There are absolutely no rules of the road - just put one foot in front of the other and smile. What's the rush? This is one huge block party. If you’re jostled, more than likely you’ll hear a “sorry” or “excuse me”. If you’re claustrophobic, it won''t be pretty.

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

 

People everywhere...

in coveted areas in the shade ...

no matter where it was found...

on the sidewalk...

buying a party hat or figuring out which band to visit next...

hanging out with giants...

or with friends.

Festival International de Louisiane: A Sample of Saturday's Bands

Saturday April 28, 2012
Lafayette, Louisiana

Red Stick Ramblers, ( Louisiana- Swing/Cajun), Scene Malibu Fais Do Do Stage

...with their rambunctious ways, these are the wise guys of the Festival - irreverent, witty, recklessly spontaneous. There's no telling what any of them will say on stage.  The RSR''s music has a rollicking sensibility charged with the power of a crawfish boat that's scooped up every musical influence on their prairies - cajun, creole, even swing - and plays it out with their assortment of fiddle, guitars, banjo, drums, bass, and accordion.These guys began playing at LSU in Baton Rouge in the late 1990s. They throw a stick of dynamite into roots and country swing music and draw crowds wherever they play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnReIxupwOs&list=UUpO59RlFb0TWCXQLKYfisdA&index=2&feature=plcp




Vishten (Prince Edward Island, Magdalen Islands-Traditional Acadian), TV 5 stage Lafayette Stage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FexsC0aeD8

Pastelle LeBlanc on accordion, her sister Emmanuelle LeBlanc on keyboard and Irish hand held drum (Bodhran), and Pascal Miousse on fiddle and guitar, play rural traditional Acadian music, all the way from Prince Edward Island and the Magdalen Islands in way east of Canada. Pastelle and Emmanuelle make a mighty, clattering, pulsing beat by rhythmically pounding their feet on the black trunks at their feet. Influences from France, Ireland, Scotland drive the music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUeR0OZ5QUc

Once again people are on their feet dancing. The dances are jigs that require anything from simple stamping to complicated foot flying footwork in pretty much the same place, not partner dancing, but like Cajun or zydeco can go on for round after infectious round until the fiddler or the dancers are wringing wet with sweat and worries shooed out the door.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql0e8EXhFtU

Pascal vigorously bows his fiddle, the more animated the crowd, gets the more feverishly the band plays. No surprise, people figure out some way to express themselves in dance, mothers with kids in their arms, and twenty-somethings who probably got jiggled around in utero as their mother’s danced well into their terms.

Mercy Brothers, ( Louisiana – Gospel/Hillbilly/ Blues), Scene Chevron Heritage Stage

Three guitars, one bass, a big ol' drum kit, and electric keyboard, this is rock 'n roll come to jesus music, maybe the kind that inspired the Holy Rollers. If you want a gospel blues rock 'n roll country band, covering everything from love to perdition, these are your men. Once again, little islands of people are dancing, the sound system is awesome, and I am in heaven.
http://lineup.festivalinternational.com/band/the-mercy-brothers

Khaira Arby (Mali-Desert Blues) at the Scene Malibu Fais Do Do Stage

Once again Lafayete embraces the exotic, the spectator area is packed, am I repeating myself?  Lafayette has become a musical tapas town where the idea is to sample music you’ve never heard of. Desert Blues sounds intriguing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtci5CDZr9o

Men and women, as partners or solo, make up movement on the spot - trance, free form, or Martha Grahame with a world music twist. At the end of the show, the lead singer Khaira Arby introduces her band in Malian. We have no trouble imagining what she's saying and applaud when she talks about each of her two guitar players, one bass player, and the man behind a big percussion unit. Her two lead guitar players are whizzes. Her singing is enchanting and match her Malian nickname, "The Nightingale of the North".
 

Lamajamal (Middle  East/US-Gypsy Surf)  Scene TV5 Stage

This is the dark horse act of the day. From Vishten to Kaira Arby to Lamajamal one act tops another for sheer exoticism. Imagine the sounds the five of them make with a wild collection of instruments including mandolin, cümbüs (fretless Turkish banjo), drums, our, keyboard, guitar, melodica, accordion, clarinet, sax, flute, dulcimer and percussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPAySRTTt0o&feature=youtu.be

One of the musicians says he’s from the West Bank, that a popular dance there is the circle dance. He asks people to form a circle, hold hands, and connect in energy and friendship. Hey, we may be in Lafayette, but today this could be Istanbul or Ramallah, no problem, friends and strangers dance to the joyous music, if there’s one word I will wear out today it is JOYOUS.
http://lineup.festivalinternational.com/band/lamajamal



Texas Tornadoes at Scene Malibu Fais Do Do stage

"These guys are awesome," a guy tells me, obviously in some kind of rapture, "I've been listening to them for twenty years.The original members Freddy Fender and  Doug Sahm died recently but Sahm's son Shawn got the band rolling again. That guy playing the accordion, Flaco Jiménez, he's a legend!" With that he took his friend in his arms and began to dance. So it goes around here. Judging by the crowd, Tex-Music has a big following.

Slavic Soul Party (Balkans/US - Slavic Soul), Scene Malibu, Fais Do Do Stage

This is the greatest kitchen sink band, from one groove to the next they turn on a dime from the middle east to Africa to USA, often  mashed altogether, gypsy, soul, funk, with a collection of  brass, reed and percussion to pull it off. If you can imagine a New Orleans brass band with saxophone, accordion, trombone playing in a Turkish bazaar somewhere in Havana, you might approximate what these guys sound like. Once again, the crowd cheered them ferociously.

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Festival International de Louisiane: Friday Gears Up

Friday Night April 27, 2012
Lafayette, Louisiana


Beats Antique  (U.S.- Electronica/World/Dance),Scene Malibu Fais Do Do stage

Arrive in time to catch the last song by a totally funky group named Beats Antique. They wear masks and cavort about the stage to the tune of their own music. This is as close to a rave scene as I've heard so far, arms raised and waving in unison, the audience looks like a field of wheat swaying in the evening breeze. The band reminds me of an earth-bound Cirque de Soliel with a massive percussion section.

Pine Leaf Boys (Louisiana - Cajun), Scene Chevron Heritage Stage

The Pine Leaf Boys, local musicians with four Grammy nominations. They've revived the old time Cajun songbook and have so much fun doing it that they've captured the allegiance of their parents' generation, their own, and probably the ones to come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0QDxkh85a0

The festival is run like clockwork. The shows begin on time and end on time. The Pine Leaf Boys show finishes at 8:59, scheduled to end at 9 PM. When the show is over, it is over. Within minutes tech crews are offloading one band's sound system and replacing it with the next - wires, mics and all.

At the end of the show, an announcer implores us, first in French, then in English, to buy festival pins and artist CDs and festival merchandise in the merchandise tent. This is the way the festival can run in the black and keep this spectacular weekend free to the public.

Lafayette is mindful of the French heritage common to much of southwest Louisiana - it's what binds the festival's music together. Lafayette began a French language immersion program in 1992. Over 1000 students are enrolled now, many more on a waiting list. For one or two generations before this, Cajun kids would get punished for speaking French in school. Pride in culture has been revived in the schools, it was never out of favor in the dance halls and front porches around here.


Lindigo ( Reunion Island-Maloya/Sega), Scene TV 5 Lafayette Stage

The band is as different in appearance and music content as anyone has seen so far this weekend. Listening to it puts most of us as close to Madagascar as we will ever get. As different as this music is, people are embracing it with feel-good enthusiasm. The sound has the same effect as a brass band that gets you to move your feet and get in touch with that spot in your heart that embraces joy and makes you smile. The lead singer has boundless energy. His movements groove and stop with the precision of Lindigo's traditional polyphonic songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWsJCt-mFt4&feature=youtu.be

In case you had any doubt that the spirit is moving, here come a pair of silver haired locals parading in a samba step to the music, teenagers sashaying all over the place - this is happy music, people relate to it, there's a mom holding the handles of her kid's stroller and rocking the kid gently to the beat of the song.

The seven men and one woman on stage play traditional wooden percussion and metal percussion,  no brass and no reed instruments, and one African string instrument. The lead singer paces the stage like James Brown, great moves, relentless energy, at one point the whole band steps and sways together. now I know where The Four Tops and The Persuasions got inspiration for their stage presence back in the 1950s.

Chico Trujillo (Chile – Cumbia/Punk/Ska/Chilean Folk), Scene Malibu Fais Do Do stage,

This Chilean band plays zesty Cumbia music, full of energy. A red, white, and blue Chilean is being waved by a proud compatriot somewhere in the front row. This band throws everything at us - trumpet, trombone, saxophones, drums, accordion, guitars, and soaring vocals. By turns sinuous and full bore rocking cumbia, it's all dance friendly. Hundreds of spectators take the cue, with all kinds of inventive dance moves.


Vagabond Swing (Louisiana–Gypsy/Afro beat/swing) Scene Chevron Heritage Stage

A wild combination if I have ever heard one, it attracts lots of the kids of the Goth persuasion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ka4OD4RUD4&feature=youtu.be

Around 10:45 PM, Gary Clark, Jr. (US–rock), Scene Popeye International Stage

Gary is a phenomenal guitar player, got down and bluesy at end of set.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh-K7Xhn3YY&feature=youtu.be

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Festival International de Louisiane: Thursday Opening

 Thursday, April 26, 2012, UPDATED

Lafayette, Louisiana

Narrative to follow, having too much fun to write...look at this schedule. The fact that most Americans have never heard of most of these bands is a non-issue. The promoters have an ear for music that is connected with the predominantly French culture of southwest Louisiana.

In the words of the organizers…
“Festival International de Louisiane is a community-based, non-profit arts organization formed in 1986 to produce an annual visual and performing arts festival celebrating the French cultural heritage of southern Louisiana - primarily a combination of French, African, Caribbean and Hispanic influences.”

Every music act on each of the five major stages is introduced in French and English. Wandering up and down the streets of downtown Lafayette, I’ve heard French with Cajun, Canadian, and African accents. Thousands of people jammed the center of Lafayette Thursday night. This is the biggest, friendliest block party in the world.

By 7:15 Thursday night, the festival was ON...

Ce Qui Marchent Debout (France - Brass Funk)- Scene Malibu, Fais Do Do Stage

These guys rock. Big-time fusillades of brass, trumpets, saxophone and a percussion system with power that could back up a fracking machine. You can feel the vibration in the pavement under your feet.  These guys are  a grab bag of everything, rock funk Latin rumba and a little bit of rap llte and it’s no small wonder thousands of bots are shimmying to the beat of this cosmic party band.

Soul Express Brass Band (Louisiana - Brass) Opelousas's first Brass Band

Heading back down Jefferson, I hear the unmistakable "taa daa daa daa daaaaa daa..." of a New Orleans brass band. The Soul Express is holding court on the corner of Jefferson and Vermillion, the epicenter of the festival.

Nothing in the world sounds like a New Orleans brass band. The sheer raw firepower of pealing trumpets, glissando raking trombones, a big bad tuba, crackling snare drums, and one booming bass drum, with that particular rolling thunder New Orleans rhythm that inspires foot stomping booty shaking hand clapping behavior from anyone with a beating heart.  Little girls hold hands and dance around in circles. Their big sisters and brothers groove right behind them. I don’t know how spontaneous Lafayette residents usually are, but here they are shaking just about everything God gave them to the beat of the band.

Bombino (Niger - Desert Rock) on the Scene Popeye International Stage

Vocals in Tuareg, band led by led by Omara "Bombino" Moctar, a young Tuareg guitarist from Niger, driven by three guitars and one gigantic drum set that packed the power of a summer storm.

Joel Savoy's Honky Tonk Merry Go Round (Louisiana - Honky Tonk)

A rare event, music inside and not on a big stage outside where they will play later this weekend, Joel Savoy's Honky Tonk Merry Go Round plays at Antlers, a bar on Jefferson. Ample sized stage and dance floor make for happy people. Joel's parents Mark and Ann Savoy were in the audience as were fellow musicians who come onstage to jam. The next day a friend told me Wayne Toups stopped by and sang a George Jones country song with the band. That must have been just this side of spectacular.

Scene Popeye, International Stage, Robert Randolph Family Band (US - Funk/Rock/Soul)

The first song got my attention but as the set war on the band devolved into a mellow Grateful Dead groove, music that meandered, then occasionally exploded with Robert Randolph's impressive frenzied solos. 11 PM, time to head to my motel.

Courtbouillon: A Musical Stew at the Festival International de Louisiane

Courtbouillon at The Blue Moon Saloon
Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Forget that this is a show in a jam packed commercial venue. The three guys sitting side by side on the stage of the Blue Moon Saloon are in their own world. From the feeling of camaraderie onstage, Wilson Savoy on fiddle, Wayne Toups on accordion, and Steve Riley on guitar could be jamming on Wayne’s front porch. Wayne sits in the middle and is the engine pulling this train headlong down a Cajun line that stops in every town in the prairie.

“This next song is the Crowley Two Step,” Wilson Savoy announces as the second song rolls by. It’s one of the few songs they’ll identify by name during the two-hour love fest. Most of the crowd packing the saloon knows the names already. Even pt at large recognizes the melodies of songs he’s heard in previous trips to Lafayette.

You can’t sing Cajun songs without having felt the sting of sorrow or joy of love or the fun of living on the edge. The more Wayne Toups sips whatever is in the little black plastic cup at his side, the deeper into the bayou his songs reach. He’s not just singing lyrics, he’s singing the heritage, culture, and pride that exudes from every cell in his body.

Toups sings with vitality bordering on urgency, every so often letting out a whoop of pure enjoyment following it with a finger-flying flourish on buttons of his accordion and a few fierce foot stomps for good measure. His face soaked in sweat, a diamond earring flashing in the stage light, he banters with Savoy and Riley. After one especially playful duel with Savoy’s fiddle, a big smile spreads across Toups’ craggy face and he claps Savoy on the shoulder.

How often can you listen to three musicians, each famous in his own right, share the same stage? What pulled them together is their love of and prodigious knowledge of Cajun music. The songs these guys sing were old when they first heard them. They reach as far back as Amadee Ardoin, a Creole accordion player who is one of the fountainheads of Creole and Cajun style music and whose songs were some of the first recordings of this region’s music in 1929.

They first teamed up to play a year ago. They don’t appear together often so when it happens, it’s a huge draw. They’re sort of like earth, wind and fire. Toups provides the fire on accordion, Wilson Savoy, intently listening to his mates, provides the playful airy and wistful tones on his diminutive fiddle, Steve Riley, more reserved, is the earthy presence that keeps the show in an orbit fixed on their shared heritage. No drums are needed for this group. Eric Frey, standup bass player for The Red Stick Ramblers and The Revelers, keeps the backbeat in check.

A Courtbouillon (COO-be-yahn) is a thick, rich fish stew, brimming with Acadian flavors. Two hours of Cajun two-steps (like “Quel Etoile”) and pretty waltzes flash by in less time than it takes to simmer a courtbouillon. The songs have been sung in French…a fitting way to begin the next four days of the Festival International de Louisiane.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Festival International de Louisiane: World Class Music

April 26, 2012
Lafayette, Louisiana

pt at large is in Lafayette, Louisiana for the 26th Annual Festival International de Louisiane, five days worth of music and mingling, food and fun, dining and dancing. In the first two days here, I've met Pastel and Pascal of the band Vishten from the Magdalen Islands located in the Gulf of St Lawrence, listened to bands from France,Niger, and the good old USA. This is the biggest street party int the world.

"Festival International de Louisiane is truly a community event drawing together approximately 1,500 volunteers from all segments of the community to work together to celebrate both our diversity and the common human experience that binds us together. Through the arts presented and the joint efforts to produce it, the festival contributes to the spirit of community that is so unique to the Acadiana region.

The annual 5-day festival is held during the last full week of April. Historic downtown Lafayette, Louisiana, is transformed into an entertainment complex featuring six music stages, food court areas, street musicians and animators, arts and crafts boutiques, art galleries, beverage stands, cultural workshops, international cooking demonstrations and a world music store."

The festival was recently voted "Best World Music Festival" in the About.com WorldMusic Reader's Choice Awards.
Stay tuned for reports from Lafayette...

Photo of "Bombino" playing on the Scene Popeye Stage by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Janiva Magness: Rip Roarin' Blues at the Regattabar

Janiva Magness
Regattabar, Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA
April 4, 2012
7:30 PM show

Janiva Magness is not one to mail in a performance. The sultry singer torched the place at the Regattabar Wednesday night. I’ll be honest. I’d never heard of her before a friend with solid musical instincts suggested we take in her show.  Good idea.

Magness is on tour to celebrate the release of her album “Stronger For It.” She sang every one of the dozen songs on the *record, the tenth album in her 35-year career. If the CD has the same power as her live performances it might catch on fire. That’s exactly what Magness did after about the third or fourth song in the set, “Whistlin’ in the Dark,” a bittersweet ballad of love lost.

Fronting the band like a cat on a hot tin roof, she tossed her mane of lustrous black hair as she prowled the stage and made great eye contact with the audience. Sitting behind me, a pair of fifty something female teachers from a local private school whooped and hollered after each of Magness’s songs of gritty survival, carnal appetite, and reflective sorrow. If James Brown has a modern female counterpart, it could be Magness.

Like Brown, she had a rough upbringing. Both her parents committed suicide when she was a teenager, she got pregnant, gave up her baby, and ended up in a foster care system. She’s had a first name relationship with the blues since then.

Tonight’s band is her well-oiled quartet (sorry I didn’t get the names): lead guitar, bass, B3 and a drummer from Marshfield whose dad was in the audience. They seemed psyched to be playing for a lively full house that ate up each and every one of their boss’s R&B and straight ahead take no prisoners blues.

Dressed in a tight black sleeveless outfit, she worked up a sweat early. There’s nothing laid back about a Janiva Magness performance, she lights into you and doesn’t quit till the house lights go up.

She pauses between songs to tell us things that matter to her.  Early in the set, it was the transformative moment in her young life when she snuck into a club and heard Otis Rush. The urgency of his singing matched her quiet desperation. “That’s what I want to do,” she thought.

A 2009 Blues Music Award for B.B. King Entertainer Of The Year (only the second woman to ever win this award, Koko Taylor being the first), three time Contemporary Blues Female Artist Of The Year, and eleven previous Blues Music Award nominations show that she succeeded. Magness can interpret songs by the greats with passion. Most of the songs on “Stronger For It” are hers. Her intense delivery comes from some dark place within her that demands to be heard.

Late in the set she talks about her teenage pregnancies, giving up her baby, her time in foster care homes (“They saved my life”).

It’s matter of fact, low key, and her way of connecting with us personally. That’s why, when she mentions her association with foster care at the end of the show, we know it’s her way of showing gratitude for overcoming a part of life that some performers might rather hide than reveal. (She is a national spokesperson for Casey Family Programs National Foster Care Month Campaign).

Before singing her last song, Magness invites Boston blues legend Ronnie Earl to the stage. Magness’s guitar player slipped his white fender guitar off his shoulders, handed it to Earl, then grabbed the B3 player's camera to record Earl’s solo, a classic undulating riff so perfectly sinuous that the elegant Regattabar seemed to transform into a smoky, sweaty roadhouse.

One song later and the evening show ends.

“Give this old lady of 55 a hand,” Magness says after thanking us for showing up. We spring to our feet.  This is clearly a woman with something to say, something to prove, and the chops to do it.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Janiva Magness greets fans after the hour and a half show. The warm smile she flashes belie a life that could easily have been derailed by homelessness, drugs, and family tragedies.

*"Stronger For It" Tracklist:
01 – There It Is
02 – I Won’t Cry
03 – Make It Rain
04 – Whistlin’ in the Dark
05 – I’m Alive
06 – Ragged Company
07 – You Got What You Wanted
08 – I Don’t Want to Do Wrong
09 – Thought I Knew You
10 – Dirty Water
11 – Things Left Undone
12 – Whoop and Holler

The Birch Street Bistro: Thursday Night Musical Merry Go Round

It's no secret that Cambridge and Somerville are petrie dishes for local acts to form, find followings, and flourish. Roslindale, a few miles southwest of Boston, is way under the radar. The Birch Street Bistro may not be the only spot in town offering live music but it's caught on with the local clientele and a good number of local musicians.

Birch Street Bistro
14 Birch Street
Roslindale, MA 02131
Tel: 617-323-2184
March 22, 2012
Hours: Sun-Tues 5-9:00pm |  Wed 5-9:30pm  |  Thurs-Sat 5-10:30pm

It’s no secret around Roslindale but the Birch Street Bistro is the place to be on Thursday nights. The place was crowded when I arrived at 8:15.

The warm tones of burnished wood and exposed brick signal this is a place to settle into.

Divided English pub style with a shoulder high partition, half the interior is dedicated to the bar and a narrow set of banquettes.  A mirrored backdrop that holds a serious selection of distilled beverages in handcrafted mahogany colored shelving occupies most of the wall behind the smooth black and gray granite bar.  The exposed brick wall runs the length of the other side, occupied with banquettes for the dinner crowd.

High overhead, cordovan stained joists, cross beams, and wood planking add to the warm tones. Someone was paying attention to detail when the former office space was redesigned onto this high and deep neighborhood watering hole about six years ago.

A seasoned pro named Stephanie is keeping customers at the twenty-seat bar happy. Without a hint of stress, she takes incoming orders from the wait staff serving the patrons in the other in other half of the pub and the scattering of tables outside on this unseasonably warm March night in which Boston broke the temperature record for daytime heat at 82 degrees.

By the end of the night there was serious heat generated from the front corner of the bistro where Bill Walsh and his band Common Ground (Diane Gately, drums, Gary Barcus, bass) hold forth every Thursday. 

Guitar player Walsh has invited vocalist/ guitar player Big Jack Ward, tenor sax/flautist Amadee Castenell, and keyboardist Joe Bargar to join his trio this week. Any one of these three could be a main draw. Three of them together and we hit a music trifecta.

The first set gets in the groove with Amadee Castenell laying down a smoky blues number and everyone else following suit. The five of them may never have played together but it takes this group of seasoned pros exactly one song to work out the kinks and start firing on all cylinders.

I notice the man I’ve identified as Big Jack Ward sitting in back, waiting a couple of numbers before striding down to the tiny bandstand.

“I heard people asking how you were doing, do you mind saying why they were asking?” I ask Big Jack. At 6'2" and about 210 pounds, the "Big Jack" nickname is warranted.

“I had a quadruple bypass in November. I have the zipper to prove it, ” Jack says with a smile. “I had plenty of warning so could plan it. I’m getting my energy back slowly, I started doing some gigs recently, playing again is part of my personal rehab, makes me feel good. I think I’ll be back in shape by next November.  Most Tuesdays you’ll find me at Smoken’ Joes in Brighton.”

“You’re about to make a bunch of people feel pretty good tonight,” I say. “How long have you been playing?”

“My whole life, actually since before I was born. My mother was a singer, she sang until she was eight months pregnant with me, I’ve heard music from the womb. I began playing drums when I was three. ”

By the time Big Jack Ward walks up and delivers a sweet swing number a few dancers squeeze into a space smack in front of Birch Street Bistro’s front door.

The set rolls on with upbeat or sultry covers of swing and a little funk but blues seems to be the coin of the realm here. Once the applause dies down, these guys look at each other, one of them tosses out a title, the others nod, and we’re off to the races. Big Jack launches into a cover of B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone,” Joe Bargar and Bill Walsh take turns soloing and Amadee Castenell picks up his flute and lays down hauntingly poignant lines.

Amadee Castenell, Joe Bargar, Big Jack Ward and Amadee Castenell

Big Jack belts out “Big Boss Man, ” an R & B classic that’s been covered by everyone from Elvis to Jimmy Reed to The Grateful Dead. The little area in front of the door is packed with a dozen dancers.

This is a strangely bipolar room. Patrons at the far end of the bar are intent on conversation or the goings on of March Madness on the solitary TV on the wall there. Mercifully, this is one bar where plasma screens aren’t strung like Japanese lanterns across every wall and corner.

The patrons interested in music have snagged the seats at the bar, a few booths closest to the band’s corner, or stand a few feet away. The music is big enough to make a statement and cuts right through the chatter.

Bill Walsh, Diane Gately, Gary Barcus

During the first (and only) break, I meet Brian Sullivan, call me “Sully,” a friendly regular who could double as an enthusiastic press agent for the place.

“You’ll probably see a few different keyboard players sit in for a song or two in the next set. That’s Mellow Mel,” he says, identifying the burly black man blissfully seated like a Buddha, playing his tambourine as mystically as if he were meditating. He’s in his eighties, pulls up a chair here most Thursday nights, and patrons walking in for the second set greet him warmly.

“He can pull out a comb and a dollar bill and make it sound like a real mouth harp,” Sully says.

“This place is a great deal. No cover, good pours, lots of free parking nearby. The crowd is mixed, race and sexual orientation are non-issues in the six or so years I’ve been coming here. Head liners like Diane Blue show up and sit in up here for the second set, they do it for fun,” he says.

The second set is loose. A keyboard player and at least two guitar players join in for a song or two. (I learn later that Wali Ali who played and recorded with Marvin Gaye and the Temptations, Taj Mahal, Peter Tosk, and others names you'd recognize, sat in for the first set).

Singers named Delaware Floyd, Sweet Judy Teo, and Ron The Voice, join the band and croon everything from “Just My Imagination,” to “You’re Gonna Miss My Lovin’,” “At Last,” and  “Try Me.”

It’s 11:30. Most of the socializers have departed, a handful of the dancers and the listeners are still here. Sir Cecil steps up to sing what Sully tells me is the official good night song, “Crying Time Again.” To cement that point, several in the crowd sing the chorus.

Just another Thursday night at The Birch Street Bistro, a local hangout with a hunger for music and Bill Walsh's Common Ground Band and their friends to provide it.  I don’t know whether every Thursday is as packed with talented musicians but it will be worth the effort to find out.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
 

Big Fat Tuesday in tiny Iota, Louisiana: VIDEOS

Iota, Louisiana
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
"Fat Tuesday", Mardi Gras Day, Courir de Mardi Gras

 

Music at the "Young Musicians Tent"

 

The Tee Mamou Mardi Gras parade, what a sight! The truck cavalcade rolled into Iota at around 3:00 PM.

 

 

  

 

 

Everyone who participated in the courir in the countryside earlier in the day, running after chickens and begging for food, all masked and in Mardi Gras costumes,threw candy to the crowd jamming the side of Duson Avenue and made a racket by pounding or kicking on the sides of the high sided floats (probably that height so they would not lose a kid "overboard" during the parade.)

 

Twenty minutes after the parade passed through the middle of town, masked celebrants returned to the stage, where they danced to the music and cavorted with glee, many of them standing on the front rails of the raised dance floor and begging for money or candies.

Some parents came to the stage to dance with their younger children, then a shrill whistle  pierced the air, the Capitaine cracked a whip and yelled "Everybody down!"

Onto their knees or bottoms they went. The two men who led the parade by triumphantly displaying the red rooster led the kids in the Mardi Gras Song with all the verses. Some of the kids crawled around the stage making begging gestures or acting comically during the song, all part of the bending but not breaking any of the rules they have to learn. Every one of them had to learn the Mardi Gras Song by heart, probably not much of a stretch since they've heard in since they were in utero.

A raucous cheer at the end, a little more cavorting and they stepped off the stage, all of them dancing and begging for loose change.

 

 In the last seconds of the video, a woman  shouts, "Love it…. love it!"
"Where do you live?" I ask.
“Boolerow” she says with a Louisiana accent you could cut with a sugar cane knife .
"You're not from here," she says.
"I'm from Boston."
"I'm from Louisiana," she says
I ask her again where she's from.

After three times I finally get it. Just after i mistakenly click off the video, "I leev in Butte La Rose. I live in da swamp! I come fer dis every year!" she says with a booming laugh.

 

 

Big Fat Tuesday in tiny Iota, Louisiana Part 3

Iota, Louisiana
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
"Fat Tuesday", Mardi Gras Day, Courir de Mardi Gras

PART 3

3:30 PM. A convoy of police cruisers, sirens screeching, announces that the Courir de Mardi Gras has returned from begging in the countryside. The crowd pulls back like the Red Sea and stands three deep at the side of the street. Many of them wave and shout to friends or relatives who fill the three colorful wagons rolling down Duson Avenue.

 
Joyous bedlam - sirens braying, band playing, Mardi Gras celebrants shouting and banging on the sides of the trucks carrying them triumphantly through town.

 

Twenty minutes later, the Courir crowd, adults and youngsters, gathers on the dance stage.

Under the leadership of two capitaines, they sing The Mardi Gras Song. For some, it may have been their first courir. Learning every verse is required, though anyone growing up in southwest Louisiana knows the song by heart, and probably learned it before The Star Spangled Banner.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

MORE MARDI GRAS SCENES FROM IOTA

 

One red-feathered chicken, a symbol of a successful "courir", is held aloft for all to see (L). The chickens in the cage in the truck bed will benefit from release back to their roosts, not be cooked up in the ceremonial gumbo as in days of yore.

 

Snapshots of the parade.

After dismounting from the trucks, celebrants mounted the raised dance floor to beg and dance.

Once the Mardi Gras Song is sung, the revelers descend into the street. A masked reveler's right index finger taps the palm of his left hand, I hand over a dollar. As a reward, pt gets a piece of hard candy!

There's that chicken again! Only after the Mardi Gras Song and ritual begging and dancing in the street are celebrants permitted to remove their home made masks and capuchons (hats).

Serendipity strikes. As the revelers disband, I chat with  a woman who's just "unmasked".
"Did you know there's a women's courir, too? My grandmother began it thirty years ago. I've been doing it for years." She introduces me to her son, Trever Frugé.

Amazing. The first "Capitaine" for the women's courir was Gerald Frugé.
 

 

Big Fat Tuesday in tiny Iota, Louisiana Part 2

Iota, Louisiana
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
"Fat Tuesday", Mardi Gras Day, Courir de Mardi Gras

PART 2

Music is the thread that keeps Cajun tradition alive. At 11 AM, under a small tent at one end of the street party, a handful of teenage guitar, fiddle, and accordion players line up to play Cajun two steps and waltzes. A “house band” of grown men with guitars, fiddles, and percussion ask the kids what they want to play and back them up. None of the men has to consult a chart. They know every song these kids have learned. Some of the kids are shy. They’re all good.

 

Concessions from the Egan-Iota Lions Club, the Catholic Daughters 1519 of Eunice, St. Francis School, Boy Scout Troop 64, Sister’s Gourmet Nuts, and a handful of other local social groups are selling boudin, gumbo, jambalaya, cracklins, crawfish etoufee, po boys, homemade bread and sandwiches, fried alligator, cookies, syrup pies, glazed pecans and a host of other goodies. The Iota Rule: all of it has to be home made. My eyes glaze over as I contemplate how to taste some of everything. 

Old time Cajun music drifts out the doors of The American Legion Hall at the other end of the street.  Alex Caswell from Orange, Texas, and a bunch of his friends and relatives from Port Arthur to Vinton, Louisiana, play a steady stream of Cajun two steps and waltzes. The little bar in the rear is doing a good business, as is the food table with crawfish etoufee and rice and beans. Entire families sit around the dance floor in folding chairs. They, too, know the songs by heart.

Brother/sister Liz and Eric Kelly of Port Meche, TX play with musicians led by Alex Caswell of Port Arthur, TX.

A raised dance area with a sturdy plywood floor is set up in the middle of town. Les Bassettes, Corey “L’ll Pop” Ledet, then Scotty Pousson and the Pointe Aux Loups Playboys play from 11 AM to closing time at 5 PM.  It isn't an official party unless there's music.

The list of today's Tee-Mamou Mardi Gras sponsors includes local pharmacies, banks, liquor distributors, restaurants, truck stops, roofing companies, hair salons, and a host of local officials.  Buy a string of tickets at $1.00 apiece and you can eat like country royalty. Otherwise, the whole shebang is free.

Across the street from the food concessions is a string of Louisiana Folk Crafts Booths. Mardi Gras masks and capouchons, handmade wooden toys, carvings of egrets, fish and birds, jewelry, art work, clothing, hand made cutting boards, crocheted baby blankets, ceramics, and candles are tempting items behind the booths.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Vignettes from Duson Avenue

Richard “Joe” Miller (R) finds the young guests and emcee Howard Noel, Jr. handles introductions plays drums and sings.  They have a set lineup of youngsters who will play and invite anyone who’s come with their instrument to join the veteran musicians under the little tent to play. This is a tutorial and opportunity for kids to experience  playing for a friendly crowd that absolutely wants them to keep the tradition alive well into the 21st century.  these kids may have iPods and spend time on Facebook but they’re hardwired to their  culture as well and they’ll use social media to deepen their connection with Acadiana.

Around noon I head down to the American Legion Hall. Hot damn, there’s Farland Henry and his wife Carole, two friendly people sitting in just about the same seats where I met them here last year.
“You remembered my name from last year?” he says “It’s an unusual name Far Land,” he says. I ask him where he’s from “West  Orange, Texas,” he says, and gives me their address and telephone number.
“We’ve been married 64 years,” Farland says.
“I knew I wanted to marry him two weeks after we met,” Carole says with a big smile..
“Call us anytime you come down our way,” he says. And he means it. “My mother was born in Indian Bayou,Louisiana.
"Somewhere in the 1930s she met my dad and they moved to Texas. I worked for Dupont for 27 Years."
That was a time when tens of thousands of men worked in American factories and never thought it would ever be any different in the future.

Tourists and locals mix with ease. You're not in Iota unless you love the music and respect the traditions and the people who carry them on.  Louisiana natives appreciate that.

 

Down to the Catholic Daughters 1519 concession for coffee au lait and a  sweet dough syrup turnover. "We boil down cane sugar till it's the right thick consistency and wrap home made dough around it."  At 5 PM, his melt-in-my-mouth treasure washed down with coffee au lait is a divine restorative.

 

Boy Scout Troop 64 sells po-boys; the kid's slide is popular all day long.

The program for the 25th Anniversary Tee Mamou Mardi Gras Folklife Festival, downtown Iota, Tuesday, February 21, 2012
 

Next year i'll get photos of the crafts booths! Just about every business in Iota sponsors the Tee Mamou Mardi Gras Day.

Mardi Gras organizer Larry G. Miller, retired master builder of accordions, makes all kinds of announcements between bands. "Robert Lejeune is writing a history of Iota, it's never been done, if you have any information about your family you’d like to pass on to him he’ll be grateful,” he says to the crowd.
"Money was tight this year. We're doing everything we can to keep the day free of charge, and we accept donations at the concession ticket booths," Miller says to the people listening to the music.

“That fiddle player, Heather Cole-Mullen, with Les Bassettes is from the Boston area," Miller tells me when he finds out I'm from Boston.  "She’s a prodigy, When she was 13, she convinced her parents to send her to Ireland to compete. She didn’t win but did well. She’s the girlfriend of my grandson.”

 

Big Fat Tuesday in tiny Iota, Louisiana

Iota, Louisiana
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
"Fat Tuesday", Mardi Gras Day, Courir de Mardi Gras


PART 1
Drive into Iota on Mardi Gras Day, Fat Tuesday, and you might as well be driving into a time warp. Sure there are digital cameras popping and smart phones recording everything in sight. But what’s in sight in and around Iota has been going on for over a hundred years.

A 500-yard section of Duson Avenue, the main street through the heart of Iota, is closed to traffic. If you were doing the speed limit, you’d drive past the town’s dozen stores and the American Legion Hall in fifteen seconds.

Not today. The street is jammed with what could possibly be every one of Iota’s 1399 inhabitants and hundreds of others who’ve come to be part of an authentic, down home, celebration of a town that prizes its heritage. Friends and neighbors greet each other. Little kids trail their moms and dads, wide eyed at all the goings on. Tourists from afar wander around like extras in a movie set.



Some of the kids running around here will be bringing their own families here twenty years from now. A good chunk of the adults remember tagging along after their parents a generation or two ago.

There are Mardi Gras celebrations going on in every city and town within 100 miles. They’re all special but this one has the timeless aura of an old-fashioned snow globe. The concession and folk craft booths in the same spot where I saw them last year. . It’s as if they are perennial plants that bloom once a year.

Somewhere out in the countryside, revelers wearing traditional Courir de Mardi Gras garments are roaming from house to house begging for food and chasing chickens – a hilarious sight and a re-enactment of a Catholic tradition with roots in rural Brittany on the coast of France. In the old days, the beggars would return to town and use the chickens they could catch to make a pot of gumbo big enough to feed every celebrant. The day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the dietary restrictions of Lent was a day for feasting, drinking, and let it all hang out merriment.

The begging is ceremonial now but no less impassioned. The beggars must wear homemade costumes, masks, and conical hats called capuchons, follow the time honored ‘rules of engagement’, and are under the control of a “capitaine,” who wields a burlap whip. Given the fact that the adult revelers are often offered something to whet their whistles as early as 7 AM, it gets a little rowdy but, under the watchful eyes of the capitaines, never unruly.

Plenty goes on before the Courir de Mardi Gras parade enters town at 3 PM.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

You can hear the music from 500 yards down Duscon Avenue.The street's empty because everyone in town is already there!

Les Bassettes play early. Corey "L'll Pop" Ledet and then Scotty Pousson and the Pointe Aux Loups Playboys will follow. The raised dance floor is never empty.

Mardi Gras 2012: Goldman Thibodeaux at Vermilionville

Bal du Dimanche with Goldman Thibodeaux & the Lawtell Playboys (LA Creole)

Dance the afternoon away with Goldman Thibodeaux & the Lawtell
Playboys at Vermilionville's weekly Sunday Dance. 1 – 4 p.m.

Refreshments will be available for this smoke-free all ages show at Vermilionville's
Performance Center. Visit the calendar of events at vermilionville.org
for more info on the performers.

Bal du dimanche is held every Sunday.
$5 admission is for dance only and does not include entry to the park.

Vermilionville, 300 Fisher Rd, Lafayette, LA 70508-2028
Large Wood Dance Floor, No Smoking
Info: (337) 233-4077

Goldman Thibodeaux and the Lawtell Playboys are performing at Vermilionville, a recreated Cajun village in Lafayette. I’ve missed half the set by the time I arrive at 2:30 PM. An hour later I’ve danced to classic waltzes and two-steps, all sung in French, and all born of the joys and sorrows of Creole life in mid twentieth century Louisiana.

Old timers like Goldman are windows into the past. My friend May Louise from Lafayette says he plays “La La”, a nickname for the genre of music that preceded zydeco in the mid 20th century. Goldman remembers listening to the legendary accordionist Amédé Ardoin play at a house party when he was 8 years old.

The group on stage today – rub board, drummer, guitar, bass, and, sitting on a stool at center stage of the barn-like structure built specially for music and dancing, seventy-something year old Goldman Thibodeaux,.

The singing duties are divided between Goldman and his drummer.

Goldman isn’t much on chatter throughout his set so when he talks, you listen. The first story he tells is a funny one about a hat. He tells it in French, milking it out as slowly as he sometimes pulls his accordion during a song, and adds some mugging for effect, and chuckles with the telling.

Despite only understanding every fifth word, I laugh when he finishes because his usually hang-dog visage melts into a wrinkly wry smile.

A few songs later, as the afternoon is waning, Thibodeaux pauses and says, “Places like Vermilionville are special. There used to be places like this all over the countryside. Now few like it are left where you can bring the whole family to listen and dance.”

No doubt there are fewer of the rural bars and restaurants but that doesn’t mean the tradition of parents bringing their kids to restaurants and dance halls is a thing of the past.

Aside from the scattering of kids here with their parents, children are not only welcome but expected at Randol’s Restaurant right up the street in Lafayette and Pont Breaux down the road in Breaux Bridge. Mamas, papas (accent on second syllable) aunties, uncles, gran’papas and gran’mamas cradle kids in their arms as they dance two steps and waltzes around the floor.

When they get big enough, and for some that means a couple of weeks after they can walk, children totter around to the music with an adult. Even teenagers shed self-consciousness to join their parents on the dance floor. It’s not as if people are leading a charge cultural charge to retain their culture. This is simply what people do here.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

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.

Accordion Player Luke Huval: An Old Soul In A Kid's Body

McGee’s Landing and Family Restaurant
1337 Henderson Levee Road
Henderson, LA
Saturday, February 18, 2012
7:30 PM

There may be more musicians in southwest Louisiana than crawfish. There are hundreds of Cajun and Zydeco bands within an hour’s drive from Lafayette. Every native I’ve talked to here knows a musician or has a father, brother, uncle, or grandpapa who plays an instrument.
 
Case in point: Saturday night at McGee’s Landing, a family restaurant in Henderson. The place has a small dance floor. The musicians set up against the wall on chairs and play a few feet from the tables.
 
Joe Hall of Joe Hall and the Cane Cutters is playing with an ad hoc group tonight. Joe says he learned to play the accordion from his granddaddy. Joe’s employer in his day job? Fiddler Terrence Huval, leader of the popular Cajun band Jambalaya (and Director of Lafayette Utilities System, but that's another story).
 
Tonight, the drummer, whose name I didn’t get, sings most of the first set, two steps and waltzes in French. Pretty much standard fare. But I notice that the kid playing fiddle looks like a tenth grader.
 
After the break, Three kids sit in to play on their own: 15 year-old Zack Fuselier on fiddle (who was playing in the first set), 13 year-old Luke Huval on accordion, and his 17 year-old brother Phillip on guitar. Luke and Joel are sons of Terry Huval whose band is Jambalaya. These Huvals are distant cousins to the 13-member Huval family that fronts the Huval Family Band. (You have your scorecard out yet?)
 
From the looks of it, three kids who probably practice once a week in someone’s basement and are getting a chance to stretch their wings here on a slow Saturday night. That’s when lightning strikes.
 
The accordion player begins to sing. If you had your eyes closed, you’d never guess he probably hasn’t even begun to shave. Open them up and you see a musician totally inside his music. His right knee pounds relentlessly up and down with the beat. He sings with urgency, as if his life depended on the effort.
 
The songs are infused with the dark energy that has animated Cajun music for 200 years, bitingly sad, piercingly wistful. This is an old soul in a kid’s body. The songs feel like they’ve been rolling over the waters of the Atchafalaya Basin for 200 years.
 
I put down my fork. I don’t want to miss one beat of this music.
 
Luke Huval has been playing accordion for about ten months. “I pretty much taught myself,” he tells me after the set. Forget talent. The kid is gifted.
 
Zack Fusilier has been playing fiddle for all of two years. He’s been playing with Joe Hall for a year. Joel Huval has been playing guitar for about six months. The three families are neighbors in nearby Scott, a few miles outside Lafayette. Zack’s mom and dad are sitting at a table near band. One of the men from the table gets up and sings a couple of songs with the trio. Does anyone here not play an instrument or sing?
 
Toward the end of the set, Luke gets into a Zachary Richard song “Travail es dur” (“Work is hard”). Stunningly simple, viscerally a blow to the solar plexus. A woman weeps at my table. I have a lump in my throat.

You want history of a culture? Listen to this anthem to survival. And marvel that a 13 year-old kid can transport a room at McGee’s Landing back to a shack somewhere in the bayou way out there across the bay in front of the restaurant.
 
“Luke won the Youth Division at the Cajun Squeezebox Shootout Accordion Championship in Jennings this afternoon,” says Patrick Fuselier, Zack’s dad, as the band packs up to leave.
 
No small wonder. And no small wonder that with kids like this carrying the banner, Cajun music will have an audience for a long time to come.

Photo and video by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8tZDaDmA8k&list=UUpO59RlFb0TWCXQLKYfisdA&index=1&feature=plcp

Mardi Gras 2012: Cedric Watson at The Blue Moon Saloon

Cedric Watson and Bijoux Creole
Blue Moon Saloon
215 East Convent Street
Lafayette, LA
February 16, 2012

Cedric Watson, even in the rich universe of Cajun and zydeco musicians in Louisiana, stands out for the sheer variety of genres he packs into one set. Whether with his button accordion or shiny fiddle, the guy can play up a storm.

While deeply respecting the culture that produced it, he consciously shows us the far-flung roots of the music that zydeco has assimilated. Riffs he’s picked up from listening to Haitian, Dominican, African, and Cuban music pop up playfully in his songs.

Listening to him sing in Creole French is a treat. Dancing it, with its rich range of zydeco, Cajun, swing, waltz, two-step and occasional rock 'n roll rhythms, is divine.

By the time his second set ends at the Blue Moon Saloon, it is what I call Clown Car Dancing, with an astonishing number of people  seemingly defying the laws of physics, occupying the same space at the same time. This syndrome happens regularly in southwest Louisiana.

With the Clown Car, a ridiculous number of people climb out of a ridiculously tiny car. In Clown Car Dancing, most people turn around after one dance and ask another partner to dance. Who wants to leave a jammed dance floor when a guy like Cedric Watson and his Bijoux Creole Band are playing such mesmerizing music on stage?

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Special guests at the break, Chief Zydeco Mike and the Creole Headhunters

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

15th Carrier Family Festival
January 1, 2012
Roy Carrier’s Offshore Lounge
Lawtell, Louisiana

Chubby Carrier (far right, accordion) and the next generation, on washboard (left), playing next to washboard player Earl Sally

Directions--go into Lawtell on the one way street, turn right at the first gravel street (McClelland), go over the railroad tracks, immediately turn left onto Perry & go to the club. This will be a fund-raiser for renovations to the club so it can reopen on a regular basis.

These are the kinds of directions you often get in southwestern Louisiana. Roy Carrier’s Offshore Lounge was so deep in the country that my GPS could not find the place. I plugged Lawtell Louisiana in the little black box and headed about 25 miles north from Lafayette. Crossing into Lawtell, I jammed on the brakes when I nearly passed a black and white hand-painted Offshore Lounge sign tacked onto a pole.

Yep, gravel street…there are the railroad tracks…another hand painted sign, then a few hundred yards down the road a dirt parking lot in front of a low, rectangular one story building.  A thin gray cloud issuing from a huge smoker floats under the roof of the overhang in front of the club.  Music is pumping from inside. I’ve arrived.

Lawtell has a population of 174. There are more people than that inside this dance hall.

Zydeco dancers are an eclectic bunch, black/white, young/old, urban/rural, from every social class. They’re also loyal. When they heard that Roy Carrier’s musician sons, Troy "Dikki Du" Carrier and Chubby Carrier wanted to honor their late father Roy by reopening his Offshore Lounge, which had fallen into serious disrepair, they flocked to a 2011 New Year's Day Keep Roy's Dream Alive fundraiser at Slim’s Y Ki Ki in Opelousas. At least ten of the areas best bands played that day for zip. The family raised $6000.

Today, Dikku Du Carrier has a one day permit to open for the Offshore Lounge for a fund raiser.  We’ll dance to Chubby Carrier & the Bayou Swamp Band, Dikki Du & Zydeco Krewe, Dwight Carrier & the Black Cat Zydeco Ro Doggs, Corey "Lil Pop" Ledet, "T" Broussard, and Lil' Pookie.

Dikki Du Carrier needs to raise a serious chunk of cash to pay for a septic system and rebuild according to updated building codes. Today, dance loyalists who've homed into the Lafayette area for New Year's celebrations gladly pay $20 a pop for admission, buy Roy Carrier CDs, T-shirts and fried chicken, red beans and rice, gumbo and BBQ. They also write checks on the spot.

Roy’s family has a long slog to keep Roy’s dream alive – but making dreams a reality was a Roy Carrier specialty. When Roy bought the tumble down roadhouse in 1980, it became a place where he fostered the talents and dreams of some of the best known musicians in Louisiana – John Delafose, Beau Jacques, to name two, and gave young Geno Delafose his first paying gig.

Not surprisingly, Roy's father and uncles were musicians and he began playing with them at age ten and he kept on playing till he died in 2010.

With both of Roy’s sons playing their hearts out on the stage, The Offshore Lounge was showing definite signs of life. In one or two more years,  the place may again become the spot where the next generation learns their chops.

NOTE:
If you would like to contribute to the "Keeping Roy's Dream Alive" cause, write a check to Troy "Dikki Du" Carrier and send to Richard Brainard, 813 SW Alder St. #700, Portland, OR 97205.
As of January 13, 2012, $5500 has been raised toward the goal of $10,000. Read Troy Carrier's letter to learn more about how the Carriers will use the money.

 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Roy's Offshore Lounge might need repairs but the BBQ being smoked is first class.

 

All kinds of helpers dish out the food/pt with Dikki Du Carrier
 

Chubby Carrier and The Bayou Swamp Band/Dikki Du Carrier's son Troy, Jr. on drums and niece on washboard - the third generation of Carriers to play!

 
Fun on the dance floor...Chubby Carrier arrives to play.

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

 

 

 

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

 

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!

Visit with Herman Fuselier at KRVS, Opelousas

Thursday afternoon, December 29, 2011

Louisiana hospitality...Herman Fuselier, on air host of "The Zydeco Stomp" on Opelousas station KRVS, has invited me to visit him after I emailed him during his December 24 show. The St. Landry Parish Visitor Center, on a small parcel of land just off I-49 at exit 23, where he has an office, is one of the "greenest" buildings in the state.

I'm welcomed at the front desk by Miss Gloria. Cheryl Castille (pictured below with pt), on air host of the singer/songwriter/folk roots program "The Exchange", and Celeste Gomez, Director of The St. Landry Parish Tourist Commission, pop out of their offices and greet me warmly.

Herman Fuselier, is as easy going in person as he sounds on his radio program. Thanks to Herman, after our half hour conversation, I've drilled down one more layer into the fascinating history of the music in this part of the country. I would venture to say that south central Louisiana is the most fertile territory for cross-pollination of music genres in the entire world.

Story to follow... 

 

Sustainable features of the center include a water cistern, wind turbine and photovoltaic panels.

 

But the best feature is the people who work inside!

St. Landry Parish: Opelousas, Birthplace of Zydeco

St. Landry Parish
Louisiana

OK, we take history seriously around Boston. The thousands of tourists who visit here can visit Paul Revere’s house, the Old North Church, the USS Constitution, Bunker Hill and scores of historic sites in Lexington, Concord, and other places that feature prominently in history books.  The temporary seat of government for the infant United States of America is a quarter mile down the street from my house in Watertown, twenty minutes from Paul Revere's house in Boston.

My impression that we have a corner on the market of American history hit a speed bump when I began researching St. Landry Parish in advance of meeting Herman Fuselier at the St. Landry Visitor Center in Opelousas, Louisiana.

The Poste de Opelousas, an outpost of the French government, was one of the first European settlements in Louisiana. Contributing to its rich cultural history is that the outpost was subsequently governed by the Spanish and was later settled by English, Irish, Scots, and Germans. The fertile prairie land was a godsend to these pioneers who farmed (rice is a big crop here) and raised cattle on the 933 square miles of the parish.

Adding to the mix were black slaves arriving with European settlers in the early 1700s. To further spice things up, people who became known as Creoles, blacks with Caribbean or Haitian roots, blacks who were free people of color, and others with mixed Spanish or French blood, began to settle in the area in the late 1700s when the Spanish were granting land rights to all comers. Less is known of the Attakapas Indians who lived in the area.

Creoles and Cajuns stamped the region with their music. Opelousas is considered the birthplace of Zydeco. Vermillion Parish on its southern border is often credited with being the birthplace of Cajun music but neighboring parishes contest that. Many credit Amadee Ardoin, a native Creole from Opelousas in St. Landry Parish, as the father of Zydeco music. In true Louisiana style, both genres borrow from one another and both have loyal dance followings.

Louisiana might just be the musical crossover capital of the world. Listen to contemporary Creole and Cajun music and you'll hear influences from blues, country, rhythm n blues, honky tonk, and swing along with traditional songs carried forward from generations past. Creole and Cajun - the ultimate koan: they are different and they are the same. Trying to separate them cleanly is like trying pick bits of okra from a good bowl of gumbo.

Opelousas, let alone the other 12 cities and towns in the parish, has a ton of attractions.

Here’s a starter list:

• The St. Landry Parish Visitor Center to see Herman
• Le Vieux Village where the old train depot was located and now houses the •Louisiana Orphan Train Museum.
• Opelousas Museum & Interpretive Center.  The Center is comprised of a Main Exhibit Room, The Civil War Room, The Geraldine Smith Welch Doll Collection, and The Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Music Festival Archives.
• The Creole Heritage Folklife Center
• The Evangeline Downs Track and Casino where my friend Bill Ives took in some good music shows.

Gee, I won't have time to do more than a sliver of this itinerary during this holiday week…what a shame. I’ll have to come back.

Photo by Paul A.Tamburello, Jr.

Herman Fuselier's Zydeco Stomp: A Gumbo of Music, Culture, and Community

Zydeco Stomp radio show –A Gumbo of Music, Culture and Community
Hosted by Herman Fuselier
“Zydeco, Blues and You and Me from 12 to 3…”
KRVS 88.7 FM University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana

Herman Fuselier is the entertainment editor for the Lafayette (La.) Daily Advertiser newspaper and a music columnist with The Times of Acadiana in Lafayette and Offbeat Magazine of New Orleans. He broadcasts Louisiana music shows on KRVS 88.7 FM in Lafayette and KDCG-TV 22 in Opelousas.

Friday, December 23, 2011

“Herman Fuselier does a great show every Saturday. You can listen to it online,” my friend Bill Ives told me as he recounted a 9-day whirlwind pilgrimage in which he crisscrossed highways and byways from New Orleans to Eunice. Bill’s visit with Herman at the St. Landry Parish Visitor Information Center in Opelousas was one of the many highlights of his trip.

A New Orleans native now residing in Cambridge, MA, Bill planned his trip around visiting restaurants, dance halls, and cultural attractions. Judging by the stories he told me at lunch, he packed it in tighter than shrimp in a po boy from The Taco Sisters restaurant in Lafayette. I take his advice.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Listening to the Zydeco Stomp on December 24th was a revelation for me. “Zydeco, Blues, You and Me, From 12 to 3” is Herman’s tag line. With his playlist of Zydeco, Swamp Pop, Rhythm ’n Blues and straight up Blues, he didn’t disappoint.

By the time his show is over, I have a good a feel for the charm, history, and pride that animate music that echoes around parishes (counties) in southwest Louisiana.

Zydeco and Cajun music are played all over southwest Louisiana. They have evolved from two distinct cultures. Herman has written that Zydeco emanates from a Creole culture that stretches back nearly 300 years from descendants of slaves, Creoles mixed with Spanish, French or American ancestry, and free people of color. Zydeco became recognized as a distinct genre of music in the 1950s.

Cajun music began to flourish in Louisiana when French speaking people migrated to the bayous in southwestern part of the state in the mid 1700s after being expelled from their homes in Acadiana in Canada by the English.

Zydeco and Cajun each have their own dance styles (that's another story). It can get complicated, yes, but the great thing is the way the musical cultures have borrowed from each other. Listen to Herman’s Zydeco Stomp program and you’ll get a sense of the luscious intermingling of blues, rhythm ‘n blues, swamp pop, with a pinch of Cajun.

"Glad you enjoyed the show. I try to make it fun and informative. Zydeco has always been influenced by mainstream music, especially blues and R&B. So I'm just trying to connect the dots," Herman says in an email.

"Clifton Chenier is heralded as the King of Zydeco and rightfully so. Listen to his music and you'll hear Ray Charles, Fats  Domino, Sam Cooke, Glen Miller and lots of other mainstream pioneers. Some of their songs he simply changed to French and made local hits out of them."

Herman's on-air style is warmly personal, evokes a strong sense of place, and demonstrates a deep understanding of how genres of music are interconnected (Fusilier played local artist Lynn August singing a zydeco-style cover of Bobby Blue Bland's "Lead Me On"...amazing!).

Herman occasionally zips amusing voice overs into the songs in his wide ranging playlist and gives shout outs to listeners emailing into him today from North Dakota to Houston. "Merry Christmas to you, your lovely wife and those two awesome boys of yours," texts one of Herman's listeners. (Herman gave me a shout out at the 2:11 mark on his December 24 show!).

It felt like he set aside three hours to put together a puzzle. Song by song I began to get the picture of the roots of zydeco music, the men who played it, and the way their music influenced other musicians.

Down here, if a man sings or plays an instrument, the chances are his brothers or sons or cousins or uncles are in a band somewhere. Herman plays John Delafos, Geno’s late father; Jude Taylor, Curley Taylor’s dad; Clifton Chenier, C.J. Chenier’s late dad…you get the idea. I’ll bet that the only sense of competition musicians here have is who can have more fun playing.

“Zydeco is the blues and the blues is zydeco,” says Herman, “and it doesn’t have to be played at 900 miles an hour to be good zydeco, Boozoo knew that” as  he cues up “Driftin’ Blues,” by the legendary Boozoo Chavis. I was thrilled. I knew the man’s name but had never heard him sing. Great introduction.

Today, Herman plays several songs as a salute to James Brown, ‘The hardest working man in show business,” who died on Christmas Day 2006. Herman got into JB’s slow drag, “Try Me,” and “Santa’s Got A Brand New Bag,” and a handful of other James Brown classics that demonstrated his enormous versatility and surprising range.

The gem of the afternoon for me was the godfather of soul’s bluesy rendition of “Let’s Make This Christmas Mean Something This Year” - as heartfelt as any carol I’ve ever heard, with a powerful message deserving of wide circulation.

Thank you, Herman, Merry Christmas!

Feufollet: A New Generation of Cajun Music

Festival International de Louisiane: Dispatch 5
Feufollet, A Cajun Band
Saturday evening, April 30, 2011
Festival International de Louisiane
Lafayette, Louisiana


In case you had any worries that Cajun music in Louisiana is nearing the end of its genetic line, look no farther than Feufollet.  The players in this band look barely old enough to vote. They have a young following as ardent as any rock group. You could be at an all ages Jimmy Buffett concert with the way they sing the choruses of Feufollet songs except I don’t believe that Jimmy Buffett fans hop up and down en masse to the beat of his songs. And shout out song requests in French.

Saturday night at the Festival International de Louisiane Heritage Stage, Feufollet took Cajun music into a direction that legendary singer Dewey Balfa might never have predicted. But what Dewey would recognize are the themes about love and life that matter to these kids today and the utter fervor with which they sing. And the lyrics – all in French.

Whoa, what’s this? They’re belting out a version of The Four Tops’ “I’ll Be There”  - in French! The front line makes lots of eye contact and feeds off each other’s energy. They’re fearless. If they love a song, they’ll play it.  These are the kinds of kids who ate their peas but aren’t afraid to try new things.

In the early part of the 20th century, Cajun kids would get a beating if they spoke their native French language in public schools. At the Festival International de Louisiane today, every one of the scores of musical acts is introduced in English and French. The ancestors of the Acadians who settled here from the Canadian provinces flat out refuse to let the language of their forebears be forgotten. It’s a matter of pride and cultural cohesion that spills over into food, dance, and music.

Feufollet’s learning curve hasn’t been limited to traditional music. The front line of guitar, accordion/guitar, fiddle and the electric piano are thrashing the music with power chords they might have heard from their parents’ Led Zeppelin collection.

Some of the songs have a vague gig or two-step feel, nary a waltz in sight, and many of the songs seem better suited to listening (or maybe hopping up and down) than dancing.

Anna Laura Edmiston (guitar), Chris Stafford (guitar) Chris Segura (fiddle), Mike Stafford (drums), Philippe Billeaudeaux (bass),Andrew Toups (electric piano)

The next thing you know, they’re doing a cover of “Lucille,” for god’s sake, driven by the fiddle, accordion, driving bass and funky B3 sounding keyboard, and sung to a fare thee well in French in a two step rhythm. The younger crowd, and a good number of their elders, sings the choruses.

You’d think the older Cajuns would regard this song the way 1950s America viewed Elvis, with incomprehension and derision. Not here. They’re proud that the youngsters are keeping a tight grip on their French heritage.  Two gray-haired men in front of me keep nodding their heads and slapping their knees to the beat of each song. Trust me, this isn’t the same music they heard on stage when they grew up.

Both Cajun and zydeco music are passed down from generation to generation. If you were to start counting the fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, and in-laws who play in each other’s bands you’d need a scorecard. Feufollet bloodlines run something like this.

Chris and Mike Stafford’s grandfather, Howard Ratlif, was the original drummer for Bobby Page & the Riff Raffs, who played New Orleans-styled rock and R&B in the late '50s and early '60s. Steve Riley of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys produced their early albums when they were barely teenagers. Anna Laura Edmiston grew up with French being her first language at home. Chris Segura's great grandfather, Robert Fontenot, was a fiddle player and his great uncles were the Segura Brothers, who were recorded by legendary folk historian Alan Lomax.

The last song in the set blows me away. The best I can do is describe it as a souped-up garage band version of the very traditional Cajun anthem, “Parlez Nous A Boire” … with a crashing thunder final burst, in which the young fiddler fans his instrument close to the amplifier, a la Jimi Hendrix, producing a glorious dissonant blast. The future of one branch of Cajun music is budding right in front of my eyes. 

 

 

Susan Werner: No Wonder That Concert Seemed So Spectacular

No wonder the Susan Werner concert I reviewed in March felt so special! Read why in her newsletter  of September 20 (copied below). She's on tour for the rest of the year. Check her out if she gets near your neighborhood. If you live around Boston, Susan's at Passim on Friday, October 7 and Saturday, October 8.

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A Note from S. Werner

They say you should go out on top.   Maybe I should retire right now. 
 
Because I’m not sure anything I do is ever gonna top this new live double CD, recorded at The Center for Arts Natick (MA) on March 19th of this year. 
 
For the sellout crowd present, you know what a good time we were having that night, all of us, onstage and in the seats. At the end of the evening, I turned to bass player Gail Ann Dorsey and to harmonica/percussionist Trina Hamlin and said “You guys, that mighta been the best show of my entire career.”  And road manager Jane Paul said “And I think the sound man got it ALL.”

Sure enough, Natick sound engineer Al Kennedy DID get it all - so much of it we had to print two discs.  When’s the last time you had two discs of music?  Frampton Comes Alive?  Goodbye Yellow Brick Road?  Rush – Exit Stage Left?... (Do I date myself?  Hey, at least that’s a cheap date).
 
Order the discs here through Bulletproof:
http://bulletproofartists.com/onlinestore/category.cfm?Category=21

 or come get your own copy at the shows this fall - we got a full slate of concerts, and new tunes to boot.
 
Guess I’m not retiring quite yet...
 
sw

Reggie Smith, New Orleans Music With An Alabama Accent

Reggie Smith, Tenor sax, New Orleans Music With An Alabama Accent
Corner of Royal and Saint Peter Street
French Quarter, New Orleans
Friday, August 26, 2011

Hang on, there’s something familiar about the wail of that saxophone. Sure enough, in front of Rouse’s at the corner of Royal and St. Peter Street, there's the sax player who fronted the street band I got inspired to write about during Satchmo Summerfest.

Actually, fronted is too tepid a word. This guy pranced, danced, sang, chanted, bantered with the passersby, and played up a storm of funk, rock, gospel, and pop with a distinctly New Orleans accent.

Today, in an electric blue shirt, plaid shorts, and his dreads sticking out from his white band hat with the Cool Bone Jazz insignia, he is more subdued in manner but certainly not in the energy he's putting in his music. I’ve dropped some folding money in his sax case so when he takes a breather, I feel like it’s ok to ask him a few questions. And I continue my learning curve about the life of street musicians.

Reggie Smith, in his late 20s, came here from Alabama two months ago and hasn't left yet. It started in a typical New Orleans fashion.

“I asked if I could sit in with one of the street groups, they said yes, and I got my start. The way it works is that they ask you to wait till they start the next set, divide the tips before I begin the next set with them, then divide the tips again after I've played with them.”

Playing on the street is usually an ad hoc adventure. Few of these gigs are regularly scheduled events and very few of the musicians lead regularly scheduled lives.

“This is how I network here. Sometimes another musician asks for my name and calls me when he has a gig I can work on. If I get a gig and I need a musician, I call one of the guys I know. You've got to love working out in the street or it would be real hard. Some guys look down on playing in the street but not me. I love being out here and starting a party.” Sweat is dripping from the short beard on his chin. It's about 90° in the shade.

 

He begins to play again. The guy could start a party in a morgue. Reggie is playing just about anything that comes into his mind. I hear him rumble out the theme from the old Peter Gunn TV show, then a few shreds of Richie Valens' "La Bamba", and a slow dirge of  "St. James infirmary". Folding money is piling up in his sax case but I doubt it's enough to pay for a serious buy at a supermarket.

Then Reggie gets going on “Just My Imagination,” the Smokey Robinson song with all sorts of trills and flourishes. He could just as easily be on his back porch trying all this stuff out, it's almost like an open rehearsal, with a live audience who happen to be the regulars and the tourists traveling through this busy intersection. Somewhere in his own mind, Reggie’s on a stage.

All these flourishes and imaginings are a form of practice. He took Robinson’s “Just My Imagination” and turned it upside down and inside out and boy was it fun listening to it. You can take it to the bank that some of those wild improvisations will get honed down and played next time he is on stage or on a street corner.

I chat him up again during his next breather. He grins when say that I wrote a story about his “Let’s have a party” attitude when he played with his bunch of street musicians on August 4.

“In Alabama, I grew up in a gospel tradition. I learned jazz in school. When I hear New Orleans music I hear lots of those elements in it. If you want to learn New Orleans music, you buy a Louis Armstrong CD and learn how to play those songs. I know lots of guys who have memorized those songs and can play them just like Louis,” he says.

“When you're playing on the street, you know how well you're doing by the tips that are rolling in. I like to get people involved, get out there and throw a little street party. If we get into a riff that gets the crowd going, we remember what that was. Next time we get together, I might say let's do that Wednesday riff and they'll all remember and play it and we get the crowd going again. If we get into a groove and people aren't moving and involved, we start playing something else.”

His time as his own, he'll quit when he feels like it or if he has another gig or if he feels like setting up someplace else - people or no people, tips or no tips. Guys like this can no more stop playing than they can stop breathing. He's performing in his own world, bobbing and weaving, playing whatever comes to mind, now is playing the theme to a TV show I can't identify, every so often blowing through the reed to make sounds that would scare a raccoon or perhaps romance it. I’m about ten yards away, scribbling notes on my pad that’s perched on lid of a trash bin and feel like I’m in a concert hall.

Wander around the French Quarter and you can fill your day listening to mini-concerts from street corners to Jackson Square - blues, jazz, gospel, brass bands - no cover, no minimum, but be sure you have folding money in your pocket and liberally drop it into the tip jars.

There's a lot of energy in French Quarter street music. And it’s not just for the tourists. This is birthright music, music that honors the legacy of Louis Armstrong, the kid who used to sell coal from a cart near this neighborhood, who learned how to play the cornet at a reform school, and later reformed the entire genre of jazz. If you listen hard enough, you’ll hear riffs that resemble the music played in the brothels and saloons on Basin Street and the neighborhoods around the port of New Orleans.

You’ll also hear how New Orleans is not too proud to add to its legacy. Musicians hear a lick a guy like Reggie Smith brings from his upbringing in Alabama and bam, it gets absorbed with a New Orleans accent, and is echoed on other corners throughout the French Quarter.

“I'll give you my cell number in case you want to ask any more questions,” Reggie says.

This is the way it is down here - open, friendly, engaging, a real southern thing. If I feel like throwing a block party the next time I come to New Orleans, Reggie’d be the first guy I’d call.

Photo and video by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Valley of Silent Men Second Line Parade

The Valley Of Silent Men Social Aid and Pleasure Club 26th anniversary Second Line Parade

August 28, 2011
 
Trying to capture the energy of a Second Line parade it's is like trying to hold water in your hands. Try explaining the sensation of a sneeze, or an orgasm, or a fabulous surprise, and you’ll get the idea. None of it would happen without the band, in this case the Young Fellas Brass Band and the social aid and pleasure clubs that support it and the people who come to join it from all over the city, or stand on their porches to watch it, or set up their chairs on the sidewalk, or on the neutral ground (that’s the narrow strip of land in the middle of a wide New Orleans street – when I first read about a neutral ground, I thought it meant some kind of social truce zone!), or follow along for a block or two. When you think of the parade up North, you think of an event that you watch in a stationary position, cheer when it goes by, then go home.
 
Well, that is not the model down here. There is no way you can be in the vicinity of a second line parade and not get involved in it some way, for example, if you walk along, before you know it, you’re walking in time with the thump thump bump and blare of the band. And you're talking to people you've never seen before and may never see again. Actually talking might not be the right word. Joking, joshing, adding your own comments to the joking and high times going on around you is more like it. Everybody around you is yelling, cheering, poking good-natured fun at someone, or getting good natured fun poked at them, and returning it with interest.

 

Video by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Valley of Silent Men Second Line Parade

 

August 28, 2011

New Orleans, Louisiana

Reggie Smith: Musician, Street Performer in the French Quarter

French Quarter
Royal and St.Peter Streets
New Orleans, Louisiana
August 26, 2011

Last time I saw this man he was fronting a band on the same corner. He filled the street with so much energy I was inspired to break out my note pad and write a story on the spot.

Today, here he is playing solo on the same corner. I chat with him between songs. Reggie Smith's story to follow but I cant resist sending you this little video to give you a taste of Smith-style street music in the French Quarter.

Check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOqRJ1Auozw

Photo and video by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Candlelight Lounge, New Orleans: Musicians and Characters

Seva Venet and Mike Beauchamp, a banjo, a saxophone, and two stories
The Candlelight Lounge
925 North Robertson
New Orleans, LA
August 3, 2011

You never know who the full cast of characters is going to be when the Tremé Brass Band gets going at the Candlelight Lounge. You know that co-founders Benny Jones, Sr., rock steady presence on the snare drums, and legendary bass drum player Lionel Batiste, will anchor the back row, and that irrepressible trumpeter Kenny Terry, trombone player Ed King, and a few other regulars are going to show up. What you don’t know are the wild cards, the guys who founders Benny or Lionel Batiste have invited to sit in.

Sometimes the regulars don’t even know the names of the men who share the bandstand with them. Which is exactly what I learned at the first break when I asked Ed King to name the men who were playing tonight. Ed named the regulars then grabbed the banjo player to help him name the others.

This never fails to amaze me. And it happens all he time down here, in pickup groups of street bands and regular gigs like the Candlelight. Musicians show up, they play, they get paid (not much), and they go home or to another gig. They get to know each other by how they play together.

Banjo player Seva Venet, who shows up to play every two weeks or so, names a few others. Ben Julius McKee, “Call me Jap, and don’t confuse me with a Jewish American Princess!” tuba player Ben Julius jokes as he listens to Seva.

Like other musicians, Seva has another job to keep the cash flowing. “I’m the resident musician at Wilson Elementary School. I use creole music to teach history in a program called KidSmart. My trio is playing at the Jazz National Park on North Peters Street on August 27, come down if you can.”

Photo below: Mike Beauchamp, baritone sax on left, Seva Venet on banjo in second row

I am in for a bigger surprise when I start talking with the baritone sax player, a middle aged, casually dressed man with a salt and pepper beard and a cap with a New Orleans Saints logo perched on his head. I ask him for his name and get a great story.

“I was working at my flower stall at Aududon Park one day and the Tremé Brass Band set up right in front of my stall. A crew was filming them and while they did, they started talking to me. When I mentioned I was a musician, too, Lionel Batiste invited me to sit in here every other week.” This is such a typical New Orleans six degrees of separation story.

Mike Beauchamp performs as a pharmacist in his day job at Tulane University.  “After hours, I’m an urban farmer, I work with a group called Perennial Plate,” Mike says, “I like to stick close to nature.” Growing flowers at Audubon Park does the trick.

“But I’ll tell you, coming here every other week is like therapy for me. There’s so much energy here.”

When I get back to my hotel, lo and behold, I find these links to The Perennial Plate, brassrootsmovie.com, the group who filmed the Tremé Brass Band, and even one from the Huffington Post.

Check these videos out for a good look at Mike Beauchamp, pharmacist, urban farmer, musician, and flower child in a gray beard. When he gets going on his baritone sax, Mike puts every bit of love into his solos as he puts into his flowers at the park.

I can’t wait to return to the Candlelight. The stories the musicians tell are about as good as the music they play.

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello,Jr.

Satchmo Summerfest: Satchmo Strut - Frenchmen Street

The Satchmo Strut
Friday, August 5, 2011
6 PM to 2AM
All along Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny Neighborhood

The Dancing Man leads The Free Agents Brass Band down Frenchmen Street and the Sweet Street Symphony leads a concert further up the street.

Ed King of the Treme Brass Band wails on his trombone - in Michael's Bike Shop! He'd gone inside to find a new seat for his bike after playing for the Strut with the band. They recognized him and begged him to play - he did, and sang a few verses to boot.

The crowd wanders down the street; pt with Treme Brass Band founder and leader, Benny Jones, Sr. "We're playing at 3 PM tomorrow," he reminded me, "Don't miss it!"
 

We can hear the jubilant Glen David Andrews from inside the Three Muses - and feel the Free Agents Brass Band as they serenade at a stop along the street.
 
 

The Young Fellas Brass Band funks it up from the balcony of The Blue Nile - pt with dancers from Florida he met at The Rock n Bowl Mid-City Lanes the night before.
 

James and Greta Fulton - James regaled me with stories, gave me pointers about the city and listed his favorite  spots for listening to music in New Orleans. He and Greta are reasons this city is special - friendly, engaging people who want to share the story of the city with strangers who, in an hour, feel like they've met a new friend.

Satchmo Summerfest preview: Street Musicians in the French Quarter

Corner of Royal and St. Peter Street
French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana
3 PM
August 4, 2011

Other parts of the country might have pollen or smog in the air. In New Orleans, especially in the French Quarter, it's music.

You can hardly go anywhere in the French Quarter without music breaking out somewhere.  Might drift down from a window behind a Spanish style wrought iron balcony or a passing vehicle. 

Then there are the street musicians. (Video link) You can damn well hear them three blocks away, god love 'em, and you start to walk toward the sounds like a moth to the flame, except with way better results that burn you up with lighthearted joy and insouciance. 

You’ll stay anchored across the street from them and start moving your feet and shaking whatever body parts begin to move  of their own accord until you render yourself entirely late for wherever you were planning to go. What the hell, you’re in New Orleans... may as well get on New Orleans time.

These guys would be an ordinary looking bunch of men if you happened to see them on a streetcar or sitting in a diner. Put tubas, percussion, trumpets and a saxophone in their hands and they become street artists who can turn your day around.

They set up on a street corner with nary a soul in sight and before long they create an audience. The musicians might be young, old, black, white, scruffy or dressed outlandishly or to the nines. The Ghostriders, if the CD on the street next to the tip jar is an indication of their identity, are all but the last.

These men might not have two nickels to rub together, but you’d never know it by their music. Playing music is like breathing to them, no choice in the matter, they do it to survive and to feel alive and free and untethered from cares that would probably sink the rest of us.

The sax player sings, hollers, and does a second line ballet routine improvised on the spot. He serenades unsuspecting tourists who walk down Royal or St. Peter Street.  Watching a couple from Denmark or Ohio try to fathom what’s going on and how they react is a great part of the show.

So we put folding money in their tip jars. It’s not enough to pay for what they give us, a buoyancy that lifts us away from our own cares and makes us feel happy. Really really happy.

Photos by Paul A.Tamburello,Jr.

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MORE PHOTOS...
 

The folks back home will be entertained by what they see. Millions of pixels a day are used up recording the antics and harmonies the street musicians of New Orleans create.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 
 
 

 

Satchmo SummerFest: Clapping on the Twos

11th Annual Satchmo Summerfest
The premier American jazz festival dedicated to the life, music and legacy of New Orleans' native son, Louis 'Satchmo' Armstrong
August 4-7, 2011 at the old US Mint, now part of the Louisiana State Museum in the French Quarter

I’m heading for the 11^th Annual Satchmo Summerfest in New Orleans. It was there last year that my self-image as a knowledgeable listener got banged on like a little drum, a tamburello, ironically enough, if you translate the words into Italian.
 
The Saturday program at The Palm Court Jazz Café last year on Decatur Street read:
12:30pm – 1:30pm - Louis Armstrong’s Musical Gumbo: Trumpeter Clive Wilson, drummer Herman Lebeaux, and pianist Butch Thompson (long associated with Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,”) explore the New Orleans ingredients – the elements and styles - that contributed to Louis Armstrong’s revolutionary trumpet playing.

There was Clive Wilson, esteemed trumpeter and jazz historian, saying that when musicians like Buddy Bolden began changing the musical landscape in the 1920s, Louis Armstrong was paying attention. “The popular music at the time was in 2/4 time,” Wilson said, then played a song in which the beat was one-two-three-four,  one-two-three-four. OK, I got that.

Next came my musical Waterloo. “Musicians like Bolden began to accent the melody in different places and converted it to 1 / 2 time,” Wilson said, and played “Hail To The King ” as an example.

Butch Thompson, piano, Herman Lebeaux on drums, as Clive Wilson plays into a coconut shell to demonstrate how trumpeters "talk." In the old days, they'd use a bucket that may have doubled as a spittoon.

“Clap on the downbeat, not the upbeat. Anyone clapping on the one will be shot!” he said with an impish grin.

I was cool with that. Until I nearly got shot. I’d always thought I was the hippest guy in the room when I clapped or snapped my fingers knowledgeably or nodded my head sagely when everyone else did the same on the next beat - the downbeat. To say that I was embarrassed would be an understatement.

 
The audience was full of the people I’d scoffed at for being so uncool as to not hear when to hit the correct beat. I sat on my hands. Left to my own devices, I’d have exposed myself as a fraud. To this day, I still catch myself doing what the trumpet playing HBO Treme character Delmonde Lambreaux says dismissively of audiences in Portland, Oregon. “I’ve been there. They clap on the ones!”

The rest of the afternoon's information about jazz in the Armstrong era was less deflating to my self-image.

Butch Thompson explains how musicians play ahead or behind the beat.

“Guys like Armstrong are historians who happen to be musicians. You’ll hear influences from gospel to opera to Buddy Bolden to King Oliver in Armstrong’s music. Some of the phrases that Satchmo invented survive to this day – the end of “Tin Roof Blues” and “Savoy Blues” are two examples.” Then the trio played the phrases.

King Oliver and Clark Terry could “talk” on their trumpets by playing into buckets. Wilson, with Butch Thompson at piano and Herman Lebeaux on drums, played into a coconut shell to demonstrate. I got completely lost when Wilson, who came to New Orleans in 1960, showed a video of “Careless Love” and talked about stuff like strings improvising with diminished tones. Improvising I get. Diminished tones? Maybe I’ll learn more this year.

“Some musicians play ahead of the beat and some play behind the beat,” he said, and the trio played “The King Porter Stomp” to show how it’s done. At least I could follow that.

And, Lord have mercy, I knew to clap on the downbeat.

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"I used to come to New Orleans when I was in college in Minnesota. I could even afford it then," Butch Thompson said after the seminar. I must say, it's really cool to meet a musician I've admired for years, and told him so. These guys were so accessible and talked with everyone who wanted a minute after the seminar.

MORE SEMINARS ON SUNDAY

On Sunday, Village Voice writer Larry Blumenthal (far right) moderated  a seminar talking about the music in HBO series Tremé, what a lineup (left to right)...writer Tom Piazza, musician Davis Rogan (after whom the Tremé character Davis Rogan is fashioned),Times-Picayune newspaper music reporter Alison Butterscotch, and Stafford Agee,New Orleans trombone player who is doing the real playing for Tremé actor Antoine Batiste.

Blumenthal says the Treme show is a fictional show that is intensely  researched, a post Katrina story between fact and fiction, “NOLA lives in Tremé  …” he says. "Writing about music is rare goal in TV and   music is alive in the streets here."

The real Davis Rogan and the real pt at large.

Legendary Columbia records producer George Avakian discovered Louis Armstrong and produced some of his most important records. He produced the first LP record and the first live recording of jazz - Benny Goodman in 1938.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Avakian

Writer Tom Piazza (Why New Orleans Matters, City of Refuge, Understanding Jazz: How To Listen, and writer for the HBO series Tremé) with you know who.

Fred Griffeth's Birthday Bash 71: a Fandangolous Evening at Toad

Fred Griffeth and Fandango
Wednesday, June 1… and every Wednesday from 7:30 – 9:30 pm
Toad, 1912 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02140


The sacred meets the profane every Wednesday night in a Cambridge neighborhood bar named Toad. The sacraments? Traditional gospel, rock 'n roll, rhythm 'n blues, country, with a taste of calypso and New Orleans, washed down with house reds, vodka on the rocks, UFO from the beer tap, and a mysterious amber liquid in the large paws of the Right Irreverent Fred Griffeth at the mike, assisted by his mighty apostles, a quartet by the name of Fandango.

The loyal flock doesn’t call this occasion “Church” for nought.  The service is three parts revival meeting and one part cult movie - "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" with audience participation expected. The place is filled with saints, sinners and the great gallop of us who teeter between the two poles. Salvation? Redemption? Hell, no. We’re talking ritual - familiar, satisfying, insistent, uplifting, accept no substitutes ritual. The kind that inspires. The kind that discharges whatever woes you came in with for about three hours and well into the night as you walk to your car.

Hymnals are unnecessary. When the Right Irreverent Fred cues up a song, we know the words.  Let me put it this way: most of the congregants probably don’t show up at an “organized religion” service on Sunday but tonight, with tornado warnings blaring on every radio and TV station in Boston, Toad was packed.

The general line of thinking?  “We’re going to be blown away with the music anyway so if Cambridge is twirled around like a Kansas farmhouse in a funnel, at least we’re gonna fly to our graves to the beat of a familiar song.”

The response here is visceral bordering on spiritual. How else can you explain it? The songs traverse the path of human experience - love, loss, ecstasy, melancholy, joy, sorrow, and hope. The melody from at least one song will dominate your brain waves through the rest of your night.

A deeper current courses through your gut.  Other than this one night, you probably don’t connect with the people packed into this tiny bar. By the end of Fandango’s set, you’d go to war with them if Fred Griffeth were leading the charge.

Susan Sullivan, Prez of Griffeth’s fan club, has alerted us that tonight Fred is celebrating his allegedly 71st birthday. Expect the unexpected. Cakes and trays of cupcakes lie about on the bar and Toad’s tiny tables. Arrive before 7 pm if don’t want to be stranded outside, in a long line, when Toad gets filled to capacity, which it will, and you will suffer mightily at being so close yet so far away from the action.

Griffeth launches into the traditional gospel hymn, “A Closer Walk With Thee,” the standard set opener. “Choich,” as he pronounces it, has begun. Stragglers start filling the pews.  When he digs into the calypso tinted “Sittin’ Here In Limbo,” two songs later and saunters up the aisle, which is jammed like an MBTA trolley at rush hour, we know the drill. We sing along with the refrain.

“Hey, it’s my birthday, no one’s gonna have more fun tonight than me!” Griffeth shouts. We give him a run for his money.

For the rest of the set, Griffeth’s velvety baritone plus his assorted barks, groans, and yelps that spontaneously punctuate the lyrics, are familiar anchors.  

 When local belter Kit Holiday joins Fred for “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” a pretty good choice for the occasion, the audience needs little encouragement to holler the chorus to the bluesy tempo. Holiday’s upper register tickles the glass you’re holding.

“We’re gonna try something new!” Griffeth shouts. Perhaps in the spirit of turning a new annual page, Freddy is showing his flock he’s not afraid to mess with the tried and true repertoire.  “Devil Moon,” the Neville Brothers song, takes on the flavor of a home movie when the woman in the front row holds the lyric sheet so Fred can read it and cradle the mike and his drink at the same time. 

The set steers back into familiar territory with “It’s All Right,” “Amen,” and “This Little Light of Mine.” We know every verse.

Fred, the good pastor, wades into the aisles and spreads the mike around like an electrically charged communion chalice, offering it to amateurs and veterans alike, and good lordy, they testify unabashedly. No one is more charged up than Reverend Fred, exhorting the assembly-  “Don’t be afraid - feel the spirit!”

By this time Cliff Spenser on keyboard, Steve Cuoco on bass, Bob Enik on guitar, and Chris Anzalone on drums, have jammed solos that have the effect of a good snort of nitroglycerine. These talented musicians don’t lurk in Griffeth’s shadow. When they take their solos during each song, they're channeling vibes that would stop traffic on Mass. Ave. if someone opened Toad’s front door.  They’re rewarded by hoots and cheers.

Two songs into the second set, Griffeth’s voice caresses the lyrics of  “Since I Met You Baby” like warm honey. It appears to ignite a conspiracy being hatched by nearly every female in the house.

Two women, their arms outstretched, g strings and thongs in hand, approach Fred and plant them ceremoniously upon Fred’s hat. Amidst giggles and screeches of laughter, a mind boggling array of lingerie is being tugged from purses and handbags, held high in outstretched hands. A pagan procession advances. Fred is festooned with enough female underpinnings to satisfy all the gods in Bacchanalia.

You’ve heard of the laying on of hands. This, my friends, is the laying on of drawers-full of Victoria’s Secret’s finest along with Target’s most flagrant.  There isn’t a man in the house who does not wish he were Fred, the object of such diaphanous affection.

The set rolls on with “Serve Somebody,” with spiritual overtones like many other songs in the standard set. Cuoco’s insistent bass makes you want to bear witness yourself.

By now, Reverend Fred doesn’t have to encourage his flock to sing the choruses, they nearly beat him to it. If this were a meeting of Holy Rollers, there would be people on the floor.

Around 9:30, the service ends with napkin-waving and full-bore engagement. People have been seizing the moment and each other to dance in Toad’s narrow aisle. Cake and cupcakes have been dispensed. Some lucky men have been beneficiaries of ‘flimsies’ as Fred calls them, generously bestowed by women who had the sense of occasion to purchase enough for mass distribution. When I exit the bar, I hope I remember to remove the pair of panties a woman decorously placed over my head during Freddy’s birthday baptism.

“You can’t capture this in words, you can’t capture this in pictures. You have to experience it,” one congregant says to me as I scribble. I fear she’s right.

I have stopped taking notes. The tornado warning for Boston has been lifted. The roof over Toad is intact but that’s my mind playing tricks on me. I know damn well it blew off a couple of hours ago and has just decided to come home to roost for the night.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

MORE PHOTOS...
 

Fred before...Fred after.

  Fred Griffeth, the good pastor, wades into the aisles and spreads the mike around like an electrically charged communion chalice.

Fred with Prez Susan Sullivan and wife Gail Nickse.

Birthday cakes, cupcakes paraded down to Toad's tiny stage by the Prez. There was enough for everyone...

during the festive break.

The boys in the band - Bob Enik on guitar, Cliff Spenser on keyboard, Steve Cuoco on bass,  Chris Anzalone on drums

Gail Nickse has the scene recorded for posterity...and Fred's scrapbook!

Matter of fact, the whole show was recorded.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The party's over...

 

What's Special About New Orleans: Jazz Fest Version

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival:

What's Special About New Orleans? Jazz Fest Version
Sunday, May 8, 2011

If these kinds of things were to happen once in a while, I’d write them off as random acts of kindness. In New Orleans, I have a new category: “Frequent acts of kindness.”

I’ve been writing for a couple of years about the people responsible for these persistent small acts that happen the way an unexpected afternoon breeze cools the thick summer air or a fabulous street singer pulls out a music case and begins serenading passersby in Jackson Square.

Is it something in the water down here? A secret ingredient in the gumbo, jambalaya, po’ boys, and other foods unique to this part of Louisiana? Maybe secret messages in the mix of Cajun, zydeco, swamp pop, even hip hop that’s making it’s way into traditional music.

Whatever it is, it’s real and it still surprises me every time it happens. Sunday afternoon at Jazz Fest those kindnesses got sprinkled through the hot afternoon like pecans in pralines.

Juggling my camera, notebook, and a bottle of cold water on the way to the Gentilly Stage, I lose my grip on the bottle. Onto the dustiest part of the infield, of course. Dirt coats the bottle’s condensation like iron filings on a magnet. I stuff camera and notebook in my pack, begin to wipe the mess off the bottle, and keep walking.

Five steps later, a black hand waving a white napkin floats up from a man in a camp chair. Just that. Not a “Do you need this?” Or “Here, take this” Just a wordless gesture to solve an obvious problem.

I am floored.

I take the napkin. I stop and kneel next to his chair. And for the umpteenth time blurt out how often this sort of thing happens around here.

“My name is John Bernard. That’s the way we are here,” he says. That’s another thing about “here.” More often than not, people introduce themselves when they begin to talk to me. Don’t remember that happening in my neck of the woods.

“I’m retired military, used to serve in the Air Force up around Boston, “ Mr. Bernard volunteers in an accent so thick I ask him to repeat what he said.

“I love your city and the people in it,” I say, smile a thank you, and walk away. Once again, kissed on the cheek by New Orleans.

A gray haired man who’s been sitting next to me way in the back of the Jazz Tent during the Irvin Mayfield show decides to leave. The closure strings at the top of the narrow nylon carry case for the camp chair he’s just folded up keep getting caught in the legs of the chair as he tries to slide  it into the case. After his third unsuccessful attempt, a young woman sitting on the ground next to him leans over and holds the strings aside. The man smiles a silent thank you. The woman smiles back.

 On the way out of the Blues Tent, I stop to snap a photo of two women, telling them I’m taking photos of the glorious variety of hats on display. They oblige. We begin to chat. Soon we’re joined by two of their friends, Juan (who happens to be one of the sound stage technicians) and Sidney.

“We’ve lived in New York City and Boston. Boston is a cold city, not just the temperature,” Sidney’s lady friend says. “We welcome your presence here, it helps to make the city what it is.”

“It always surprises me that people here look you in the eye and greet you on the street,” I say to Sidney when he joins us.

“When we say hello to you, we’re acknowledging your presence,” Sidney says.

Simple as that. And it happens all the time.

Sunday, 7 pm, the last concert has finished, my traveling companion and I are heading for the exit.

“What are those girls eating?” I ask her.

“Fried green tomatoes,” she says. I turn on a dime and approach them.

“How do they taste?”

“The bomb!” the first girl says, holding a small paper container with four lightly fried delicacies inside. “You can get them right over there,” she points with a plastic fork.

Two minutes later I pass the girls again. “You got the last bombs, they’re sold out,” I say, disappointment writ large on my face.

“You want one?” says one of the young ladies, holding out the tray with two left.

“Yes!” I’ve never sampled fried green tomatoes – I’m dying to taste one.

She carefully lifts a golden round from the container. “Swipe it into the remoulade sauce before you eat it… and don’t forget to share with your girlfriend!” she laughs.

My first taste of fried green tomato is a fabulous blend of light batter, soft, slightly sharp tang of tomato, and rich hit of remoulade sauce. But the lasting memory is of the ‘frequent acts of kindness’ showered on me randomly on this sunny New Orleans day at the Fairgrounds.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Brass Bands, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Mardi Gras Indians

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival:
Brass Bands, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Mardi Gras Indians

2011 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
Saturday, May 7, 2011
 
Unique to New Orleans, a brass band is a sassy, brassy magic carpet that you’ll jump on and fly wherever it takes you. I don’t care what you’re doing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival - if you get in range of a social aid and pleasure club parade with a brass band right behind it, you’re gonna be late for whatever you were aiming for.
 
That snappy beat from snare drums, joyful peals from trumpets, glissandos from slide trombones, and tharumping bass beats of sousaphones jubliantly leads you away from your intended stage destination like a befeathered Pied Piper.




One moment I was on my way to hear DL Menard at the Fais Do Do Stage and the next I was strutting along with the Undefeated Divas and the New Generation Social Aid and Pleasure Club with the Baby Boyz Brass Band firing on all cylinders right behind them. There were five such parades that wound through the walkways in the infield both Saturday and Sunday.
 
Their brassy calling card drew people from food tents, crafts and merchandise areas. Bystanders jockeyed for position to get a good shot of the hip shaking, attitudinous, merrymaking procession with men of the New Generation Social Aid and Pleasure Club sashaying down the paths and waving the brilliant magenta feathers that are their trademark .

And this doesn’t count the processions of Mardi Gras Indians in their wildly spectacular feathered costumes who marched in their own parades.

The Mardi Gras Indians create new ensembles every year for Mardi Gras – hand sewn beaded work for the front and rearranged or brand new features with electrifying colors for the outer costume that resembles an earthbound bird of stunning plumage and proud demeanor. They march on Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, and often on St. Joseph's Day.
 
DL Menard would have to wait a few minutes. He’d understand. 

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

More photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 
 
Parades
Saturday
12:20 PM
Undefeated Divas and New Generation Social Aid and Pleasure Club
1:30 PM
Trouble Nation and Mohawk Hunters Mardi Gras Indians
2:50 PM
Cherokee Hunters and Wild Red Flame Mardi Gras Indians
4:10 PM
Haitian Rara Parade featuring RAM
5:25 PM
Westbank Steppers, Valley of Silent Men, and Pigeon Town Steppers Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs with Kin Folk Brass Band

Sunday
12:20 PM
Lady Rollers, Nine Times Ladies, and Original C.T.C Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs with Da Souljas Brass Band
12:25 PM
in Economy Hall - Secondline Jammers Social Aid & Pleasure Club
1:25 PM
Wild Tchoupitoulas and Wild Apaches Mardi Gras Indians
2:25 PM
Haitian Rara parade with RAM
4:15 PM
Original Lady Buckjumpers and Prince of Wales Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs with TBC Brass Band
5:10 PM
Apache Hunters and Buffalo Hunters Mardi Gras Indians

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: The Big Picture

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival:
The Big Picture
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Let’s clear something up from the jump. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is a misnomer. A more precise but impossibly convoluted title would be the New Orleans Jazz, Blues, R&B, Gospel, Cajun, Zydeco, Afro-Caribbean, Folk, Latin, Rock, Rap, Country, Bluegrass, Americana and everything in between and Heritage Festival.

This is one of the biggest lawn parties in the known world. Being that it’s in New Orleans, this is not a typical lawn. It’s the 140-acre Fair Grounds Race Track in the Mid city neighborhood.
 
Win, place, or draw, you’re going to have a good time.
 
Over the course of ten days from April 29 to May 8, 400,000 people from every state and most continents will wander between 12 stages, a few of them gigando outdoor affairs with speakers the size of FEMA trailers and giant video screens that cast performers’ images onstage to spectators a thousand yards away, more stages inside huge tents with hundreds of rows of folding chairs, and still others at smaller stages tucked inside the Fair Grounds Grandstand. Pretty big difference from the first festival that attracted an audience of 350 at nearby Louis Armstrong Park in 1977.

People begin streaming in when the weekend opening acts begin at 11 am and don't leave till the party's over at 7 pm.
 
I must digress. This is the Mt. Olympus of locations to see New Orleanians and their blood brothers and sisters from every corner of America and several continents in the wild, in their natural habitat – outdoors, in the sun (or, in the rain, no matter), a rambunctious series of rainbows arching over the most glorious jambalaya of music loving humanity on earth.
 
 A nation of music lovers, densely packed together in affiliated tribes, or spontaneously formed ad hoc groups, they sit/stand inches apart, in camp chairs, on blankets and bed sheets, with a discernable camaraderie, quite possibly the result of an unseen Tinkerbelle tapping her feet and dispensing feel good fairy dust over the multitudes. This is a harmonic convergence of chords, rhythms, and meters just short of a religious experience.
 

Food? Two food areas sell tons of mostly Louisiana specialties made with crawfish, alligator, trout, catfish, pork, artichokes, and shrimp. I can speak with authority on the servings of catfish almondine with crawfish rice, shrimp and grits, fried green tomatoes, red beans and rice, crawfish bisque and Trout Baquet.
 
Drinks? Beer is sold in astronomic quantities in concession stands and from a small army of guys pulling ice chests of iced down beer to every nook and cranny of the grounds. Oh, and mango smoothies and frozen daiquiris and margaritas. And ice cream.
 
Festival organizers take pride in the “heritage” aspect of The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Three crafts areas display and sell original art, sculpture, porcelain, glass, jewelry, and ceramics created by the African-American, Cajun, and Native American people of Louisiana. Four cultural villages schedule dances, seminars, food tastings, and demonstrations representing the same groups plus, for the first time, a Haitian pavilion.
 
And of course there’s festival merchandise. A raft of souvenir tents selling official Jazz and Heritage souvenir T shirts, bags, bandannas and godknows whatall are scattered all over the place. I have a T-shirt and a couple of mementos to prove it.
 
The audience is as eclectic as the music, a kaleidoscopic blend of age, class, race and social status. Music matters to them. They know the lyrics to songs written by Professor Longhair, Alan Toussaint, Irma Thomas, James Booker, hymns from the Gospel Tent, and iconic local bands like The Radiators, like the rest of us know the lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner.

This isn’t like a baseball game when many fans leave in the seventh inning. They cheerfully empty the place just before sunset after the biggest acts have finished blowing everyone away. The mass exodus is astonishingly orderly. Everybody knows the area will take a while for foot and auto traffic to drain. No one is jockeying to get ahead of me, I don't hear car horns bleating. They obey the police at crossings. They strike up conversations with each other. They come to outdoor concerts all the time. They know the drill. It feels like the party's still going on.
 
From inspirational to funky to traditional, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival is THE place to hear a showcase of America’s own music…and hang out with the most engaging, fun loving, diverse, share the love people in America.

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

Standing or sitting, tens of thousands cheer singer/songwriter Marcia Ball at the biggest stage, the Acura Stage, at 12:30 PM Saturday afternoon.

My traveling companion and I planted our two camp chairs at noon. When we returned to hear Marcia Ball at 12:30, finding them in the crowd was a challenge, but they were still there!
  

"Tribes" plant pennants in the ground so their friends can find them.

Merchandise for every taste...

 
Several stages are undercover: The Blues Stage here (The Gospel Tent, Jazz Tent, and People's Health Economy Hall Tent are other covered temporary stages erected for Jazz Fest). The Lagniappe Stage and the Alison Miner Music Heritage Stages are located inside the Grandstand.

The Gospel, Jazz, and Blues Tents have an ingenious systems of "misters" that help keep temperatures cool inside the tents. "Cool" is a relative term in New Orleans but these covered stages are the only places to find shade and the only places with seating (first come, first served, stay as long as you like). Good thing because outside it's usually pushing 90 degrees F and the sun beats down on us like co-founder of Treme Brass Band Uncle Lionel Batiste's bass drum.

 

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Saturday, May 7, 2011

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Greetings from pt at large and about 100,000 festival goers. Stories to follow...

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 


 

 

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Marcia Ball at The Music Factory

2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
Thursday night, May 5, 2011
The Music Factory, 201 Decatur Street, New Orleans, Louisiana 70130

My, my, my, what do we have here? We’re smack in the middle of the 2011 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival - two weekends of music surrounded by unofficial music jams and offerings all over New Orleans.

One of these gems between weekends is Grammy winning singer Marcia Ball playing a free concert in the tiniest, skinniest, most unassuming record store in the French Quarter – The  Music Factory. An elevated section in the middle of the stacks of CDs and racks of memorabilia and T shirts is the “stage.”

Fans from Boston to San Francisco jam this little boxcar of a store, which specializes in Cajun and zydeco music and New Orleans jazz from seminal recordings to emerging artists. Lynn Drury preceded Marcia and young Amanda Shaw followed her in packed one-hour sets.

New Orleans lives and breathes music. Witnessing it in a teacup of a setting like The Music Factory is a sublime treat.

 

   
 
   
 

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch 6: Louisiana International Music Exchange

The Louisiana International Music Exchange
Festival International de Louisiane
Acadiana Center for the Arts 
Jefferson Street, Lafayette, Louisiana, 70501
Friday, April 29, 2011

The Louisiana International Music Exchange event on Friday afternoon is a big deal. The goal is to connect Louisiana musicians with concert and festival presenters from around the world, across the country, and right here in Louisiana.

Since this is the biggest Francophone festival in the USA, musicians like Les Freres Michot, Red Baraat, Marie  de Barros, Grand Baton, and Myelle are spread amongst the Louisiana musicians at the presentation tables all the way down the main hallway of the Acadiana Center for the Arts in downtown Lafayette.

I am in luck. Janine Dugas (talking with MaryEve Aubrey, Myelle's agent), who I met last October at the Giant Omelette Celebration in Abbeville, books the entertainment for that annual event – and she’s offered me an extra ticket to this private event.

One minute inside, I spot Leroy Thomas, several members of the Pine Leaf Boys, Steve Riley, and David Greeley (names familiar to any Cajun or Zydeco dancer).

The place is humming. Musicians and their agents stand on one side of a long line of tables and promoters and presenters wind their way past on the other. Names are dropped, common musical interests explored, thirty-second elevator speeches reeled off with varying degrees of polish. Promotional CDs, publicity packets, and business cards are changing hands.

Musicians and promoters at the "Meet and Greet" session.

Many performers are young, emerging artists. For them, this must feel like a casting call. The people on both sides of the tables never know when lightning will strike. One gig might lead to a breakout performance and set a career on a trajectory dreamed about for years.

Janine, who’s worked in advertising, had her own radio program, taught dance, and founded Lafayette’s Krewe de Canaille, knows just about everybody in sight.

Over the next two hours, she introduces me to Steve Riley; Kathy Richard, who runs the Richard Sale Barn in Abbeville; Sam Broussard, awesome lead guitarist of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, Mark Falgout, owner of The Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette; organizer Mary Beth Lowry; Jon Bertrand, fiddle player with the Pine Leaf Boys; Lisa Stafford, who books the bands for the festival; and Valerie Broussard, the bi-lingual young woman who announces each of the six “Showcase” bands who play brief sets in the new building’s beautifully outfitted performance space.

Oh, and I have a new identity… Ron Bumpus, the name of Janine’s friend who was supposed to be her guest before a business emergency derailed his plans and opened the door for me.

By now, I’m ready to drop a few names myself.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The Pine Leaf Boys and Leroy Thomas, two of the "Showcase" bands

 

David Greeley with his band GumboJet, pt with Pine Leaf Boys Jon Bertrand, whose card is a guitar pick!   Note pt at large's name tag... Ron Bumpus for today!

Musician Grand Baton  and Steve Riley and Vagabond Swing talk with promoters
 
 
Sam Broussard, legendary guitar player with Steve Riley and The Mamou Playboys; Valerie Broussard, who has her own radio show on www.KRVS.org on Thursday nights at 9 PM. Valerie, who introduced each Showcase band in the French language she was born listening to, is finishing a PhD in Francophone studies at The University of Louisiana in Lafayette.

Festival International de Louisiane Dispatch 5: Second Night

Festival International de Louisiane
Thursday, April 28, 2011

A chance to look at the Festival International de Louisiane from the inside out: become a volunteer!

The festival simply would not work without worker bees who sign up for shifts during the five days of entertainment to sell beverages; provide security; welcome artists and VIPs when they arrive and at the hospitality tents, media centers and hotels; stock pins, shirts, hats, jewelry, posters and sell it at the all important Official Merchandise tent; set up and take down tents, kiosks, booths, barricades, tables and chairs; empty trash receptacles, recycle boxes and keep grounds clean.

Hospitality Director Sarah Moss with pt at large, who volunteered a shift at the Amis Suite on Thursday night. pt  (wearing the official Volunteer T-shirt) greeted supporters at the level of Grand(e) Ami(s) $100 - $249; Tres Bon Ami(s) $250 - $499; and Magnifique Ami(s) $500+ “ who helped bring the world to Lafayette.”

Outside the Amis Suite at Malibu stage, guitar and percussion group Touhab Krewe is playing polyrhythmic, Afro-Caribbean, salsa, rumba, pop, trance, with sneaky middle east riffs, danceable if you like to improvise, as do a group of young girls sinuously winding their way past the suite like young Shebas.

=======
An Alligator Shake
When pt at large showed up at the food vendor tent named Alllgator Shake to buy what he thought would be a milk shake spruced up with some exotic alligator juice, he got instead Alligator Balls (in hand) - shredded and battered meat from alligator tails that's been battered and fried !

Patty and Mark Rotolo of Baton Rouge own this concession. Their business named "Jambalaya by Shake" was formerly owned by a man named Schexnaider, nicknamed “Shake” (I'm sure you can deduce the reason for his shortened - and pronounceable, nickname).  Unable to use that business name "Jambalaya by Shake" at the Festival, Rotolo temporarily dubbed the business  'Alligator Shake'. I tell you this because everybody in Louisiana has stories about their roots, commercial or otherwise.

==========
Parc Sans Souci
The Parc Sans Souci (translate The Carefree Park) in the midst of downtown Lafayette lives up to its name tonight.

The distant chants and pounding drums from The Master Drummers of Burundi at the Parc International Stage on one side and music from an outdoor café float over the park like smoke from a campfire. Dusk is descending into darkness.

The smell of fried, roasted, or sautéed food drifts over from the food vendor tents. People savoring the international menu lounge on benches or the low brick walls that surround plantings within the park.

A cluster of ground level fountains shoots vertical columns of cool water into the summer sky - the perfect temptation for tots and teenagers, darting and weaving through them or standing like statues until thoroughly and giddily soaked.

The usual Louisiana constellations of age and race and class are mixing it up together within these couple of acres of public space: a mom and dad pushing a stroller, a trifecta of grandparent/parent/grandchildren checking out the scene, pre teens and teens roaming and squealing or sprawled on the grassy expanse texting like crazy, all of them in the moment, alive, exuberant, in a place they in which they feel totally at home - and visitors like me, who are met with a smile and taken into the fold after one how-do-you-do and treated like a long lost friend.

Parc Sans Souci by day and early evening (upper right) and The Master Drummers of Burundi on stage a block an hour later.
======================
A chair story.

This is another one of those wonderful, quirky, only in Louisiana customs that was on full display Friday night. Reserve a space at a concert or  outdoor dance by depositing your chair in your preferred spot hours before the event begins…

The story: my Louisiana friend Bernard Ussher, who has his fingers on the cultural pulse of the city, texts me at 8:30 after I’ve finished my ‘shift’ as a volunteer at the Amis Suite on Jefferson Street. I'm absorbing the vibe at one of Lafayette's public parks. Sunset at the Parc Sans Souci, shirtsleeve weather, a celestial navy blue canopy blooming overhead, is a glorious hive of activity. “Come to City Bar, margaritas and food await!” the text reads. Ten minutes later, I’m consuming both with a bunch of Bernard's and his wife Rubia’s friends. (I could easily digress here to say how welcoming people from this part of Louisiana are but…)

9:45 PM: time to walk to the main stage where Ke’Mo is scheduled to play at 10:00. “Don’t worry, we set out chairs for the three of us a few hours ago,” Bernard says, “ we’re in the second row.”


 My jaw drops as we enter the Parc International. There are way over five thousand people there, filling the park front to back, side to side, seam to seam. All I see is a wall of people, all shoulders, heads, backs – no aisles, no loosely kept alleys to pass through –an impermeable mass.

“No waaaay,” I’m thinking to myself as Bernard and Rubia skirt the thin edge of the throng. “No chance we get through here.” Imagine a cornfield with plants growing inches from each other, no rows. Bernard dives in. People shuffle feet to accommodate the trio of invaders. We pepper our advance with the occasional “Thank you,” “Excuse me,” or a smile of a “Hello” and edge sideways toward the middle of the barricade set up ten feet from the elevated stage.

Mind you, it is not possible to see the ground (cement, to be accurate). It is not possible to advance more than a foot at a time. But the sea parts. No one grumbles. Everyone treats this as Standard Operating Procedure. They’ve all done it themselves.

If we’d headed in without the strategic purpose of finding the chairs Bernard and Rubia set out hours earlier, we could have just kept on aiming for the center and found a place to stand. There is always room for someone to join the crowd. It happens on dance floors, it happens in concerts like this one. The nature of territorial imperative is flexible in Louisiana crowds.

Except with chairs. If you put down a chair at 3 PM for an outdoor show or a parade that begins at 8 PM, it will be exactly where you placed it when you arrive at 7:45…in this case with thousands of people standing around it. By the time we’re closing in on our chairs, Bernard, Rubia and yours truly are in our own little conga line holding hands to keep from getting separated. If I lose sight of them, I’m doomed.

Rubia senses the final location. Bingo! There, three tiny blue canvas atolls suddenly appear at our feet. Our chairs! In the exact coordinates in which they’d been deposited. People around us smile. They’ve been expecting us.

I consider it a miracle, they consider it normal.

Ke'Mo in on the big stage at Parc International on Thursday night.

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 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.