pt at large

Darryl "Demo" Demourelle: The Kilroy of Breaux Bridge, LA

There wouldn’t be as much joy in the Joie de Vivre Café without the bigger-than-life paintings that give the place a special sense of identity…you can thank Darryl Demourelle for that.

Joie de Vivre Café
August 18, 2018

The first thing I think of when a guy tells me his nickname is 'Demo' is that his closet if full of blasting caps and his idea of a good time is blowing something up.

Partly correct...but certainly not dangerous.

When Darryl Demourelle talks enthusiastically about blowing things up, he’s talking about his paintings you can see clear across the Joie de Vivre Café, which is where I met him.

“There are two types of paintings I do here, ‘up close’ and ‘at a distance’,” says the artist.

He points out two paintings that have become the visual calling card of the café “They're ‘at a distance’ paintings, usually one big portrait or subject in the frame.  You get the idea all the way across the room.”

He leads me over to the small bar area in an adjoining room. “For the ‘up close paintings’, you need to walk up to them to see the details and they are in smaller frames.” Right now he is busy working on three portrait commissions and a razzle-dazzle painting he wants to airbrush onto his truck. “The work is never boring!“ 

Demo is the Kilroy of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.  His signature style is all over town - murals splashed across the sides of buildings, wild looking trucks and automobiles, T-shirts, boats, RVs, oh, and an airplane and a bridge.

His career started by accident. In the Air Force, he began to paint his boots and service T-shirts with big bold colors. Guys in his outfit admired them so he offered to sell them, “I sold my stuff so fast I never needed to change my clothes!“

Self taught, he’s been painting since he was a kid.  After his stint in the Air Force, he was hired to make signs to advertise Tupperware parties they were popping up all over in the 1980s. He opened his own company. He hasn’t been lacking for business since. 

Demo sort of likes the idea of being an outlier. His Facebook page proclaims him to be “the best unknown artist in Breaux Bridge”. Unknown maybe. But good, oh yes. 

He started working in Lafayette but moved to Breaux Bridge which, like himself, has a personality all its own. The little outpost of about 8000 is sprinkled with a surprising share of entrepreneurs, musicians, and artists along with farmers, fishermen and Cajun and Creole families that have lived there for generations. 

He will paint anything. “I’m about to airbrush my truck so it looks like it has tractor treads running along the sides.”  That should make a splash around town. Anyone with a lick of sense will give him the right of way at every intersection along Rees Street.

“Everybody needs signs!” Demo did the lettering for the Jim Bowie Museum in the Vieux Village in his hometown of Opelousas, 24 miles north of Breaux Bridge.

“Younger artists come to me when they are having trouble with their work and I show them tricks that I know. I’m not going to lose any business. Sooner or later everybody comes to me.” 

Spoken by a man comfortable in his own boots, even though he doesn’t paint them any more. 

May as well say Coffee & Culture & Art Café

"At a distance" ...you can almost get a whiff of that huge cigar.

and one "up close" lower left

What do you do with former truck transmission cartons? Make outlandishly colorful guitars that would steal the show from a musician brave enough to compete with it.

Papier mâché fish from Demo's studio, not the Bayou Teche!

Walk out the door of the café...you won't see that bemused fellow but you will see those buildings right across the street!

Walk inside the café on a Saturday morning...you just might find Darryl Demourelle sitting under one of his fabulous paintings.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Yvette Landry and The Jukes Take Off At The Whirlybird: Videos, Photos, More...

August 18, 2018

Yvette Landry and The Jukes Take Off At The Whirlybird...a night of  music and dancing on Cloud 9.

The Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking is made up of onion, celery and bell pepper. There’s another Holy Trinity in southwest Louisiana: food, shelter, and music. The first two are self explanatory. Music - playing it, singing it, dancing to it, was the way the first French speaking settlers from the maritime provinces countered the trials of life living on the bayous in the early 1800s. If they couldn’t hunt it, trap it, fish for it, they went hungry. On Saturday nights, a family would put whatever furniture they owned outside, invite a fiddler or accordion player and their neighbors to sing and dance the night away. Amazing how working up a sweat doing waltzes and two steps could lift their spirits, remind them of their roots, and invigorate them for what lay ahead.

Yvette Landry doesn’t have to worry about her next meal but she's damn proud of the music that’s bound up with her Cajun roots. You better believe that Swamp Pop stole a place into her heart when she first heard it in dance halls and on the radio. A bunch of those songs are featured on her latest CD, Louisiana Lovin’.

When dancers hear the first eight beats of a Swamp Pop song, the same thing that happened when Swamp Pop was introduced sixty years ago happens tonight. Chair legs squeak as they’re pushed back and men and women look for a partner to hold in their arms for some good belly rubbin’ music.

Yvette and Roddie Romero sang most of the song's on Yvette's 2018 Louisiana Lovin' CD. Yvette got on a swamp pop roll with "My Last Date With You." The title alone gives you an idea of the Swamp Pop genre, just one of the kinds of music gifted to dear 'ol USA by the musicians and singers of southwest Louisiana.

Recording on an iPhone can't do justice to the performer's voices and the high caliber musicians around them but Karl Fontenot, the man in charge of tonight's sound at the one-of-a-kind music venue called The Whirlybird in a little town north of Lafayette, gave us a cloud of sound that combined vocals and instruments that put us in Juke Box Heaven.

And yes, that's 83 year old Warren Storm, the Godfather of Louisiana Swamp Pop, on stage with Yvette. The legend can still bring it.

Yvette and Warren team up for "I Need Somebody Bad Tonight, 'cuz I Just Lost Somebody Good." I mean, could you ever pick a title that represents Swamp Pop any better? And have the man who wrote it perform it with Yvette?

The sound is distorted since I was standing right next to a huge sound stage speaker. What's not distorted? The fervor these big time musicians from New Orleans and Lafayette are bringing to the stage with Yvette Landry and Mr. Swamp Pop.

Back in the mid 1950s, when teenagers around Lafayette tuned in to the radio, they heard singers who changed the course of popular music. Fats Domino, Elvis, Little Richard were knocking on the door. Like they were whipping up a good roux, those teenagers stirred up everything in their music cupboard  - Cajun, Creole, country, New Orleans, and rhythm 'n blues - and came up with a totally original sound. It’s not too far a stretch so see how they cranked up the emotion and slowed down the pace to invent Swamp Pop. To this day, it's one of the signature sounds of southwest Louisiana.

Warren Storm was one of those kids. Road trips to New Orleans as a teenager in the mid 1950s was a game changer for Storm (born Warren Schexnider in Abbeville, LA). He credits those visits to New Orleans's nightclubs to the formation of his drumming and singing style that at first sounded like this. Over time, he developed his distinct style and repertoire and never again had to look for work.

You could write a book about how tug-at-your heart Swamp Pop music and singers like Warren Storm have carried the emotionally tuned freight for three generations of men and women who grew up in Acadiana.

Storm stepped on stage and pretty much wrote chapter one tonight. Yvette was paying attention.

"Rainin' In My Heart" (number 17 on R&B chart in 1961) ... the energy on stage is pegging the needle on high...wailing sax, perfectly tuned fiddle riffs and guitar solos... a band on fire. A man enshrined in the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame a Grammy nominated singer/songwriter on stage together...what else would you expect?

Swamp Pop artists past and present

Videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

• Roddie Romero – vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar
• Yvette Landry – vocals, acoustic guitar
• Eric Adcock – keyboard, Wurlitzer electric piano
• Chris French – upright bass
• Derek Huston – tenor sax, baritone sax
• Fiddle – Beau Thomas

Yvette Landry and The Jukes Take Off At The Whirlybird

Yvette Landry and The Jukes' CD release party at The Whirlybird
August 18, 2018

Louisiana Lovin’

Yvette Landry had a coming out party last night. The Yvette that’s been on slow boil for about eight years, creating her singing voice, her stage persona, her style, got stoked to a full rolling boil tonight. She has sung with lots of really great musicians and been part of shows with lots of other fine voices.

She’s always sung with whatever the song called for, tender Cajun ballads and frisky two steps, classic country, Americana, dyed in the wool rock ‘n roll, a touch of rockabilly, and classic swamp pop.

A couple of years ago, Yvette’s teaming up with Roddie Romero and his band to create The Jukes sparked a transformation. Roddie Romero, guitar; Eric Adcock, keyboards; Chris French, standup bass; Beau Thomas, fiddle; Derek Huston, saxophone; and Gary Usie, drums, can light up any stage with the best of them.

When they play together as The Jukes, the stage all but ignites….and they are decidedly Yvette’s band.

“This group met at 4 PM for a sound check. We've played together at different times but not on the same stage. What ever you hear tonight is going to be the first time we’ve done it together,” she says.

You could’ve fooled us. What ensued was full-bore heavenly music that traversed genres from one end of the rainbow to the other, swamp pop in one pot of gold and southwest Louisiana rock 'n roll dating from the 1950's and 60's in the other.

The sense of occasion is not lost on the band. Born and raised in Breaux Bridge, Yvette has an ardent following. Playing to this particular audience, they were damn well going to pull out all the stops. The solos from Roddie Romero, Eric Adcock, Chris French, Beau Thomas, Derek Huston, and Gary Usie, can always mesmerize with sheer talent. Tonight they dug in to deliver inventive, inspired musicianship that all but levitated the Whirlybird and at its peak sprinkled us with rapturous fairy dust.

The Jukes sang every song from their new album and a bunch of rock and country classics, including Yvette's rowdy rock 'n roll-y “Do Anything But Stay Offa My Cowboy Boots.” When Yvette and Roddie launched into Swamp Pop, Louisiana’s gift to the American songbook, the thermal capacity pegged the meter on the compact Whirlybird's dance floor.

If the seven stars of the Pleiades were to form a band, Yvette Landry would be its most luminous. Tonight, in the hothouse August atmosphere inside The Whirlybird, she sang from a deep place in her core that I’ve never heard before.

I said as much as I talked with her as she signed the cover of “Louisiana Lovin’” after the show.

“I didn’t have to play guitar that much, it gave me time to let it all come through my voice,” she says after the show. Oh, yes.

Yvette has always had a streak of Loretta Lynn in her. Tonight she unleashed her inner Wanda Jackson. She went from singin’ pretty to singin’ gritty.

Roddie and tonight’s band were the gasoline. Yvette was the match. To my ears, this was a defining career moment, a voice and a presence whose depth that quite possibly took her by surprise, a new benchmark from raw, to raucous, to lyrical, to lonesome and back again. She’s never gonna’ be the same. And that’s a good thing.

 

The Whirlybird...the lull before the Jukes Storm...that tiny dance floor was mighty packed with deliriously happy dancers all night long.

The Jukes on stage...oh, my… and I haven’t even begun to talk about special guest, godfather of Swamp Pop Warren Storm…stay tuned...

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Cajun ingenuity in Lafayette, LA: Practical Rain Gear for 2 Cents

August 17, 2018

I’m ready to leave after my visiting my friend Doug, who is recovering from a hospital stay.
The sky has opened, it looks like Niagara Falls outside with occasional thunder rumbles to boot.

“I’ll make you a Cajun raincoat,” says Doug. Born and raised in the bayou, he knows a thing or two about improvising.

He pulls a 30-gallon trash bag from the cupboard. “Poke a hole in the bottom to put your head through,” says he.

“Hold still,” he says as he cuts holes in the corners. ”Put your arms through here.”

“Now for a hat,” and he rummages through the recycle bin for a plastic WalMart bag.

Trying to match my style with his sense of ingenuity, the bag I tie looks like a chef’s toque with a fashionable tilt.

“You’re ready to go for it!” says he.

I bolt through the deluge, into the car just as dry as you please. My outfit cost about 2 cents and kept me as dry as any expansive creation from REI.

Let’s hear it for Cajun ingenuity. Thank you, Doug!

Two Musicians Provide the Two-Steppin' at the Joie de Vivre

Friday night at the Joie de Vivre Café

August 17, 2018

A fiddle and an accordion are all you need for a night of entertainment around here. The people in the audience will partner with the musicians to fill the place with energy. Dancing, not required, certainly adds a layer of oomph, not unappreciated by tonight's duo, Forest Huval and Jonno Frishberg..

“The name of that song was ‘Reel de Coquin’, it means Dance of the Thieves,” Forest Huval says. It was the last dance of the evening at Joie de Vivre Café in Breaux Bridge, and he and Jonno Frishberg got into it.

“It was a tune originated back in the day by Dennis McGee (January 26, 1893 - October 3, 1989) and has been played by fiddlers ever since,'” says Forest. McGee was one of the first Cajun musicians to record music on 78 rpm disks. His influence is felt by every musician who wants to feel the span and breadth of Cajun music from the time it was recorded.

The first time i heard Forest play December 31, 2012, when he was playing accordion with the late great and dearly missed Al Berard at a house party in Breaux Bridge. Since then he's taken up the fiddle. Al would be impressed.

Link below to 2011 story and video

http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2012/01/a-start-your-new-years-early-party-party-in-breaux-bridge-louisiana.html

VIDEO

Photos and video by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Group Therapy at the Joie de Vivre Café

Group Therapy at the Joie de Vivre Café
Joie de Vivre Café
107 N Main Street
Breaux Bridge, LA 70517
August 4, 2018

Happens every Saturday morning at the Joie de Vivre Café in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. No need to lie down on a therapist’s couch, just pull up a chair, and breathe easy. The pharmacology here is music.

A big circle of music makers is sitting on a small dais. A Cajun jam is in full swing. By tradition, all are welcome to join. By all, I mean men or women who’ve been playing for a few weeks, accomplished players who know the lyrics and chords of the songs, and pros like Gina Forsyth or Christine Balfa who live nearby and show up once in a while. No one bows or curtsies to the pros, who just sit down with everyone else and play.

By custom, the jam is led by a fiddler or an accordion player who sings the ballads and two steps as everyone else plays along ensemble style. It’s a bundle of egalitarian energy.

Whether you understand French or not, you grasp that the high-pitched mournful keening voice has got to be a response to hardship, dislocation and gritty survival after "The Grand Derangement" forced the Acadians to flee British ruled Canada in the mid 1700s. The frisky two-step tunes show that they knew how to let loose and let joy seep into their lives before they headed home to tend to the uncertainties of weather and life.

There's a mountain of research that listening to music makes us feel better.
.
That’s what’s happening at a table where Elaine and Jim are sitting. Elaine takes turns strumming her guitar with the group on the dais. Her husband Jim, in a wheel chair, isn’t moving a muscle. “He was diagnosed with ALS five years ago,” Elaine says, “recently he’s had trouble speaking.”

Jim, who has the lean frame of a man who has run 43 marathons, is having no trouble taking in the music. Jim is dancing with his bright blue eyes.

“Jim looks for the gifts in life, “ Elaine says, “coming to this café and listening to the music is one of them.”

The joyous sound echoing through the Joie de Vivre is a gift to all of us. For Jim, it’s a therapy to stay in the moment, moments that get more precious each day.

ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” is a neuromuscular disease. Muscles waste away. Total immobility ensues. There is, as yet, no cure. Ability to speak goes. When the diaphragm can’t keep up, breathing stops. All of our days are numbered. Jim’s number is smaller than ours.

The music, camaraderie, and cozy confines of the Joie de Vivre Café are an uplifting mood enhancer, nourishment for soul and body. The world and its cares will be there when we walk out the door. We’ll walk into them with a lighter step.

John Armstrong, a Scotish inventor (1709-1779), wrote, ‘Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain, subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.’

Today’s Cajun jam will not expel Jim’s ALS. But nothing will keep him from looking for the gifts in life, a soaring example of the will to endure. Jim is living life in C major…C for courage.

PHOTOS and VIDEOS

Fiddles and guitars make up the majority of the instruments played in the Cajun jam.

Today's jam led by Joel Breaux (fiddle), Ryan Simon (accordion, also drummer for Pine Leaf Boys and plays with T’Monde), Lester Gautier (washtub bass)...leading ballads and waltzes. If you close your eyes, you can imagine neighbors trekking to a friend's home on a Saturday for a night of music of bygone days in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Every skill level is welcome...

From 8 AM till about noon, people gather for food, dancing, and old time music, in what Cajuns call, "Passing a good time."

Glen Fields (drummer for The Revelers and T'Monde) and Russell Ducote, both play the "T-fer", the Louisiana French name for a triangle, originally made from tines of a hay fork and used to provide rhythm in a Cajun band. "He's one of the best," says Russell,who is pretty darn good himself.

Conversations between songs...

Antoine Melancon...

an institution all by himself on the dance floor...leaves the building.

Cheerful decor, cheerful atmosphere...

The music is good medicine for all of us, the smiles say it all...

Jim and Elaine...Jim looks for the gifts in life. This is a big one for him. So is his presence for the rest of us.  

Cajun jam video 1 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_wGnPgf1-s

 

Cajun jam video 2
"The Bosco Stomp"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv9oZfQZ1Zo 
By custom. only one T'fer is played at a time in a Cajun jam.

Alan Crochet interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWj0LfjCOXA

No better example of the range and depth of the pervasiveness of music in the lives of a chunk of people in southwest Louisiana...Alan Crochet. Alan Crochet has been playing harmonica "off and on" for most of his 80 years. "I was born and raised in Loreauville, about 30 miles from Breaux Bridge." He’s been coming to the jam for ten years. " i drive here by myself," he says with quiet dignity.

He explains how to use the tongue to block some holes while blowing through others in the harmonica. To give an example, a moment before, he played "Begin the Beguine."  In this video he plays what sounds like "It's The Loveliest Time of the Year" but Alan says its title is "Over the Waves." He shows me his German made Hohner Big River Harp. "Most players use the key of C harmonica; it has ten holes. This harmonica cost $35, my first one  cost about 35  cents!," he says.

Today’s fiddle player and one of the jam leaders Joel Breaux is his cousin. "Joel’s grandfather and I are first cousins, my mother was a Breaux.” 

"Who's your Mama?” or “Who are your people?” are the ways people connect the dots around here. The concept Six Degrees of Separation operates robustly in southwest Louisiana. When it comes to musicians, it’s more like Three Degrees of Separation.

Fellow musician Russel Ducote says that Alan spoke no English for a long time. "Do you speak French?" Alan asks as we part. "Oui," says I and we have a brief conversation. "I can understand you," says he, encouraging me, then, as he walks to his car, "Au revoir"and in case i didn't get it, adds "It means I’ll see you again." I look forward to that.

Music, mood, well-being

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-consciousness-question/201703/what-is-the-effect-music-the-listener
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170412181341.htm
https://www.verywellmind.com/surprising-psychological-benefits-of-music-4126866

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Lafayette ArtWalk: Monthly Evening Culture and Commerce

November 11, 2017

The Wall Street Journal declared Lafayette to be the country’s Happiest City in 2014.
https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/news/local/2014/07/21/lafayette-happiest-city-in-the-country/12941529/

Take a stroll down Jefferson Street on a Saturday evening ArtWalk and you get an idea why. The city feels lit up and it’s not just the lights pouring out from galleries, restaurants, bars, and storefronts like Sola Violins on East Vermilion. Doors open wide, art galleries give a come hither vibe that makes you want to walk in. Even if the art isn’t your cup of tea, the smiles on the faces of the hosts whose goal seems to be hospitality first, business second, make it easy to sashay inside. In case you hesitate, nothing says, “Come on in” like tables filled with tasty appetizers.

The appetizers are floating atop an ocean of civic pride, something on the endangered species list in some cities …I’m sure you have your own list.

Lafayette is not one of them. The Acadiana Center for the Arts is a magnet tonight. Have a cocktail. Nibble on appetizers, take in art and sculpture in the main gallery, check out a modern dance in the state of the art theater, admire the creations hanging in the hallway, schmooze with your friends.

 

Lafayette is a certifiable hotbed of music. Tradition runs deep. Cajun and zydeco bands play the old stuff and plow into new ways of presenting it. If Hank Williams, or Roy Orbison, or Ed Wills, Willie Nelson, the late Professor Longhair or Allen Toussaint were to pass by, they’d find someplace in town that would be music to their ears.

Whoa! On the corner of East Vermilion Street and Jefferson I stop in my tracks. That’s live music.

Inside Sola Violins, there’s Luke Huval, deep in the moment, pumping that accordion and totally locked in to the emotional charge of the times in which they were first sung in the late 1700s. Cajun ballads sound more like a plaintive keening expression put to music of fiddles, accordions, and guitars that describes dislocation, loneliness, heartbreak, hard times on one hand and explosive playful joy at others.

Back in time, all of it was played at a Saturday night fais do do in which families trekked to a neighbor’s house, put the furniture on the porch, put the kids to bed, and sang and danced away their shared cares and trials.

Voices have stamps. There aren’t a ton of singers that you can recognize after a few phrasings. The last time I heard that voice was in 2012 at McGee’s Landing in Henderson, LA.

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

Along side of Luke is the same kid who played accordion in 2012, Zack Fusilier, with the same drive that keeps this music alive. And Megan Brown, a contemporary who has grown up with the music and has the same feel for the emotional territory from which it sprang. You have to feel this music to sing it. They feel it.

Sola Violins is owned and operated by Anya Burgess, fiddle player on two Grammy nominated Cajun bands, Bonsoir Catin and The Magnolia Sisters, and a formally trained violin maker. Her shop, originally in her home outside Lafayette and now in Lafayette, has been a destination for musicians since 2002. It's is the perfect place to showcase Cajun music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up51PqW0d3Q SLIDE SHOW

VIDEOS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O53A4hXTsLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=4YEjQyH_yAs

Darlene and her young son are sitting next to me on a line of chairs against the store wall. A woman slowly twirls her young daughter to the beat of the music. "I’ve seen little kids dancing on the feet of their father or mother to learn how to dance,” says I.

 “I’m teaching my little boy the same way,” says Darlene, from a Creole family in Lafayette, “that’s the way I learned from my grandfather," another way culture is prized and passed along here in southwest Louisiana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LGse297_TQ

My pal Bernard and I head down the street for some food until something way better happens. Music from Rêve, a coffee shop. Gotta check it out. The Cedar Crest Ramblers are playing fine music. No one on the dance floor. We change that. First time I’ve ever danced with a belly dancer!

Andrea...the belly dancer

Good night Irene... and Bernard... at Réve Coffee Roasters

Kylie, PT Réve Coffee Roasters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=aqnk0tsdepI

Grand Finale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=1Dml1S7pK0o

Such is life in the happy city of Lafayette, LA.