C.J. Chenier’s last album, The Desperate Kingdom of Love, went about as far outside the zydeco mainstream as you can get—ominous title, PJ Harvey title track, generally downbeat feel. But that was also a fairly explicit post-Katrina album, and it’s likely to be a one-off in his catalog. He’s back to party-band mode this time, [...]
How does a little-known if perfectly-capable blues guitarist get heavyweights Dr. John, Texas Tornado Augie Meyers, Baton Rouge blues great Raful Neal and ace drummer Big Johnny Thomassie—the latter two long deceased—to play on his debut album? The answer is a little tricky, but the liner notes explain. Neal and Thomassie’s tracks were cut an [...]
The Mumbles can be forgiven for accidentally borrowing their album’s title and cover concept from the subdudes, whose own Annunciation was released in 1994. But the subdudes never wrote a song about the street in question; the Mumbles have a title track that makes the most of the spiritual implications of its name. Keith Burnstein’s [...]
This is Galactic’s first official live album in a decade, though countless board tapes and CD-Rs have crossed fans’ hands in the interim. As it turned out, 2001’s We Love ‘Em Tonight: Live at Tipitina’s signaled a change of course: Singer Theryl “Houseman” DeClouet was soon to go, and from then on Galactic was less [...]
Like Gang of Four, which is now essentially two guys, Garage a Trois has a band name that’s just too good to change when it’s no longer numerically accurate. The group only remained a trio for a short time after drummer Stanton Moore launched it as a 1999 side project, with guitarist Charlie Hunter and [...]
The music world lost a great maverick when producer Jim Dickinson died two years ago of heart complications, at the age of 67. Originally a session keyboardist who played with Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones among many others, Dickinson became a champion of all that was primal and impassioned, be it the Delta blues [...]
It didn’t take a genius to peg Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews as a national success waiting to happen. He’s young, good-looking and a born entertainer, he was also making credible jazz records when he was barely out of puberty. His roots are in the Treme Brass Band circuit—which, if the HBO series Treme does its [...]
Quick: Name a New Orleans funk band that recorded for a major label in the ’70s, worked with Allen Toussaint, played backup on dozens of notable sessions, and left behind a stack of essential grooves. Odds are that you named the Meters, who’ve become synonymous with golden-era New Orleans funk. But history’s paid less attention [...]
From the start, one of Porter-Batiste-Stoltz’s strengths was their lack of a keyboard player. The power trio format is fresh territory for funk and PBS has worked wonders with it, keeping the jams spare and sneaky. Instead of recreating the funky Meters with someone else in Art Neville’s place, they effectively made open space a [...]
Every Jazz Fest seems to bring another stack of one-off, local supergroup, live jam albums. What’s different about this one? For one thing, it wasn’t made during the Fest, but one early summer night at the Maple Leaf. For another, there isn’t a Meters cover or New Orleans standard in the batch. Then again, it’s [...]
