Jonathan Batiste. Photo by Ingrid Hertfelder.

New Orleans has long been a piano town. And it’s long been a parade town. Therein lies the problem: If you’re a pianist, you can’t join the parade. No one’s yet found a way to strap a Steinway around his or her neck and march down St. Charles Avenue.

This dilemma has often perplexed Jonathan Batiste, the gifted New Orleans pianist now living in New York. The 24-year-old Kenner native is very tall and very thin—almost a living stick man—and he has long, lean fingers to match. Those fingers were made for the piano, for they can reach across an octave and a half with such ease and agility that Batiste can form voicings that other pianists can only imagine.

When he played Jazz Fest this past May, he wore white slacks, a white shirt and a bright red blazer as he sat down at the Steinway grand on the Congo Square stage. When he played “New Orleans Blues,” his composite of several Jelly Roll Morton tunes, he got two different rhythms going at once—a push-and-pull Caribbean rhythm in his left hand and a rippling European rhythm in his right. At times he lifted his hands off the keys and started slapping the second-line groove on the dark wood of the piano itself.

The whole time he seemed to be squirming on the piano bench, as if it were unfair that he couldn’t get up and walk around the stage—or even into the crowd—the way his high school pal Trombone Shorty does. As soon as the number was over, Batiste leapt off that bench and strolled around the stage, glad to be free again.

“It’s frustrating,” he confirmed during an August phone call from Manhattan, “because you always have to sit down when you play the piano. I want to interact with the audience more, and that’s difficult due to the nature of the instrument. As much as New Orleans is a piano town, it’s also a trumpet town, and one thing the trumpeters can do is interact with people directly and get that energy back to them. I want to do that too.”

Batiste thinks he’s found the solution to the problem. He recorded his new album, MY N.Y., in places where pianos can’t go: the platforms and trains of New York’s subway system. You could never get acoustic pianos down those narrow stairs, and no extension cord is long enough to reach an electric keyboard all the way from 59th Street to 125th Street. But Batiste’s solution didn’t rely on advanced technology; it relied on a novelty item from his Louisiana childhood.

When he was a youngster, Jonathan’s father Michael played bass with the Batiste Brothers, a popular family funk band in the style of the Neville Brothers. Jonathan was only nine when he began playing congas with the band alongside his first cousin Russell Batiste, later the drummer for the funky Meters. Russell’s dad David played organ alongside his brothers Peter and Paul (keys and guitar), and it was David who would sometimes pull out a small plastic keyboard that you play by blowing through it while fingering the keys.

“Sometimes he would pull out the melodica,” Jonathan remembered, “and go walking into the crowd with it. I felt a strong connection to it from the first. The first draw was it allowed you to get up off the piano bench and still play; it was a portable instrument that’s still like a piano. But I also liked that it was very brazen and distinct. It’s like a horn but it’s not quite a horn. The sound is really unique. The closest things to it are a harmonica or an accordion.”

You could certainly play a melodica in a parade or a subway, Batiste realized, but could you make serious music on it? Because it’s cheap, plastic and often given to children, the melodica is often thought of as a toy, not a serious musical instrument. But that didn’t deter Batiste. When he moved to New York at age 17 in 2004 to attend the Juilliard School, he brought along his melodica. He started using it just as a way to practice between classes or out in the street when a real piano wasn’t available. But as he got more and more serious about the instrument, he started bringing it into his live performances. He called it a “harmonabord” to free it from past associations, but it was still a melodica.

“Sure, it was created as a toy,” he conceded, “but a lot of instruments that are popular now weren’t created for serious musicians to play. The electric bass is a perfect example. We all love it now, but no one took it seriously when it first came out. It was only something to use if you didn’t have an acoustic bass. So anything can be used for serious music; it just depends on who’s dealing with it. If someone has the right concept, they can play serious music on spoons. That’s the great thing about Ornette Coleman; he made great music on a plastic saxophone. So why can’t I make great music on a melodica?”

Jon Batiste at the piano. Photo by Ingrid Hertfelder.

Batiste hadn’t given up on the piano by any means. Having recorded his first piano album as a teenager with his NOCCA buds in 2004 (Times in New Orleans) he recorded a piano-trio album, Live in New York at the Rubin Museum of Art, in 2006 with his Manhattan group (bassist Phil Kuehn and drummer Joe Saylor). Two piano EPs followed, 2008’s In the Night and 2009’s The Amazing Jon Batiste!. All of them showed off his keyboard skills, but none of them solved the problem of the pianist left behind by the parade.

So, after he graduated from Juilliard in 2008, he started going into the subways with his alto saxophonist Eddie Barbash just to practice. They didn’t ask for money; they just played. Batiste wanted to see how a melodica/sax duo would go over with a totally unprepared audience.

“I wanted to find a way to bring the music to people who wouldn’t usually have a chance to hear it,” he explains. “The subway was the perfect place. Maybe they weren’t jazz fans. Maybe they never thought of going to a jazz club. Maybe they thought of it but couldn’t afford the $30 cover and $10 minimum. When they heard us, they always say, ‘We never heard people play jazz that were close to our age.’ So that’s the first step.”

Before long, Batiste was trying to convince the rest of his band to come along, but they were skeptical. “Oh, man,” they complained, “I don’t know if I want to do it. I don’t want to take my instrument down there. We just played a gig. We’re tired. It’s so late.” Batiste says, “I really had to put on my salesman’s shoes to convince them.” But convince them he did.

In a popular YouTube video, you can see Jonathan Batiste and the Stay Human Band on the platform at Pennsylvania Station as they are about to board the No. 3 train, the southbound express. Tuba player Ibanda Ruhumbika and guitarist Ryland Kelly carry their instruments in their arms and their instruments’ padded black cases on their backs. The band’s drummer, Joe Saylor in a red-checkered shirt, carries only a tambourine, while Batiste, in a turquoise baseball cap and dark blue blazer, has only his “harmonabord.”

Including Barbash and accordionist Sam Reider, there are six musicians in all, plus two camera operators and two sound recorders. They set up in the middle of the car with Batiste leaning against the sliding doors. Ruhumbika starts pumping out a New Orleans-flavored, descending tuba line reinforced by the tambourine, and Batiste brings in the rest of the group by piping the melody to “My Favorite Things,” hewing closer to Julie Andrews at first than to John Coltrane.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The nearby riders look away, afraid to establish eye contact with someone who might ask for money. But as Batiste’s band keeps playing without asking for donations while 28th and 23rd streets slide by in the windows behind the leader, the riders relax. Several pull out smart-phones to video the proceedings, and the group starts swinging and improvising. When they finally stop, the riders applaud. Some even offer money without being asked for it. Batiste grins and kicks off the next song, Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World.”

“After a lot of experimenting,” Batiste revealed, “we figured out that the best repertoire was songs that people already knew, either classic songs or popular songs, mixed in with jazz songs they might not know. A melodica can articulate a tune that really cuts through, especially when it’s a great melody from Richard Rodgers or Michael Jackson. Then the tuba can play a bass progression with motion. When you add percussion, it pushes that motion along. When you add another horn, it provides a less brazen counterpoint to the melodica’s extreme sound. A tambourine is uplifting; when you hear it, it has that sanctified quality to it. It has the splash of the cymbal and the pop of a snare.

“We didn’t want to be mistaken for those people who go into a car, play for 30 seconds and then pass the hat. We wanted to be the antithesis of that. People would clap and say, ‘I really like that; what do you call that?’ and we’d say, ‘Jazz.’ and they’d say, “Oh yeah? I never knew it sounded like that.’ That was an eye-opener.

Batiste knew he had to document these guerilla subway sessions while they were still fresh and exciting, so he started bringing along the camera and sound crew you see in the above video. A subway train, however, proved to be just about the worst imaginable environment for recording music. There’s a lot of extraneous noise that’s especially hard to screen out when your sound person is being bounced in different directions by each jolt of the train. The musicians themselves struggled to keep their balance through the same jolts while trying to play their instruments. And while many authority figures were willing to look the other way, some weren’t.

It was worth all the hassles, though, Batiste was convinced. There was something about playing before skeptical listeners in an unlikely setting that brought out the best in the players. It wasn’t unlike playing on a street corner in the Marigny or in a jazz funeral through Treme. It was busting out of the jazz cocoon and trying to win over strangers on the street. He took the best of the subway recordings—tunes by Rodgers, Jackson, Charlie Parker, T. Rex, Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder—and edited them into an album, MY N.Y., that he released on his own label in September. There’s not a note of piano on the disc, just a whole lot of melodica.

“The parallels to New Orleans street music were obvious,” Batiste declared; “it was all about keeping people engaged. It was like a brass band, even though we didn’t have any brass but the tuba. I went to NOCCA with Julian Gosin from the Soul Rebels, and I’ve played melodica with the Soul Rebels and the Stooges. I still play with them when I go back home, and it’s not that different from what we did in the subway.”

Jonathan Batiste hasn’t abandoned his mainstream jazz career by any means. He spent the second half of August on tour as the pianist in the Wynton Marsalis Quintet. And he recently learned that the HBO series Treme has been renewed for a third season, so he will once again be playing piano in the band led by trumpeter Delmond Lambreaux, the fictional character loosely based on Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison.

“Delmond’s character reminds me a lot of my own struggles being a New Orleans musician in New York,” Batiste acknowledged. “The struggle is to play music that’s true to who you are, which is always changing. When you come from New Orleans to New York, you find a high-brow, sophisticated way of making music, which is very different from what you knew at home, which is very much a down-home, almost folk music.

“But you can’t take all that New York information in without it becoming a part of who you are too. So when Delmond plays ‘Milneburg Joys’ at the Blue Note in Manhattan and people are like, ‘Are you kidding? Are you really going to play that?’ I could definitely relate because I’ve been there, done that. All you can do is try to remain organic and allow all the things inside you to come out, no matter where they come from.”

Nicholas Payton. Photo by Skip Bolen.

“I want to embark on another journey that will include the music of my own generation,” Nicholas Payton said over coffee at Café Luna on Magazine Street in 2009. “I want my music to reflect all the records I listen to, not just the jazz records. When I went to the stereo as a kid, I put on records by Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire and Run-DMC. That’s who I am, and I want my music to reflect who I am.”

The trumpet star was wearing a black-and-gold Reggie Bush football jersey but allowed his glasses to slide down his nose towards his pencil mustache as if he were a soft-spoken scholar at Tulane. He never spoke in strident tones about his quest to take his music in a new direction; he described it calmly, as if it were an inevitable natural process. At the time, controversy was swirling around his then-new sound, and the storm would only grow fiercer in the years to come. Sonic Trance (2003) and Into the Blue (2008) had been attacked in some quarters for their funk grooves and electric keyboards. His next album, Bitches, emphasized dance grooves and amplification even more, and it featured more of Payton’s vocals than his trumpet playing. It was slated to be released by Concord Records in 2010, but the label decided not to put it out.

“The A&R guy I was working with at Concord thought it was brilliant,” Payton claims today. “He said it was a flagship project for the label’s move away from the traditional idea of jazz because this music wasn’t just R&B or just jazz. Several release dates were set and pushed back. Then they decided they weren’t going to release it at all. No formal reason was ever given.

“For now it’s sitting on the shelf. It’s been leaked on the Internet, though, and has taken on a life of its own. I think it’s unfortunate that they decided to deep-six it because people really love it. It has been suggested that I could buy it back and put it out myself, but just on principle, I refuse to pay a penny for it when their A&R guy sanctioned it every step of the way.”

Payton never raises his voice, but an edginess creeps in that hints at how angry he really is. He’s determined to keep pushing forward. In March, he debuted his new 21-musician ensemble, the Nicholas Payton Television Studio Orchestra, in six shows for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. It’s an unusual big band because Payton’s arrangements forego the usual wall- of-sound and steamroller swing in favor of more transparent music emphasizing a large ensemble’s wide spectrum of colors.

“I want to use the big band’s range and flexibility,” he says, “but I also want to retain a small group’s sense of spontaneity and solos. I don’t want the drummer to have to respond to every trumpet accent. I want it to sound like a lot of small combos in the same place that you can switch back and forth between. I try to give each person a melody that can stand on its own.”

Five members of the NPTSO (Payton, vocalist Johnaye Kendrick, keyboardist Lawrence Fields, bassist Robert Hurst and percussionist Rolando Guerro) joined drummer Karriem Riggins when they performed at Jazz Fest as the new Nicholas Payton SeXXXtet, and both bands are performing tunes from Payton’s controversial recent albums. Payton and Kendrick not only sing the vocals from the unreleased album but also the original lyrics for several tunes that were released as instrumentals on Into the Blue.

“Vocals are something I had been working towards for years,” Payton says. “I started writing tunes with lyrics in the late ‘90s when I was working with some New Orleans cats in my band, Time Machine. It was me, Chris Severn on bass, Adonis Rose on drums, Steve Masakowski on guitar, Peter Martin on keys, Kenyatta Simon on percussion, and Philip Manuel on vocals. None of those songs has ever been released, though one of them, ‘Freesia,’ was included on Bitches.

“Everyone acts as if songs are so different from instrumental tracks, but the only real difference is that there are words.”

Payton looks a bit like Louis Armstrong and can sound a whole lot like him when he chooses. Though they were born 72 years apart—Armstrong in 1901 and Payton in 1973—the two trumpeters are both New Orleans natives rooted in the city’s earliest jazz traditions. So it was inevitable that Payton would one day record an Armstrong tribute album.

When that project, Dear Louis, was released in 2001, it was such a critical and commercial success that Payton received a lot of advice, even pressure, to do more in the same vein. Instead he made Sonic Trance, a jazz album full of synths, samplers and other electronic instruments.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh, he’s selling out, doing this electronic music,’” Payton said in 2009. “But the truth is I could have made significantly more money with another Dear Louis. But after I completed that album, I knew I didn’t want to play from the perspective of my predecessors anymore. I felt I had done that. Sonic Trance was me breaking away from any idea of what people thought I should do—even what I thought I should do. When Kevin (Hays) started doubling on Fender Rhodes, we had the sound I wanted.”

The electric piano proved a key element, for its chiming, reverberating notes with their long decay were a key signature of ‘70s black music, the decade of Payton’s childhood, not just in jazz-rock fusion but also in R&B. “I think the Fender Rhodes sounds beautiful,” he says firmly. “It’s a very warm instrument and it’s electric. I like electricity. Electricity was essential to a lot of records I loved in the ‘70s: Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, Milt Jackson’s Sunflower, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. That was the keyboard of the day.”

Sonic Trance proved divisive. While some reviews admired its echoes of the electric Davis, others responded as if Payton were committing treason to the Young Lions jazz orthodoxy of the ‘90s. Even those who admired the disc’s mesmerizing vibe were disappointed by its lack of memorable themes and emotional disclosure. The sales were respectable, but Payton lost his label when Warner Bros. shut down its jazz division.

“People either loved it or hated it,” Payton acknowledged. “There wasn’t much middle ground. I’d never gotten criticized like that before. It was almost personal, as if I’d done something to them. It was difficult because I’d never had my work received that way. Of course, some people didn’t like the earlier records because they thought they were too traditional, and then when I went the other way…” His voice trailed off. “I learned that you can’t please all the people all the time. You have to do what you want to do.”

For his next album, Into the Blue, Payton employed a similar process, leaning once again on electric keyboards, extra percussion and improvisations over vamps and grooves. But this time the vamps featured more catchy tunes. A key track was “The Crimson Touch,” an R&B-flavored number that brimmed with shimmery seduction. Payton had written lyrics for the piece, and even though he didn’t use them on the album’s instrumental version, he clearly had the words in mind when he picked up his horn. His trumpet seemed to be singing them in punctuated phrases as if promising pleasure to a lover. When Payton played 2009’s Jazz Fest, vocalist Kendrick took the Jazz Tent stage with a sheer black wrap covering a green mini-dress and sang the lyrics he wrote for “The Crimson Touch,” releasing her rounded, ripened vowels as if she were a human flugelhorn.

A few days later at Snug Harbor, Payton himself sang. Though he is not nearly the virtuoso on tenor voice that he is on trumpet—his vocal timbre is often less full and his intonation less precise—he is clearly committed to incorporating vocals into his music. The human voice, after all, is the most emotional of all instruments and was crucial to the music Payton grew up with. And, it’s a necessary vehicle for his growing interest in lyrics.

“Writing poetry is something that appeals to me,” he said. “The more I write poetry, the more I feel compelled to sing it. I understand the sensibility of the piece, so I feel compelled to express myself in that way. Why not? I’ve been singing longer than I’ve been playing trumpet. I can express myself through a lot of instruments: voice, keys, drums and the bass. Who knows? I might get interested in painting or acting in the future. I stay open to creativity however it manifests itself.”

When Payton prepared his compositions for Into the Blue, he recorded a demo of each tune, playing all the instruments himself—like Stevie Wonder or Prince. He was so pleased with the results that he used those actual demos as the basis for Bitches. He plays every instrument on the album including the Fender Rhodes, and sings every vocal except for six guest vocals, most notably one by Cassandra Wilson on “You Take Me Places I’ve Never Been Before” and by Esperanza Spalding on “Freesia.”

“I like the writing on his records so much,” Spalding said in 2009, “because it’s new music. It’s through-composed. Even the bass line, which plays this melodic counterpoint to the trumpet melody, is notated from beginning to end. The motifs are all singable, but they don’t repeat the way they would in a pop song. Meanwhile the drums are playing a shuffle.

“When you hear all those elements put together, it’s not like anything you’ve ever heard. It’s wild. Nicholas has got great ears with a great tone. What more can you ask for from any instrument? His tone is so perfect that he can go anywhere and turn on a dime. And the same freedom he brings to playing his horn is the way he wants us to play.”

His father, the late Walter Payton, gave his son a pocket trumpet at age four and turned him over to a trumpet teacher, Xavier University’s Diane Lyle, at age eight. But it wasn’t until age 11, when James Andrews invited Nicholas to join the All-Star Brass Band, one of the ensembles popping up like mushrooms all over the city in response to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, that the youngster got excited about music.

“I was used to the Young Tuxedo Brass Band playing in the traditional style,” the son remembers. “When I heard the Dirty Dozen I went, ‘Wow. This stuff can be really hot.’ It sounded like what I was hearing on the radio. Their horn lines were funky like Earth, Wind & Fire but combined with that New Orleans thing. But unlike a lot of bands that imitated them, they also had that bebop and free jazz.”

That combination of traditional jazz, new wave brass bands, funk and modern jazz has always propelled Payton, and even as he ventured into the fusion experiments of Sonic Trance, Into the Blue and Bitches, he never abandoned his traditional New Orleans roots.

“Even if they use electronic instruments, they’ve got that spirit,” his father insisted in 2009. “The new music has a place too, because the old music left a gap for it to walk into. The old music created a desire for music; it created people whose ears are opened and now say, ‘Okay, let’s see what else is out there.’ New Orleans can afford to have both kinds of music. It’s that kind of city. It looks forward and looks backward at the same time. We look both ways and make up our own mind.”

Back in 1986, when BeauSoleil was first starting to tour a lot outside Louisiana, back when the Doucet brothers still had a bit of hair atop their heads, the band played at the Kennedy Center, Washington’s red-carpeted bastion of high culture. BeauSoleil was just a quartet in those days—Michael Doucet on fiddle, David Doucet on acoustic guitar, Errol Verret on accordion and Billy Ware on triangle and rubboard—and when the four musicians looked out over the East Coasters sunken in their seats, the Louisianans shook their heads.

“It’s okay to dance,” Michael joked. “This is dance music.” The audience smiled but didn’t budge. Most of them knew little about Cajun music; they had come to see the touring Newport Folk Festival package, and BeauSoleil was just an exotic attraction they were checking out. Michael made another joke, but beneath the humor was nervousness. It wasn’t just that the listeners weren’t dancing; they were paying rapt, quiet attention, which can be unnerving for a band used to Louisiana dance halls.

After all, if you’re playing a dance, you don’t have to worry about the subtleties of the music because they’ll get lost amid the chatter and the bustling bodies. What really matters is the energy and the thump. But at the Kennedy Center, every nuance was suddenly exposed in the eerie quiet. The energy and the thump could work for a few songs, but if people aren’t dancing, they want to hear something else before too long. It was an intimidating situation, but it was also an opportunity.

“We realized we could reach a new audience,” David says. “We’d been playing for Cajun dancers and your folk music types, but when we played these performing arts centers, we had a more diverse audience, so we wanted our music to be more diverse. We wanted to sound like a Cajun band on stuff that wasn’t the usual Cajun band material. We had to work at it, but the effort paid off. Even though we’re still pegged as a Cajun dance band today, people are surprised when they hear what we can do.”

Every Louisiana act that tours a lot outside the state faces the same dilemma: Should they stick to their dance-band roots, refusing to compromise on the social nature of the state’s music, or should they expand their scope, giving themselves a chance to grow as composers, arrangers and improvisers? No one has finessed this challenge better than BeauSoleil, which in its 35th year, manages to shine as both a dance band and a concert act.

Nothing better demonstrates the group’s duality than the new album, Alligator Purse, BeauSoleil’s first release on the roots-rock label, Yep Roc Records. It was another gig outside Louisiana that led to the album. Michael Pillot, an old friend of Michael and Tommy’s from the University of Southern Louisiana, had gone on to become a successful producer of music TV and film. When the levees buckled beneath Katrina in 2005, Pillot organized a “Build a Levee” benefit concert at Bard College in New York’s Hudson River Valley for December 3. Pillot asked Michael to join an eclectic group of players that included Merchant, Sebastian, Rudd, Crooked Still’s Rushad Eggleston, Hot Rize’s Nick Forster, Artie Traum and Dr. John.

“It was a magical night,” Michael says. “I didn’t know these people, but if you wanted to play with someone, you just sat in. And when you did, it felt real comfortable. So when some of them played on the new album, they didn’t feel like guest artists, because they were people I’d already played with and hung out with.”

It seemed natural to return to the Hudson Valley to cut the new tracks with Pillot as producer. It was good to get out of Louisiana, David claims, because when you’re away from home it feels more like work. You can concentrate on the job at hand without worrying about the busted plumbing or crying kid at home. The challenge, though, was how to differentiate this release from the 21 albums that came before it. This is always the hurdle for acts with an identifying sound: If listeners already have an album with that sound, why do they need another?

“It’s like that quote from Rolling Stone: ‘Ho hum, another great Richard Thompson record,’” says Michael. “How could they say that? But that’s what you’re facing. Why do another BeauSoleil record when the record industry’s collapsing? So you push yourself into territory you’ve never been before. You record with people you haven’t recorded with before. I wasn’t worried about them throwing us off because we’re so strong. We always have a groove, so when people come in they get absorbed into that groove, like spice absorbed into the gumbo.”

Michael wanted more songs in English this time, but he didn’t want to translate traditional Cajun songs into English. Instead, he wanted to take pre-existing English songs and Cajunize them. Bobby Charles’ “I Spent All My Money Loving You” was a natural because Charles’ swamp pop was merely a new extension of Cajun music, just as BeauSoleil’s music has been. J.J. Cale may be from Oklahoma, but his music has always had a swampy tinge. And “Little Darlin’” was almost a Cajun song already.

“Our ancestors came down from Nova Scotia with a fiddle,” declares Joel Savoy, the Red Stick Ramblers’ ex-fiddler and current head of the Grammy-nominated Cajun label, Valcour Records. “Eventually they met up with German people who played the accordion and they added that to Cajun music. Then they met some Texans who played country swing music, and they added that, too.

“Now that a lot of people are coming to Louisiana to learn Cajun music, they get caught up in preserving Cajun music as it is rather than letting it become what it wants to be, which will always be a product of what’s happening in Louisiana at the moment. Michael can play just like any of the old masters he learned from, but at the same time if he wants to add something to his improvisation, he can draw from all those things he has in his head from a lifetime of listening to all kinds of music.”

“It’s gone beyond, ‘Oh, let’s play another traditional song,’” Michael says. “That’s been done. I did all that work in the ’70s, reestablishing this tradition and that’s great. People think these songs just fell out of the sky, but a lot of work went into them—and there’s still a lot of work left to be done in continuing to develop our music and our history. It’s not like we said, ‘This is the concept; let’s do this.’ You just sit back and see what happens. When you do that, it just opens up.”

Michael’s point is a crucial one: Allowing new influences into Louisiana music is not the unnatural, gimmicky thing to do; keeping them out is. If you’re a virtuoso fiddler you don’t stop yourself from playing bebop changes or Haitian syncopation just because earlier Cajun fiddlers didn’t. If you’re a virtuoso guitarist like David, you don’t stop yourself from playing lead breaks just because Cajun guitarists never did that before. If you’re a virtuoso drummer like Tommy Alesi, you don’t stop yourself from adding embellishments to the primary thump out of fear some dancer will lose track of the counting he or she learned at a Cajun dance camp in West Virginia. If Cajun music is meant to reflect the people of South Louisiana, it has to change as those people change.

“If you add a jazz solo or a funk beat to a Cajun or zydeco song,” David argues, “you’re not betraying the music. You’re adding to it. That’s how you serve the music. You don’t encapsulate it in a certain time; you help it grow. Texas swing wasn’t a part of Cajun music until musicians in the 1930s started adding it, and before long everyone was doing it. It’s not leaving the past behind, it’s adding to it. Not every idea works. When I’m playing solo, I tell myself, ‘Let’s see if this works.’ If it works, you keep it. If it doesn’t, you finish the song and move on.”

When bringing new influences into a tradition, however, it is essential that musicians follow the principle of addition rather than substitution. If you substitute a new practice for an old one—substituting “Quiet Storm” R&B for 6/8 ballads, say, or “Dirty South” rap for carnival street chants or jazz violin for Cajun fiddle—you often lose far more than you gain. But if you keep the old as you add the new—and do the necessary work to make the two blend, then you’ve made a step forward. If you tackle a terrific piece of Americana such as Julie Miller’s “Little Darlin’” and invite Natalie Merchant and John Sebastian to add vocals and harmonica respectively, it’s necessary to hold on to what you had before: the push-and-pull of Tommy’s two-step beat, the swampy drone of Michael’s fiddle and the springy bounce of David’s guitar breaks. That’s just what BeauSoleil does on Alligator Purse.

That’s also just what it did when it played the “Grand Reopening” of the New Orleans Mulate’s after Katrina on April 27, 2006. It was Mitch Reed’s first show with the band as the official new bassist and second fiddler (replacing Al Tharp, who was devoting himself to his first love, old-time Appalachian music—the band’s first roster change since 1989). Filling out the line-up were the Doucet brothers, Billy Ware, Tommy Alesi and button accordionist Jimmy Breaux. Michael wore a loud, blue-print beach shirt and faded jeans; his shiny bald dome was flanked by two snowy tufts above his ears and anchored by a pointy white goatee. Behind him was the restaurant’s famous logo: a painting of the early-1980s BeauSoleil when the Doucet brothers had darker hair and more of it.

The sextet quickly demonstrated how they could appeal to active dancers and seated listeners at the same time. Surrounding the dance floor on three sides were tables where diners, mostly out-of-towners, sat entranced by the dizzying solos from the Doucet brothers and Jimmy Breaux.

Standing just outside of the kitchen door off to the band’s left was Bob Dylan. He slouched within his jacket, his curls stuffed inside a brown stocking cap, as if no one would recognize him, and standing next to his longtime bassist Tony Garnier. His Bobness didn’t join the dancing, but he seemed as mesmerized by a Cajunized

“Baby, Please Don’t Go,” as the tourists lingering over their bread pudding.

The song, an old blues that Dylan himself had often played early in his career, had slowed down so all those minor-key chords had time to bleed into the forlorn cry of first Michael’s high-register fiddle and then his voice: “Baby, please don’t go back to New Orleans; you know I love you so.” Jimmy’s button accordion squeezed out the droning, hypnotic riff, while Michael played jazzy lines on top. For all the deliberate tempo and ominous harmonies, however, Tommy, Billy and Mitch still delayed the beat a split second and then pounced on it with a syncopated snap, keeping the couples moving on the floor. How many other bands could satisfy dancers, tourists and Bob Dylan all on the same song?

“Last year we played this gig at Nunu’s in Arnaudville, north of Lafayette,” David says. “I was sitting there eating gumbo after the gig, and this guy came up to me and said, ‘I never listened to you guys before. I thought you just played that traditional music that no one likes.’ I had to laugh because we’d just played a bunch of traditional tunes on traditional instruments. Sure, you borrow licks and ideas from other music, and you blend those in with what you already know. It’s always going to sound a little Cajun, because you inevitably put yourself into it and you’re a Cajun.

“People don’t know why we sound different, but that’s why it is. When you learn a song, you don’t have to play it the way you learned it. It wouldn’t have been as fun for the past 35 years if we had just played the songs the way we’d learned them. I don’t think the guys before us played the songs the way they learned them. You can’t tell me Dewey Balfa played songs the way he learned them. Or Nathan Abshire.”

BeauSoleil is doing what Cajun musicians have always done: they’re listening to the radio in their heads and turning it into new Cajun music. But it has a different playlist than the radio in Dennis McGee’s head or D.L. Menard’s head. The radio in their heads plays rock ’n’ roll, Caribbean music, jazz, swamp pop and more, so why shouldn’t they make Cajun music with Garth Hudson and Roswell Rudd or with a Bobby Charles song?

“The cats I learned to play from—Dennis McGee and Canray Fontenot—are gone,” Michael points out. “We paid homage to them for years—we were the first modern Cajun band to record a Dennis McGee song, to play an Amede Ardoin song, to play zydeco—but we’re getting older; we’re speaking in English now. The world here in Louisiana has changed; it’s not the same place it was even 30 years ago.”

It’s a measure of the way the Doucet brothers think that when they heard a version of “Les Oignons” by Don Vappie, they immediately heard the connections between this New Orleans street chant in Haitian French and Michael’s own composition, “Valse a BeauSoleil,” a blues waltz in Cajun-French. If John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful could play harmonica on the latter for the new album, why couldn’t jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd play on the former?

After all, Rudd had been a Dixieland revivalist before playing with such avant-gardists as Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy and Archie Shepp. Rudd understood how Dixieland contained the potential for free jazz just as Michael understood how South Louisiana’s dance halls contained the potential for concert music. They got along so famously that Rudd invited BeauSoleil to play on two tracks for his next album. It’s these unexpected connections that keep the band pushing forward into new music rather than resting on familiar ways. They can try anything because they never have to worry about their essential identity.

“Bands are not just the type of music they play,” insists David. “It’s how they play. Michael Pillot told us, ‘You’re known as a Cajun band, but you play a lot more than that.’ We do, but we’re still a Cajun band because that’s how we play. Michael may like Caribbean music; Tommy may like jazz; Jimmy may like country; I may like old-time acoustic music, but when we play together, we sound like a Cajun band because we play this other music in our own way. We can have John Sebastian singing backup on a rock ’n’ roll song that Michael translated into French, and it still sounds Cajun. How cool is that?”

In 2007, the Folk Alliance hosted a concert by three banjo players at Memphis’s Marriott Hotel. The three men sat in a semi-circle of chairs, the drum-like bodies of the banjos in their laps, the thin sticks of their fretboards pointing to two o’clock. It was a historic occasion, for all three men were African-American, and they were previewing the music that would be released a year later as the landmark Recapturing the Banjo album.

The burly man with the squinting eyes, full beard and blue baseball cap was Colorado’s Otis Taylor, the man who had organized the project. The even larger man with the long dreadlocks spilling out of the green cap was Memphis’s Alvin Youngblood Hart, a Taj Mahal-like blues revivalist and rock ’n’ roller. The third man, the one with the thick curly hair, silver goatee and dapper black blazer was Don Vappie, a major figure from the New Orleans traditional jazz scene.

The three men were intent on “recapturing the banjo” because the instrument had become so closely associated with bluegrass that most people had forgotten that it was originally an African invention. They were unaware of the major role it had played in the music of American slaves and their descendants until the 1930s. These musicians wanted to remind everyone where the banjo had come from and what it had done for African-American music.

Taylor and Hart were most interested in the jug bands, string bands and blues singers from the upper South who made great recordings with the banjo in the ’20s and ’30s. They were trying to jump-start a tradition that had stalled, to retie a thread that had been broken, reconstructing a lost art from those records. When they closed the show with “Walk Right In” by Memphis jug-band giant Gus Cannon, the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Dom Flemons joined in on backing vocals.

Vappie, by contrast, was trying to extend a banjo tradition that had never been broken. The banjo has been a constant presence in New Orleans jazz from the time Danny Barker played banjo with the Boozan Kings in 1923 until he played it with Wynton Marsalis in 1988. When Vappie played in Memphis, crooning the lilting Creole lyrics to “Les Ognons,” he was playing a music he’d learned from older New Orleans musicians, some of them his own relatives. And he played it on the four-string tenor banjo of his hometown, not on the more widely known five-string banjo of Appalachia.

“Most blacks don’t want to deal with a banjo,” Vappie laments, “but the banjo is a very funky instrument. For a person of color to turn their back on the banjo is to turn their back on their ancestors.”

Vappie played “Les Ognons” again inside the Economy Hall tent at the 2008 Jazz Fest, backed this time by his own band, the Creole Jazz Serenaders. Wearing a dark blue blazer over a black T-shirt, the banjoist introduced King Oliver’s “Nelson Stomp” as “a very modern sound that destroys all the stereotypes about traditional New Orleans music.” It was impressively fresh, and if it didn’t destroy every stereotype, it did dent several of them.

Vappie introduced “Les Ognons” by recalling his recent experience playing with actual African musicians. “I was so happy,” he said, “I started dancing the second line and it fit perfectly with what they were playing.” He infected the audience with that happiness, teaching them how to clap out a second line beat for “Les Ognons.” From that bouncy Haitian song and its dazzling banjo solo, the octet segued into a vintage Danny Barker number and finally, “Eh, La-Bas,” all sung in Creole French. By this point, the crowd was out of its folding chairs, on its feet and twirling umbrellas or dance partners on the grass floor, celebrating at least one banjo successfully recaptured.

“One time I went up to Danny and said, ‘That’s a neat little banjo you have there,’” Vappie says now. “He put it in my hands so I could check it out. I started to hand it back, but he gave me this order that cut right through me. ‘Play something,’ he said. I respect my elders, so I played some tunes for him.

“Now I look back at that moment and I realize that Danny was passing the instrument on to me and asking me to do something with it. Because the banjo is part of us as New Orleans Creoles. You can look at it as a negative stereotype and ignore something that’s part of your heritage. Or you can embrace it. I chose to embrace it.”

Vappie, now 52, hadn’t always embraced the banjo. He had to recapture it for himself before he could recapture it for his people. Before he recorded with Taylor, Hart, Keb’ Mo’, Guy Davis and Corey Harris, before he released his own banjo albums as the leader of Papa Don’s Jazz Band or the Creole Jazz Serenaders, Vappie had shared his generation’s dismissal of the ancient, acoustic instrument.

He had grown up amid New Orleans’ traditional jazz. His mother’s uncle, Papa John Joseph, had played bass for many of the earliest jazz figures, including Buddy Bolden and George Lewis. Vappie grew up taking piano lessons at home and trumpet lessons at school. But what he really wanted to do was play electric bass.

When he finally got one, he co-founded Trac One, an early-’70s funk band that recreated the hits of the Ohio Players, James Brown and Earth, Wind & Fire. They played nightclubs, social clubs and parties; one year they did 35 proms. At more than one battle of the bands, they faced off against the Creators, a rival funk band that featured Wynton and Branford Marsalis in the horn section.

“Even though we were covering the hits, there was a New Orleans flavor in everything we did,” Vappie insists. “When you played for these social clubs at the Longshoreman’s Hall or the ILA Hall, it was almost like an inside picnic. Each family would have a table for themselves and their guests. At one point, the MC would introduce each member, escorted by a wife or daughter. They’d make this semicircle and walk around the room, so everyone could see them. You’d play a second line tune like ‘Bourbon Street,’ and you had to do it New Orleans-style to get the gig. Everyone would join in the second line, and then, boom, you’d go right into the latest tune by Maze.”

Trac One was offered a chance to tour the country, opening for Rare Earth, but the band wasn’t willing to leave its beloved hometown. Later, when Vappie was playing at Papa Joe’s on Bourbon Street as one of Sammy Berfect’s Perfect Gentlemen, he got an offer to replace Joe Beck as the guitarist in Peggy Lee’s band. He turned that down, too.

“I wasn’t ready to leave New Orleans. It’s a very unique place. Growing up here, you’d see people on the street and they’d say hello even if they were strangers. My neighbor would call out, ‘Hey, Don, ca va?’ He wasn’t just saying hello; he was singing it. I remember all the street vendors, calling out ‘bananas’ or ‘rags.’ They were singing, too. Later, when I went all over the world, I realized I was right—there’s nothing else like it.”

But when disco took over much of popular music in the late ’70s, even in New Orleans, Vappie despaired. He found the music boring and the opportunities for live musicians plummeting. He sold all his instruments and quit music for three months. “But it was like losing an arm,” he says, and he bought most of them back three months later. He took a job at Werlein’s Music where the Palace Café is now. He cleaned instruments, and whenever he’d clean a banjo, he’d fool around with it.

“I was surprised,” he says. “It sounded funky without having to mute the strings. Funk music guitarists muted their strings to get that percussive sound, but the banjo didn’t need that; it sounded cool.”

Vappie was working at Werlein’s Lake Forest branch, where Placide Adams, the bassist for Paul Barbarin, George Lewis and Sweet Emma, regularly shopped. Adams heard Vappie playing the banjo and told the youngster, ‘You sound too good to be working in here. You need to be out gigging.’ So Vappie started picking up traditional jazz gigs, only to discover how little of the repertoire he knew. He began to listen religiously to the morning shows on WWOZ to learn the tunes. Before long, he was playing with Teddy Riley, Lloyd Lambert and Gerald Adams.

But he faced a backlash from friends his own age. For the first generation of blacks born after 1955’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, the banjo was tied to minstrel singers and a plantation culture they were trying to forget—or at least put behind them.

“People would say, ‘Oh, you’re playing the banjo? So you’re Uncle Tomming now,’ Vappie says. “When they came at me with those stereotypes, I’d say, ‘Do you know it’s an African instrument?’ They’d say, ‘Really?’ I wonder why a people would disown an instrument that they brought over with them. It’s true that some people play the banjo just because they can get gigs with it playing for the tourists.

“But I play the banjo by my choice, because I like it, because I can reach out and do new things on it. Unlike a lot of guys, I play single-note melodies and variations on those melodies. I don’t just play the four-beat thing; I feel it different. I play swing rhythms, Caribbean rhythms, funk rhythms. I’ve been called the Jimi Hendrix of the banjo.”

It was a tourist gig, however, that allowed Vappie to quit his day job. The Natchez riverboat hired Vappie as the strolling banjo player in 1983 for its daily cruise that went from Jackson Square to Chalmette and back.

“I guess it provided that riverboat gambler image,” he says with a laugh. “It was early in my banjo playing, so it was paid rehearsal in a way. I could try out new things. I had to entertain people one-on-one, which was good training, too. After a year of that, I was offered the bandleader job.”

A tourist gig like this can be an economic godsend, but it can also be an artistic trap, especially if you get too comfortable and clock in your hours as if it were an office job. Vappie recognized this danger and pushed himself to learn new licks, new approaches, new repertoire. He read books and listened to records. He grew fascinated with Jelly Roll Morton, the New Orleans genius who bridged the pre-recording and post-recording eras of early jazz and regularly employed banjo players.

“Jelly Roll’s compositions and his innovations in playing are crucial,” Vappie argues. “He was the first person to comp behind a soloist with a single-note lines rather than chords, like a new melody, an improvised counterpoint. His block chords, like in the tune ‘Freakish,’ pre-date Monk doing that kind of thing. He could write down the improvised polyphony that he heard in his head.

“He’s the anti-stereotype of what people think New Orleans music is. People say, ‘You guys are great. You don’t have to read because you were born with the music in your hands.’ That’s bull. We work hard and study the music; we take lessons and teach them. This whole idea that it’s based on natural instincts is so wrong.”

Vappie’s research and ambitious arrangements enabled him to break out of the tourist gig trap. When the Historic New Orleans Collection discovered some of Morton’s forgotten manuscripts, the non-profit hired Vappie to put a band together to perform the music in public. The Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra hired Vappie and his Creole Jazz Serenaders to do an evening of music by Morton and other early New Orleans musicians. The Hot Springs Music Festival in Arkansas hired Vappie to arrange and perform a suite of music by the 1920s banjo virtuoso Harry Reser. The results will be released by Naxos Records next year.

In 2005, Vappie released the two most impressive recordings of his career: a Don Vappie & the Creole Jazz Serenaders album called Swing Out and a solo album called Banjo à la Creole. The former showcased the staples of the band’s live show, tunes such as “Les Ognons,” “Viper Mad” and “Down by the Riverside.” The latter featured eight Vappie originals plus fruits from his research into Morton, Reser and Caribbean music. He called it Banjo à la Creole, because the concept of Creole is crucial to his music and his identity.

“You ask 10 people what Creole means, and you get 10 different answers,” Vappie explains in American Creole: New Orleans Reunion, the terrific documentary about him. “What I call Creole are New Orleans people who aren’t white and aren’t black. We’re a mix of French, Spanish, African and American Indian, and that mixture made this city what it is.”

Vappie counts both jazz saxophonist Plas Johnson and Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet among his far-flung cousins, and is sometimes mistaken for a Spaniard or Mexican. He insists that the concept is more important culturally than racially. Instead of worrying about who’s black and who’s white—not always an easy task in Louisiana, he points out—we should be focused instead on the great things that happen when things get blended. Everything that people like about New Orleans, he argues—the music, the food, the architecture—is a result of that blend.

Unfortunately, Vappie’s two albums were released the same month that the levees buckled beneath Katrina’s pressure. The banjoist was in Bangor, Maine, when the storm hit and his house was largely spared. But his boyhood home, where his mother still lived, was devastated. There’s a heartbreaking scene in the documentary (directed by Michelle Benoit and Glen Pitre) where the son visits the house only to find the family photo album full of soggy blurred pictures and his old bed collapsed with rot. In the film, he asks everyone he meets if he should stay in New Orleans or move to another city.

Two things restored his optimism. For one, Don and his wife Milly launched a non-profit campaign, Bring It on Home, to create paying jobs for New Orleans musicians as a way to lure them back to the city. For another, Otis Taylor tracked down Vappie through Ome Banjos, the company that features signature instruments by both men. Taylor explained that he wanted to make an album featuring African Americans playing the banjo. Vappie was all for it.

“I don’t want the black banjo to be part of the past,” Taylor says. “I want it to be part of the future. We’re a modern people; we should play modern music. So the album includes old songs done in new ways and new songs done in traditional ways. It puts together different traditions—the Memphis tradition that Alvin plays and the New Orleans tradition that Don plays. When you do that, you create something new.”

“It was easy to play with those guys,” Vappie says, “because they come out of the blues tradition, and blues was there before jazz. If you can’t play blues, you can’t play jazz. I enjoy playing the banjo outside the box. It’s hard for people to see me outside the box of traditional jazz musician. Otis had me on top of the box.”

Don Vappie performs as part of the Nickel-a-Dance series at Ray’s Room on November 9, and at Snug Harbor November 15.

He began the set by leading his quintet through the title track from his then recently released debut album Rewind That. It began with a rock ‘n’ roll guitar riff from Matt Stevens, and the rhythm section quickly fell into the jittery groove. But Scott played long, languorous trumpet lines whose Miles Davis- like impressionism created a dramatic tension with the initial attack_ Soon keyboardist Aaron Parks was slipping new harmonies within the cracks between the guitar’s push and the trumpet’s pull, while bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Kendrick Scott reshaped the beat into an elastic funk groove.

It was a remarkable performance for several reasons. Though it borrowed musical language from rock, funk and hip-hop, the piece never lapsed into the simplicity of instrumental R&B, jam-band noodling or smooth jazz. There were too many variables aligning or colliding at all times, yet the tune never felt cluttered. Though it was obvious that they could play a lot of show-off notes if they so desired, these were the rare young musicians who played with such restraint that it was easy to follow the interactions. This was the jazz tune that proved you could improvise collectively atop the funk ‘n’ roll rhythms of the Neville Brothers as productively as atop the classic swing of Duke Ellington.

Later in the set, Scott told the crowd, “A prominent musician once told me my music wasn’t swinging, and the paramount condition of jazz is swing. This musician didn’t know I was from New Orleans. He didn’t know that I went to NOCCA and Berklee. He didn’t know that I was well schooled in jazz and that I knew the first jazz records came out of New Orleans in 1917 when there was no swing because swing was invented in Chicago and Kansas City in the ’30s. So don’t tell me that jazz has to swing.”

He delivered this mini-sermon with the kind of defiant attitude and chuckling confidence that informs his music and his conversation. More than a year later, Scott, now 24, betrays the same mindset. His debut album was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Jazz Album, and he is alternately funny, combative, engaging and brimming with confidence when talking about his second album. The confidence is well earned for his new disc, Anthem (Concord), builds on the breakthrough of the first to prove just how exciting jazz can be when it turns to the musical ingredients of the post-swing era. It’s a quality that Prince himself recognized when he made room on his new album for Scott.

“If someone says jazz has to be played with swing,” Scott complains, “it’s like saying jazz has to be played with a trumpet. It’s ridiculous. Jazz does have a history, but it doesn’t have to be synonymous with swing because jazz existed before swing was invented. You’re talking to a trumpet player that was born into a New Orleans jazz family, so I can safely say I know a little bit about what is jazz and what isn’t, what it can include and what it can’t.

“That swing rhythm is perfectly designed to break things up, to act as a catalyst for musical ideas, but each type of music has its positives and negatives in improvising. The positive thing about funk or hip-hop isthat when a backbeat isthat solid, it becomes easier to superimpose different rhythmic concepts over it. You can put almost anything against that beat because you don’t have to worry about the pulse getting lost. Matt and I also like sounds- different textures, juxtaposing textures-because that breaks things up too.”

The key to jazz is its ability to “break things up,” as Scott puts it-upending assumptions by providing an unexpected harmonic shift, rhythmic detour, melodic digression or textural transformation. It’s the “sound of surprise,” as critic Whitney Balliett once put it. And such astonishment can occur whether the starting point is swing, ragtime, rock, funk or hip-hop.

The new album’s “Dialect,” for example, begins like a Radiohead song, with stabbing piano chords and bursts of guitar noise. The horns of Scott, tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III and alto saxophonist Louis Fouche divert the tune from that path, however, with a spare but lyrical melodic theme. The piece takes another unmarked left turn with Stevens’ twisting, prodding guitar solo, then another with Scott’s effects-echoed trumpet solo. By the end of the tune, the horns’ sweet harmonies are contrasted against the grinding, churning bottom, with each side leaping out suddenly and then falling back for cover. With the surprises going off one by one like a string of firecrackers, the piece couldn’t be anything but jazz.

“The music I write is what I hear,” he maintains, “and I hear that way because I grew up on the music of my city and my generation. When I was in college, I played in R&B, hip-hop, rock, Latin bands, everything. Recently I’ve been listening to rock by Radiohead, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Beatles, AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix, and hip-hop from Eric B. & Rakim to Jay Z. You absorb that vocabulary, and you want to use it. If you don’t like the way I use it, just turn it off. I didn’t force my way into your house and make you listen to it. If you don’t like it, take it back to the store or give it to a friend. You want me to apologize for expressing myself that way?”

The word “anthem” usually implies an uplifting, celebratory tune, but the compositions on Scott’s new Anthem album are full of dark, troubling hints of pain, sorrow and anger. The title track is presented twice-once in an “antediluvian” or pre-flood version and again in a “postdiluvial adaptation” featuring guest rapper Brother Jof the X-Clan. When he introduced the tune this past March during the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Scott articulated his lean, forlorn trumpet phrases against a rumbling backdrop, as if mourning a loved one lost to the roiling waves.

Wearing a natty gray blazer over an untucked shirt at the Texas show, Scott dedicated the next number, “The 9,” to the Ninth Ward, “where I was born and raised.” This was a more hopeful number, with the street-parade rhythms setting up a tricky horn melody. But Scott’s own solo had a melancholy undercurrent as if unsure that the revival of his neighborhood would be easy-or even certain. On the album, titles such as “Litany Against Fear,” “Void,” “Cease Fire” and “Katrina’s Eyes” hint at the inspiration for these turbulent, unlikely anthems.

“Anthems are usually celebratory songs that deal with patriotism,” he says, “but the anthems I tried to construct are more brooding, which is the way I feel every day. They’re anthems for change, so we can get to a place where we can have a song that’s celebratory again. These are dark songs because these are dark days-not just in New Orleans but across the globe.

“You have a war going on in Iraq, people getting killed in Darfur and no one’s doing anything about it. Why aren’t there regiments of military in Darfur, protecting people who are being killed just for who there are? You’re going to let them die because there are no resources there? If there were natural resources in New Orleans, they’d have been there in two days. I may seem a little bit jaded but that shit angers me.”

The anger burns slow but sure on the opening tracks, “Litany Against Fear” and “Void.” Against a backdrop that often seems ready to slip into chaos but never quite does, Scott plays solos that are shadowy in timbre and dense in tone. They’re played not on the trumpet but on its older, neglected cousin, the cornet.

“I really love the cornet,” Scott says. “It’s tighter than the trumpet, so it takes more work; the piping is smaller, so there’s more back pressure. As a result, it has a darker, more intense sound that resonates very well. It doesn’t get played very much, maybe because it’s not cool looking. ”

King Oliver and Louis Armstrong both played cornet, and for all his modernism, Scott is strongly connected to the traditions of New Orleans jazz. He and his twin brother Kiel (saluted in the tune “Kiel” on the debut album) were born March 31, 1983 to a mother who was a classical clarinetist and a father who was a visual artist. They lived in an Upper Ninth Ward house where” no one ever turned the music off,” whether it was Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” or Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” And when Mardi Gras rolled around, he masked with the Indians.

“As soon I could walk, I was an Indian,” he remembers. “I was born into a tribe, the Guardians of the Flame. My grandfather, Donald Harrison, Sr., started that tribe; he was the only person to be the Big Chief of four different tribes. From four to 17 I masked with them, but when I was 18, my Uncle Donald started a gang called Congo Nation, and I became his Spy Boy.

“I hear those rhythms all the time. Before you can play drums in my band, you have to go listen to Indian rhythms. Because how you can help me get where I’m going if you don’t know where I’ve been? Some historians say those Indian rhythms are the closest thing we have to the rhythms played in Congo Square in the 17th and 18th Century. They know the Bamboula rhythm was played there and that’s a main part of the Indian music.”

“Uncle Donald” is Donald Harrison, the saxophonist who replaced Branford Marsalis in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. When Harrison and trumpeter Terence Blanchard left the Messengers together, they launched their own combo as co-leaders before parting to pursue solo careers. Scott’s childhood dream was to play with his uncle, and he knew he had a better chance if he played trumpet rather than a reed, even though his family had always been woodwind people.

He got his first horn at 11, knew he was going to be a professional musician at 13 and played in his uncle’s band at a jazz festival in Portugal at 14. After he graduated from NOCCA, he went to the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where he was determined to find a sound on the trumpet that would counteract all the comparisons to Blanchard, Wynton Marsalis and Miles Davis.

“I tried to cultivate a sound that sounded more like a human voice to me,” he says, “warmer, more textured. I started out emulating my mother’s voice because it was so soothing. It came from putting warmer air rather than colder air into the horn. If you force the air out of yourself quickly it’s cooler, but if you let it stay in your diaphragm a little longer it comes out slower and warmer. It took me two years to develop it.”

While he was still at Berklee, Scott appeared on his uncle’s 2002 album, Real Life Stories. Harrison returned the favor by guesting on his nephew’s debut as a leader, 2006′s Rewind That. But between the composing and the release of Rewind That and Harrison’s The Survivor (which also features Scott) came the event that changed New Orleans forever.

“I was in New York when Katrina came and the levees broke,” Scott says. “The rest of my family was there when it happened, and we got 10 feet of water in the house. I couldn’t get in contact with them, so the only information I could get was from TV. It was hard, because you wanted to turn it off, but you couldn’t. Maybe three or four days out I got a phone call when my grandmother finally got cell service. They had gotten to their cars and driven to Houston. No one knew where my Uncle Donald was. It turned out he was at one of the big hotels till they broke away and got to Baton Rouge.”

The trauma inevitably flavored the “anthems” that Scott was writing for his second album. On a tune like “Void,” the anger and sadness are inextricably mingled. The reverse delay on the guitar evokes a situation where everything is turned upside down, and the booming bass drum suggests a heartbeat amplified by adrenaline. The trumpet lead sounds like a lament at first and then like a promise to call someone to account.

“Katrina made me mad as hell,” Scott explains. “I wanted to break something. If you or I kidnapped someone and locked them in a closet for four or five days, we’re going to jail. It seemed that was what the government was doing. Are you kidding me? If you don’t have the resources, admit it and get some help.

“Two years later I’m still mad. I have friends from high school who lost their newborn baby. A disaster like that can happen anywhere in the world; there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s the aftermath that pisses me off. It confirmed that we are second-class citizens. There should be consequences when something like that happens, but the government seems to get off.”

He was in a much better mood when he got a call at the beginning of this year that Prince wanted Scott to play on the sessions for his next album, Planet Earth. Out of those sessions came the track “Somewhere Here on Earth,” a slow blues that features Scott’s soothing tone and snaking lines up front. Scott even got a chance to sit in on Prince’s live show at the Rio Hotel in LasVegas. It was a dream come true for a kid who grew up in New Orleans wearing out his cheap cassettes of Prince’s music.

“I’ve played with some heavy cats, including McCoy Tyner and Mos Def.” Scott admits, “but I was nowhere near as nervous as I was with Prince. As soon as you do something with him, it becomes historically significant. Leading up to it I wanted to throw up, but as soon as I took my trumpet out, there was nothing to it because I could feel he appreciated me as a musician.

“It would be safe to say that he influenced me. If you listen to my music, you’ll hear there’s more than one motif going on at a time, just like his music. You’ll hear a lot of those motifs played on guitar and piano, just like his music. He has this subtle thing about the way he sings-he can do things to a note that will freak you out, but he will also be tactful and leave things out-and I try to do that on my trumpet.”

Scott now lives in Jersey City, and in addition to the Prince album, he can also be heard on the forthcoming Randy Jackson album and seen as well as heard in the forthcoming George Clooney movie Leatherheads. But even as his career trajectory rises ever more steeply, his thoughts are never far from New Orleans.

“New Orleans jazz is my foundation,” he insists. “It’s like the first language I was taught. People always compare me to Miles Davis, but if you don’t hear Louis Armstrong in my music you’re not listening. When I’m playing with New Orleans musicians, I don’t have to say anything, because we know the same language. The blues is so deep there that it gives me goose bumps.

“I get back home several times a year. It’s not that much different since Katrina; there just aren’t as many people. People are still violent; police are still beating people up. It’s still a hard place to grow up. But there are also a lot of beautiful people, a lot of beautiful music. There’s always hope. I’ve been lucky enough to be around young people who are doing great things. But it’s baby steps. We have to deal with a level of contempt from older people that you wouldn’t believe. It’s hard when people look at you and say, ‘What do you know? You’re 20 years old”"

At first listen, the song sounds like a simplistic blues, but on closer inspection it reveals itself as a miracle of songcraft. Both the catchy melody and the rolling rhythm suggest the ambling gait of someone walking down Highway 90 from Abbeville towards the city; both the impatient lyrics and the bouncy tune reinforce the sense of a homesick man anxious to get back.

Though the writing credit was shared with Domino and producer Dave Bartholomew, “Walking to New Orleans” is primarily the creation of Bobby Charles, who may well be the best American songwriter most people have never heard of. People haven’t heard of him because he never had a top-40 pop hit under his own name and because he has spent most of his life lying low on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. But most of us have heard the songs he wrote—titles such as “See You Later, Alligator,” “Tennessee Blues,” “The Jealous Kind” and “But I Do” have been recorded by dozens of different artists.

These are just the tip of the iceberg for Charles’ deep, impressive catalogue. His melodies have a tendency to bounce along merrily until they take a sudden, excited leap up the scale. His infectiously syncopated rhythms borrow from both the 6/8 triplets of 1950s New Orleans R&B and from the push-and-pull two steps of his native Acadiana. His lyrics always feature the kind of catch-phrase that boils down some aspect of human experience to a handful of words that stick in the mind.

Charles emerges from his usual seclusion to make a rare appearance at Jazz Fest on Saturday, April 28. In addition, the festival will feature many artists who have recorded at least one Bobby Charles song: Dr. John, Buckwheat Zydeco, the New Orleans Social Club, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Sonny Landreth, Warren Storm, Zachary Richard, Don Rich, Tab Benoit and Shannon McNally.

Robert Charles Guidry was born in Abbeville, Louisiana, on February 21, 1938. When he was 14, he was so captivated by the sounds of Fats Domino on the radio that he formed a high school band called the Cardinals and translated the local slang for goodbye, “See You Later, Alligator,” into a song.

The tune became so popular locally that a Crowley record shop owner phoned Leonard Chess at Chess Records in Chicago to tip him off. Chess quickly signed Guidry, sent him to New Orleans to record the song and told him to shorten his name to Bobby Charles. It was only when the rechristened teenager finally flew to Chicago that the startled Chess realized that Charles wasn’t black but rather a white Cajun.

Charles eventually recorded 18 sides for Chess, a dozen more for Dave Bartholomew at Imperial Records and scattered singles for Hub-City, Jewel and Paula. But he never liked the road, and he made enough from his songwriting royalties that he could hide out in the Louisiana bayous or upstate New York and write more songs. Aside from anthologies of his early singles, he has only released four albums of new material in half a century as a professional musician. But the real story of Bobby Charles’ achievement is not the records he made but rather the songs he wrote. Here are the half-dozen best:

“Walking to New Orleans”

Domino had already recorded Charles’ song “Before I Grow Too Old” when the pianist met the songwriter in Lafayette. Domino invited Charles to come hang out in New Orleans, but the Cajun kid replied that he was so broke that “about the only way I could get there right now would be to walk.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Charles grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote “Walking to New Orleans” in about 20 minutes.

The song became the first Domino single to feature a string chart, and it marked his final crossover from R&B to pop. Despite the strings, however, the bluesy foundation of Domino’s music can be heard in Charles’ repeating lines, 6/8 triplets and blue-note harmonies.
The original single can be found on the indispensable four-CD box set, They Call Me the Fat Man: Antoine “Fats” Domino—The Legendary Imperial Recordings (EMI). That set also includes another Charles co-write, “It Keeps Rainin’,” a #23 pop hit for Domino in 1961. Charles’ own version of “Walking to New Orleans” can be heard on the 2006 anthology, An Introduction to Bobby Charles (Fuel). Charles and Domino sang a duet version of the song on the 1995 album Wish You Were Here Right Now (Stony Plain).
When Dr. John joined the New Orleans Social Club on last year’s album, Sing Me Back Home (Burgundy), the song he picked to sum up his feelings about his post-Katrina hometown was “Walking to New Orleans.” Buckwheat Zydeco recorded the song on his 1985 album, Waitin’ for My Ya Ya (Rounder). David & Roselyn recorded it for their 1999 album, New Orleans Style (DaRo). The song has also been recorded by Michelle Shocked, Brenda Lee and zydeco legends Rockin’ Dopsie and Fernest Arceneaux.

“See You Later Alligator”

When Bobby Charles released his first single, “See You Later, Alligator,” photos of rock ’n’ roll singers were hard to come by. So it was understandable that DJs and listeners assumed from Charles’ Deep South rasp and firm grasp of blues syncopation that he was African-American. And because his label, Chess, lacked the muscle to put the song on the pop charts, it was inevitable that a major label would recruit an established white singer to re-cut the song for those charts—much as Pat Boone had done when he re-recorded songs by Little Richard, Fats Domino and the Flamingos.

Bill Haley, though, was no Pat Boone. Haley’s roots were in hillbilly swing bands, so when he made the switch to rock ’n’ roll, he had a sure instinct for the new music’s groove and abandon. He broke open the pop single charts for rock ’n’ roll when his “Rock Around the Clock” held the top spot for eight weeks in 1955. Haley was a better singer than Charles and a year later he belted out “See You Later, Alligator” with an authority that bounced off the hypnotic horn riff and set up the frenzied guitar solo. Haley’s version went to No. 6 on the pop charts and to No. 7 on the R&B charts, eclipsing Charles’ high-water mark of No. 14 on the R&B charts.

Charles’ original single can be found on the anthology, Chess New Orleans (Chess/MCA). A later version, featuring Charles’ vocal and slide guitar by Sonny Landreth can be found on the 2003 album, Last Train to Memphis (Rice’n’Gravy). Zachary Richard recorded the song on his 1990 album, Bon Ton (Rounder). The song has also been recorded by British pub rockers Dr. Feelgood, Freddie and the Dreamers and the swamp-pop legend Rod Bernard.

“Tennessee Blues”

In 1970, Charles moved to Woodstock, New York, unaware that it had become a music Mecca. Before he knew it, he was jamming with members of the Band and Paul Butterfield’s Better Days and was recording a solo album, 1972’s Bobby Charles (Bearsville) that featured his new friends. The Band’s Rick Danko co-produced the project and co-wrote the album’s only single, “Small Town Talk.” The project received the rave reviews it deserved but sold poorly. Charles stayed in Woodstock for a while, and appeared on two Butterfield albums and the Band’s The Last Waltz.

The most enduring song from Bobby Charles was “Tennessee Blues,” a near-perfect song of yearning for escape from a bad situation. Backed by Garth Hudson’s fluttery accordion and buoyed by a swooning melody, Charles sang with a dreamy ache of a house by a lake far from everything that had gone wrong in Tennessee. Since then, the tune has been done every which way. Tommy McClain and Johnnie Allan cut swamp pop versions, while Kris Kristofferson and Tompall Glaser cut outlaw-country versions. Doug Sahm did it as Tex-Mex, J.D. Crowe as bluegrass, and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown as blues.

Among the performers at this year’s Jazz Fest, Don Rich recorded “Tennessee Blues” on his 2002 album, Come Back to Me (Jin). Shannon McNally recorded it on her 2005 album Geronimo (Back Porch).

“But I Do”

In 1960, after he was unable to follow up the success of his 1957 smash “Ain’t Got No Home,” Clarence “Frogman” Henry looked like another one-hit wonder. But Chess Records was willing to give him one more chance and turned him over to 22-year-old genius Allen Toussaint, who had just produced Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-in-Law.”

Toussaint was desperate for material, so when Charles showed up with a batch of songs, Toussaint decided to use them all. The key tune was an older song, “I Don’t Know Why,” that Toussaint renamed “But I Do” to avoid confusion with the standard “I Don’t Know Why I Love You Like I Do.” Nat Perrilliat played the honking sax intro, and Henry warbled the romantic pledge over a classic New Orleans shuffle and horn chart.

“But I Do” jumped up to No. 4 on the pop charts, much higher than his first hit, and established the singer as a long-term entertainer. The original single can be heard on the 1994 anthology, Ain’t Got No Home: The Best of Clarence “Frogman” Henry (Chess/MCA), a collection that also includes five more Bobby Charles compositions.

Charles’ own version of the song is on his 1998 album, Secrets of the Heart (Stony Plain). Warren Storm recorded the song for Huey Meaux’s Crazy Cajun label in the 1970s. The song has also been recorded by Tom Jones, Freddy Fender, Ronnie Milsap, Marcia Griffiths, Charley Pride, Dobie Gray, Tommy Roe and the Walker Brothers.

“The Jealous Kind”

Charles wrote “The Jealous Kind” in the early 1960s, but he could never convince anyone to record it until Joe Cocker included it on his 1976 album, Stingray. As soon as people heard this slinky, midtempo confession of the green-eyed curse, they recognized it as an R&B classic. There was something about the way the push-and-pull of the lyrics—the singer knows he shouldn’t be jealous, but he can’t help himself—was reinforced by the push-and-pull of the rhythm. Ray Charles recorded it in 1977, Delbert McClinton in 1980, Etta James in 1989, and Johnny Adams in 1993—great versions all.

“Ray Charles told me one time it was one of his favorite songs to do live,” Bobby Charles said on his Secrets of the Heart album. “He always got an audience reaction out of it, because there wasn’t anyone sitting in there who wasn’t jealous of something.”

Charles’ original demo of the song is included on An Introduction to Bobby Charles; a later version featuring a Sonny Landreth guitar solo can be heard on Last Train to Memphis.

“Why Are People Like That”

When Paul Butterfield, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson helped Muddy Waters record his Woodstock Album (Chess/MCA) in 1975, they convinced the Chicago blues giant to kick off the disc with “Why Are People Like That” by their Cajun pal. It couldn’t have taken much convincing, for the song is simultaneously the sharpest social satire and down-and-dirtiest blues that Charles ever wrote. Over Butterfield’s snarling harmonica, Helm’s stabbing drums and Hudson’s bleating organ, Waters’ bottomless baritone bellowed, “They take your house and your home / they take the flesh from your bone / they take the shirt off your back. / Hey, how come people act like that?”

The track launched the best album of Waters’ late career. The song was so impressive, in fact, that no less than three of Waters’ former band members—Junior Wells, Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson and Bob Margolin—all subsequently recorded the song as did Gatemouth Brown. Tab Benoit recorded it on his 2006 album, Brother to the Blues (Telarc). When Charles recorded it himself on Last Train to Memphis, Derek Trucks played the lead guitar.

The 2005 Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival was everything Jazz Fest used to be: small, local and funky. Out-of-towners made up maybe 10 per cent of the crowd, which was dominated by grandparents in their lawn chairs, married couples sharing paper plates of crawfish and teenagers in tight T-shirts glancing over their shoulders at groups of the opposite sex. Between the food booths offering a dozen ways to eat crawfish and beneath the brightly lit Ferris wheel were two outdoor stages and one stage inside a tent, each with its own crowded dance floor.

Every time you turned around, Steve Riley was on one of those stages. There he was with his brown buzz cut, beach shirt, faded jeans and button accordion leading his regular Cajun band, the Mamou Playboys. There he was alongside David Egan in the latest version of the swamp pop all-stars, Lil’ Band o’ Gold. There he was alongside Kevin Wimmer, Mitch Reed, Chris Stafford and Glen Fields in the traditional Creole band Racines. There he was as the guest soloist with Stafford’s teenage band Feufollet, whose records Riley has produced.

It was as if Riley were so anxious to play every permutation of South Louisiana’s music that he couldn’t resist any chance to try a new twist. “Years ago,” Riley explains, “Dewey (Balfa) used to tell me, ‘Music is freedom. Try to do as many different things as you can.’ He wasn’t one of those old guys who say, ‘You have to do it this way.’ He knew it was all about expression. So I took my cue from him. The music community down here is so rich that it’s hard to resist getting involved. I try to make room for all of it. Sometimes it’s tricky to make it all work, but it’s not too hard and it’s worth it, because it keeps you from getting stale.”

David Greely, Riley’s longtime partner in the Mamou Playboys, takes a very different approach. The fiddler and singer, as tall and thin as his bandmate is short and stocky, wore a blue baseball cap and a gray goatee as he stood next to Riley during the Playboys’ set at the festival. But that was the only time you saw him; he didn’t even play with Lil’ Band o’ Gold, a group he co-founded. As Riley is broadening his focus, Greely is narrowing his, concentrating more and more intently on traditional Cajun and Creole music.

“I left Lil’ Band o’ Gold mainly because I wanted to spend more time with Cajun music,” Greely explains. “I woke up once and realized I was on a two-week tour with a nine-piece band playing third saxophone and I hadn’t even brought my fiddle. I love Lil’ Band o’ Gold and I’m always glad to hear them. Now I get to watch David Ransom and Warren Storm, which I could never do onstage when I was standing in front of them. Finding harmony parts in a horn section was fun, but I don’t think that’s my calling.

“My calling is digging deeper into Cajun culture. I like that feeling of connection with history, with the people who came before us and what they’ve done. The more I learn by researching old tunes on record or at the library, the more I can create new tunes for the band.”

Riley and Greely may be pursuing very different approaches, but they’re both responding to the same challenge: how do you create something new inside an old tradition? Greely’s response is to absorb the roots of Cajun music so thoroughly that they become second nature. Then, when he tries to express his own feelings, the tradition will be part of the expression because it’s part of him. Riley’s response is to investigate every branch of the Cajun tree—from swamp pop to Cajun rock, from Creole to zydeco—so he can understand all the possible extensions of the tradition. So when he tries to express himself, he has at his fingertips multiple options that are all still part of Cajun music.

Riley and Greely insist that their contrasting strategies have strengthened the Mamou Playboys, and the proof is in the shows they’ve given in support of their 2005 album Dominos. With Riley and Greely joined by guitarist Sam Broussard, bassist Brazos Huval and drummer Kevin Dugas, the quintet always keeps the dancers moving even as they reach further back for older traditions and push forward into unprecedented territory.

It’s a tricky proposition when you try to create new work in a tradition as strong as Cajun music. If you change too much, the continuity ruptures; if you change too little, the culture calcifies. Dominos hits that sweet spot in the middle. Older songs by Cajun greats such as D.L. Menard and Dennis McGee and Creole legends such as Amede Ardoin and Canray Fontenot sit comfortably next to new songs by Greely, Riley and Broussard. The distance between past and future shrinks even further when Greely adds new music to an antebellum Creole slave poem, “Marie Mouri/Marie Has Died,” or when he adds new lyrics to “Mazurka” by the old Cajun fiddler Varise Conner.

The sound echoes an earlier era, but the dance rhythms are often pushed along by electric bass and drums; the improvisations and expanded harmonies betray modern ambitions. Those ambitions are especially evident when Riley’s squeezebox pushes the “Ardoin Medley” from traditional to rocking, or when he injects “Wait Till I Finish Crying” with a New Orleans R&B feel. The CD also reflects how democratic the band has become: Riley takes five lead vocals; Greely takes five, and Broussard takes one.

“The fact that Steve and I take such different approaches helps the band,” Greely insists, “because it brings more to the pot. Steve is a very mercurial character musically. He gets easily bored, which is one of the things I love about him. As his musicianship has grown, he’s been able to try a lot more different things. All that music that’s in him has to come out, and because he has those other vehicles to let them out, he can be more focused when he’s with the Playboys. If the Mamou Playboys got onstage and did anything and everything, we wouldn’t be the Mamou Playboys anymore.”

For those who remember Riley as a baby-faced teenager in Dewey Balfa’s band in the ’80s, it’s a bit sobering to realize that he is one of the most respected veterans of the music today. One measure of his longevity is that Rounder Records is now planning a “Best of…” retrospective drawn from the 10—count ’em, 10—albums released by Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys. Another measure is the number of younger musicians in Acadiana who approach Riley for advice or even to ask him to produce their records.

He has produced both of Feufollet’s albums, and he is currently working on the debut album from the Figs, an all-female, old-time string band in the vein of Uncle Earl or Crooked Still. They don’t sing a lick of French, but Riley embraced them nonetheless because they are a popular part of the Lafayette roots music scene. In a way, he’s passing on the tradition to these younger musicians the same way Dewey did to him. But it’s not quite the same.

“To me, as a kid, Dewey was like John Lennon,” Riley recalls. “He was a giant, and I was a fan before I joined his band. The age difference between me and Dewey was much greater than the difference between me and the members of Feufollet or the Figs. They’re more my friends. In fact, the Figs asked me to produce their record when I was out drinking with a couple of them.”

Feufollet’s Chris Stafford is Riley’s bandmate in Racines, the quintet that also features Kevin Wimmer and Glen Fields of the Red Stick Ramblers and Mitch Reed of Charivari and BeauSoleil. The word “racines” is French for “roots,” and the band grew out of Riley’s desire to explore those Creole songs that were bluesier than most Cajun songs and more fiddle-flavored than most zydeco. The band’s 2006 debut album, Racines, featured tunes by Ambrose Sam, Boozoo Chavis, Nathan Abshire and especially Dennis McGee, the Cajun fiddler who worked with Creole accordionist Amede Ardoin.

“I heard a tape of Kevin and Mitch playing fiddles together at Festivals Acadiennes in the late ’90s,” Riley remembers. “They were playing songs I had never heard and with a power I never thought two fiddles could get. So during a slow winter (2003-2004) I said, ‘Let’s put a little band together to play the clubs in town for less money than the Playboys would charge.’ Kevin has this great record collection of old Creole tunes, so I went to his house and we started learning these old songs.”

Racines has also contributed two songs to the compilation album Allons Boire un Coup: A Collection of Cajun and Creole Drinking Songs. The disc—which also features Feufollet, the Pine Leaf Boys, the Red Stick Ramblers, Ann Savoy and the Lost Bayou Ramblers—is a good introduction to the revived Cajun scene around Lafayette these days. The album was organized and produced by Joel Savoy (Marc and Ann’s son) for his new label, Valcour Records. Valcour has already released an album by Corey Ledet and the Pine Leaf Boys’ Cedric Watson and will release the Figs’ debut when Riley finishes it.

If Greely and Wimmer represent the traditional pole of Riley’s interests, C.C. Adcock represents the modern pole. If Greely and Wimmer admire the lilting lyricism of old Cajun and Creole songs, Adcock loves the pounding beat of swamp pop, zydeco and roots rock ’n’ roll.

If Greely and Wimmer are happy to stay home learning fiddle licks off obscure records, Adcock prefers to hit the clubs—and Riley is glad to tag along. And whenever the two bar-hoppers hear a rocking beat they can’t get enough of, they decide to form a band.

When they got to know the zydeco guitarist Lil’ Buck Sinegal, for example, Riley and Adcock convinced the aging legend to start a new band with them. They recruited Curley Taylor on drums and Lee Allen Zeno on bass and called the quintet Cowboy Stew. When Adcock and Riley got to know swamp pop singer Warren Storm in the late ’90s, they convinced him to start another—Lil’ Band o’ Gold.

For a group that has only released one album—and that one seven years ago—quite a legend has grown up around Lil’ Band o’ Gold. Part of the legend stems from the resumes of the original line-up: Riley, Greely, Adcock, swamp-pop star Warren Storm, ex-File pianist David Egan, ex-BeauSoleil saxophonist Pat Breaux, Sonny Landreth’s bassist David Ranson (and recently, Shreveport rocker Kenny Bill Stinson), session saxophonist Dickie Landry and steel guitarist Richard Comeaux. But most of the legend stems from the group’s infrequent but stunning live shows.

Riley and Adcock are the group’s prime movers, but the 70-year-old Storm is the undisputed star. His combed-back hair and drooping mustache are dyed jet black, and his velvety baritone similarly defies the toll of time. When he sings a broken-hearted ballad such as “7 Letters,” he knocks out the tricky 6/8 beat on the drums with a minimum of fuss and infuses the lyrics with the pain of a fresh wound. Anyone who witnesses something like that is immediately hungry for more.

“Steve and I used to go see Warren at the Four Seasons and Yesterdays (in Lafayette) all the time,” Adcock says, “and he still sounded great. We kept telling each other, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could be in a band with him and hear him through the monitors?’ So we kept asking Warren if he would come and jam with us and finally he said yes. So in 1998 Lil’ Band o’ Gold started playing every Monday night at the Swampwater Saloon in Lafayette.”

“We started out just wanting to play with one of the great singers of all time and to play all those swamp-pop and Louisiana rock ’n’ roll songs we couldn’t do with our regular bands. But the very first night we played, there was so much energy onstage, such a sense that it was a real band rather than just some guys jamming, that I immediately knew it would never be enough to just be a live jukebox, even though that was the original intention.”

Since it formed, Lil’ Band o’ Gold has played with Phil Phillips, Tommy McClain and the legends of swamp pop at Jazz Fest, southern soul heroes during Ponderosa Stomps, and recently—without Riley—were the house band for OffBeat’s tribute to New Orleans’ rock ’n’ roll legend Fats Domino. They started work on a second album in 2003 before funding fell through, but the London-based company Room 609 is financing a new album and The Promised Land, a documentary about the band.

“We’re a great back-up band and I’m glad we still get to do that,” Adcock says. “But that’s not all we can do. As much as you love your influences, your influences should lead you to something new. At the same time you’re learning all the traditions of the culture, you realize that there’s this need to create as well as inherit. That happened to Steve and David with the Playboys; it happened to me with my band, and it happened with Lil’ Band o’ Gold.”

Meanwhile, Greely, retired from the Lil’ Band o’ Gold, plays solo fiddle shows at the Café des Amis near his home in St. Martin Parish and continues his exploration of Cajun culture. One day, when researching the genealogy of his mother’s family at the Breaux Bridge Library, he came across a book from 1940 called Louisiana Creole Dialect, and as examples of that dialect, one chapter offered five poems by a slave known only as Pierre. They included the caustic commentary on slavery, “Gros Jean,” and an anguished lament for a dead lover, “Marie Mouri.” Both of them have been recorded by the Mamou Playboys, and “Marie Mouri” has also been recorded by Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy as the Zozo Sisters.

For Greely, creating new music for these ancient poems is the perfect example of how to keep a tradition alive. “When a tune or a lyric gets passed down through old traditions,” he says, “it gets distilled like moonshine. Its most potent elements stay and everything else falls to the wayside. That’s why I like to take something from the oral tradition and make something new of it. It’s like a hinge, and my new song can swivel on that old song or that old story. It’s like a potato; you have to cut up an old potato to make new potatoes.”

“Tradition is a lot like the button accordion,” Steve Riley says. “The fact that it has limits forces you to come up with these simple but very catchy riffs. The riffs are new but the sound is forever.”