Anyone who’s witnessed Glen David Andrews on a good night knows he is capable of being the most charismatic performer in New Orleans. Up until now, you had to be there to appreciate his talent, though. His 2004 Dumaine Street Blues demonstrated his capabilities playing traditional jazz and New Orleans street favorites quite well but didn’t distinguish itself from many similar recordings. 2009’s live Walking Through Heaven’s Gate captured GDA’s impressive gospel roots, but technical difficulties made the album a less than perfect medium for his galvanic talents. Finally, Live at Three Muses captures the full force of GDA’s live act for posterity. The Frenchmen Street club decided to record all of its regular acts over the summer of 2011 with the idea of putting together a compilation record. In the process, Andrews managed to condense his peripatetic performance into the perfect live recording.

Andrews can be sprawling from set to set, brilliantly unpredictable and over the top. He takes so many chances that his moves don’t always work, but he adjusts to the moment so it’s always just a short wait until the next spectacular turn. But on this record, he exercised outstanding discipline in charting a program that takes him through the full range of New Orleans styles he excels at without taking a breath.

Andrews starts out with “Basin Street Blues,” a traditional New Orleans jazz vehicle that has been a live staple for over 80 years, but his delivery is straight out of tonight. He uses the song to celebrate the New Orleans music scene as it is right now:

Preservation Hall will be here to greet you
Dr. John will be here to greet you
Charmaine Neville will be here to greet you
Aaron Neville will be here to greet you
Cyril Neville will be here to greet you
And Trombone Shorty will be here to swing you…

John Boutte will be here to greet you
James Andrews will be here to greet you
Glen Andrews will be here to greet you
Terence Blanchard will be here to greet you
Papa Grows Funk will be here to greet you
The music of Mahalia Jackson will be here to greet you
The spirit of Louis Armstrong will be here to greet you

Andrews delivers these lines like a hip-hop MC working up a crowd with neighborhood shout-outs, then moves into a recasting of Boutte’s “Treme Song,” personalizing it with new lyrics and an urgent, double-time arrangement that surges into the Andrews original “Flat Like That (Get That Gator),” a manic dance piece that moves on drummer Jamal Watson’s relentless pulse.

Andrews then breaks it down with a meditative, gospel-influenced take on “At the Foot of Canal Street,” framed by fervent piano accompaniment from Kyle Roussel. This radically transformed version of the song is typical of the way Andrews deconstructs material, basically taking the title and a few phrases and turning it into his own vehicle. It’s another example, along with the frantic pace of his beats, of how contemporary Andrews’ instincts are. Just as hip-hop artists treat preexisting songs as readymades for their own compositions, Andrews appropriates freely, dropping pieces from disparate places into the mix. His genius lies in the fact that he’s never copying other people’s music, but always reimagining it. When he says, “How about it for John Boutte and Paul Sanchez for writing such a beautiful song?” it’s more like a name check than an acknowledgement of the song itself, which is recognizable in Andrews’ version only by the use of the title.

Having given the crowd a breather, GDA launches immediately into the driving riff of “Rock Star (Like Mike),” written with cousin Trombone Shorty and Mike Ballard, which segues to the heavy brass instrumental “Whatever Happened to Peanut,” written with another cousin, trombonist Revert “Peanut” Andrews. The crowd is so hyped by the end of this track that you can hear people screaming out the melody line. Suddenly, we’re into another of GDA’s reimaginings, this time a radical revision of Monk Boudreaux’s “Bury the Hatchet” which becomes a medium for Andrews’ riveting sermon about black-on-black crime in New Orleans.

Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina” gets about the most straightforward rendition of anything on the album, a great medium for both Roussel and Watson. As Roussel plays his solo choruses, Andrews goes into a reverie, sending out a message to a 93-year-old female fan from Chicago with cancer. GDA is in the pulpit, declaring, “I believe someday we’re going to find a cure for cancer,” then asking the audience to “put your hands up for everyone who’s suffered from this horrible disease.” This kind of metaphysical shift seems to occur spontaneously in a GDA show and offers the perfect set- up for a nearly 10-minute-long gospel medley. Andrews is most at home in this medium, and while it lacks the authenticity of Walking Through Heaven’s Gate, this performance employs the crowd- pleasing usefulness of gospel material in a pop context, leading into “Saints” and the “Who Dat” chant. Heading from one old school to another, GDA leads the band into a Brothers Johnson groove based on “I Want You.” This is the real climax of the show, with a Dr. John tribute offered as a little lagniappe: “I will, I will melt your heart like butter.”

Some complain that GDA merely mines preexisting genres of New Orleans music for narrow focused tourist mongering. I hear a transformational character in New Orleans music, redefining classic works by bringing contemporary elements to them and infusing them with the force of his personality. When you hear a performer say “Somebody scream!” usually you’re getting a rote suggestion devoid of context or imperative. When GDA addresses the crowd, he’s issuing a personal command and he gets a personal response. He’s taken the rote out of the tradition. What you get at a good GDA performance is something akin to the sheer athleticism and unrelenting flow of a Celtics-Lakers NBA final. And finally, thanks to Three Muses and a brilliant engineering job by Michael Seaman, you can bring that experience home with you.

Coco Robicheaux. Photo by Jef Jaisun.

Debbie Davis stood just inside the doorway of Three Muses, singing “When I’m 64.” It was Friday night on Frenchmen Street, the day after Thanksgiving, and she held the festive crowd’s attention. “I saw the ambulance go by but I didn’t think anything of it,” she says. “Someone came into the club and told me Coco Robicheaux had just been taken in an ambulance from the Apple Barrel. His heart had stopped, and they couldn’t revive him.”

Davis told her audience what had happened. A pall came over the room, a sense of sudden, irreversible loss that overwhelmed the normally carefree Frenchmen Street revelers.

Davis said she was surprised at how much the news upset her. “I wasn’t really close, but I got to know him after the flood,” she says. “Those of us who got back first got the gigs, and he was there right away.”

The final chapter in the legend of Coco Robicheaux is the impact his loss has had on the closely-knit downtown community. His garrulous spirit led him to converse with anyone he came into contact with. As a result he leaves a much deeper mark on New Orleans than the music he left behind might suggest.

“He was a social conduit,” says Davis. “Everyone you met knew Coco as well so you always had a starting point for a conversation. He was the Kevin Bacon of Frenchmen Street—Six Degrees of Coco Robicheaux.”

It seemed like almost every time I walked down Frenchmen Street, I saw Coco Robicheaux. He liked to sit on the bench in front of the Apple Barrel, smoking a cigar and talking to passersby, or inside the bar drinking tequila. He would converse with great detail on any subject that might come up, or start in on one of his own shaggy-dog-story life experiences. He presided over a number of eccentric and unique marriage ceremonies, and even performed some hands-on faith healing exercises that his patients swore by.

Photo by Marie-Dominique Verdier.

I guess I must have seen him play at 15 different bars around the Marigny-Bywater area. Like so many New Orleans musicians of legend, he spent a lot more of his creative energy on live performance than studio work. He wanted to see the looks on the faces of the audiences. The last time I spoke to him at length, he talked about how much he enjoyed playing for prison inmates and how he wrote a song called “Sittin’ On Death Row”. Though he worked the clubs, he was the apotheosis of the New Orleans street musician—a man with a guitar and a tale to tell. Like all good storytellers, he was not afraid of adding embellishments, exaggerations or alternative interpretations of the events he described, a habit that led some to question his veracity. But even those who were skeptical of Coco’s rambles through history liked him. His friendliness and loving, giving spirit was irresistible.

Such skepticism has led some to question details of his biography, but like any American legend, the spirit he leaves behind is more important than the details. American legends are frontier characters, explorers on an uncertain journey of discovery, and Coco had that restless mystery about him.

Born Curtis Arceneaux into a Cajun/Choctaw Indian family, he gave out a number of different accounts of his biography over the years, introducing a lot of different elements without truly contradicting himself. He moved around so much, in fact, he might well have been excused for offering some confusing scenarios. Though his family was from Ascension Parish, he says he was born outside of Merced, California while his parents were vacationing. He told of a childhood working in the cane fields with migrant workers from Haiti who taught him to make reed flutes. He spent time in France traveling with his father, who was in the Air Force. He assisted his great grandmother, a hoodoo woman, in her ceremonies, an influence that runs through his music. Cousins Van and Grace Broussard were in the music business, and Curtis followed suit, playing trombone and singing in soul bands. He was playing guitar on Bourbon Street in the early ‘60s and tells of recording an album’s worth of material at Cosimo Matassa’s studio that mysteriously disappeared. After wandering out west as a migrant worker, he landed in San Francisco in time for the Summer of Love, but by ’69 he left the West Coast under something of a cloud, claiming someone had committed “terrible crimes” using his name.

From that point on he identified himself as Coco Robicheaux, a childhood nickname taken from a Louisiana folk tale about naughty children. If you did something bad, a kid’s parents likened you to the wicked Coco Robicheaux, who fell victim to the wolf monster Loup Garou. His name is a legend of its own, then, the identity of everybody’s bad self. It’s unlikely that Dr. John was referencing Curtis Arceneaux when he called out “Coco Robicheaux” during “Walk On Gilded Splinters”, but it’s possible they could have crossed paths before Mac went into involuntary exile from New Orleans himself in the mid-1960s. Calling yourself “Coco Robicheaux” is hoisting a heavy load of karmic baggage any way you look at it, but by the time he returned to New Orleans once and for all in 1992 after another legendary stay in Key West, Coco had completed his transformation into a hoodoo spiritualist. The 1994 classic Spiritland featured dense swamp rundowns like the title track, “Walking With the Spirit” and “St. John’s Eve,” which incorporated field recordings from Bogue Falaya. Frenchmen Street denizens populated the album credits, which included Irene Sage, Lenny McDaniel, Allison Miner, Nancy Buchan, Smokey Greenwell, Hart McNee, Kenny Holladay, Tommy Malone, Sonny Schneidau and Coco’s perennial sidekick Michael Sklar.

A follow-up album, Louisiana Medicine Man, plowed much of the same musical turf with some of the same musicians. The title track got considerable airplay and appeared on the benefit album for the Musicians Clinic, Get You A Healin’. Louisiana Medicine Man got the award for Best Blues Album at the 1998 Best of the Beat Awards. Hoodoo Party (2002) further codified Coco’s swamp mystic identity with tracks such as “Burn My Bones,” “Li’l Black Hen,” “Thrift Store Suit” and the title track. In the last few years, Coco put out several albums with overlapping material. Yeah, U Rite! attempts to expand his style, most successfully with the witty “Ten Commandments of the Blues.” For some reason he decided to remix most of the tracks for another version of the same record, Like I Said, Yeah, U Rite, which dropped a couple of tracks and included what would become the title tune of his final album, the covers-heavy Revelator.

For those who didn’t know him, Coco will probably be best remembered for sacrificing a chicken while on air at WWOZ on the HBO series Treme, and for his astonishingly well-attended second line on December 12. What began as a small crowd assembled in front of the Apple Barrel swelled to a throng of thousands parading down Royal Street through the French Quarter, following a brass band led by James Andrews and Uncle Lionel Batiste. The crowd sang and chanted as they marched, shouting, “Coco. Coco. Coco.”

If you didn’t know Robicheaux, well, there’s no amount of storytelling that can make up the difference. Like New Orleans itself, if you haven’t been there, you’ll never really know what people are talking about.

Coco’s second line was sandwiched in between two musical tributes to Frenchmen Street heroes which featured many of the same musicians. On Sunday night there was a benefit for Kenny Holladay’s family at Check Point Charlie. Monday after the second line revelers gathered at House of Blues for a free concert. Before he played, John Mooney said, “He got both feet in Spiritland now!” Lynn Drury went to the House of Blues just to be there, “out of love for him,” she says. “He was beautiful. He touched a lot of people. When I was coming up he was always a fixture, hanging out in the street, talking in front of the Apple Barrel. He connected everybody. He had time for everybody. I wasn’t invited to play, but when I showed up backstage, they said ‘You’re on next!’ It was a beautiful surprise. I hope we don’t have to wait until someone else dies to feel that spirit again. I learned something from that. I’m going to try to live up to that from now on. I felt I was in touch with something bigger than all of us.”

Anders Osborne was at both tributes, playing with Billy Iuso and with Andy J. Forest, who’d written a new song for Kenny Holladay and Coco:

Sometimes I imagine them both walking down the street
Nowhere left to go, no one left to meet
Blues in other rooms filter down from other dreams
Their spirits are on every corner down here in New Orleans

Back in the 20th Century when John Gros was enrolled in the George Porter, Jr. Academy of Funk as a member of the Runnin’ Pardners, he also held down a bread and butter gig playing for tourists at Tropical Isle. Gros never complained about playing the hits on Bourbon Street, though. He studied the crowds to see what hooks or choruses from the pop rock songbook people responded to. That pop savvy is one of the key elements that separates Papa Grows Funk from the rest of New Orleans funk hierarchy, even though funk’s reliance on the playing skills of band members made Gros’ instincts for pop hooks and catchy melodies a subtle subtext in the groove-heavy jams the band is known for.

PGF’s four albums have done a good job of translating the group’s energy in the studio, but Needle in the Groove is the first PGF recording that sounds like it was crafted to be a pop record. It is far from a Gros takeover, however—reedman Jason Mingledorff, guitarist June Yamagishi, bassist Marc Pero and drummer Jeffery “Jellybean” Alexander are all as important to the sound as Gros’ keyboards and vocals. Significantly, all the titles are credited to the group, although I’d guess that Gros brought at least “Make It Right Now,” “Planet of Love and Hate” and the title track to the table.

More importantly, the band called on two outside producers, Allen Toussaint and Better Than Ezra’s Tom Drummond, to make what could have easily become two distinct albums. The result is a great record that works out in the tracking order as a carefully constructed session of songs supervised by Drummond and designed for contemporary airplay sandwiching a classic New Orleans R&B session. Using Drummond’s work to frame the album and Toussaint to define the core identity of the band is a master conceptual stroke because everything on the album feels in its right place.

Drummond’s influence is most obvious on the opening track, “Do You Want It,” a group vocal over a popping bass line and electronically enhanced drum beats. The song is the most modern-sounding track on the record, and it segues into what has been one of the band’s most expansive recent live vehicles, “Make It Right Now.” But that song is positively sculpted here, with the keys to the band’s sound all in the details—Yamagishi’s subtle rhythm guitar track; the way Gros’ vocal hovers over the mix; the understated vocal chorus under Mingledorff’s tenor solo. Mingledorff is at the center of the first of Toussaint’s tracks, “Yes Ma’am,” playing the theme on alto and accenting it with a funky baritone overdub. The band is swinging on a clavinet-driven syncopation as intricate as a Cupertino motherboard, and when Yamagishi unleashes his one chorus solo, it’s clear the maestro has worked his magic.

Drummond’s meticulous handling of “Planet of Love and Hate” offers a revealing contrast between a style intended to craft a sound and Toussaint’s instinct for letting a band find its own direction, as he does brilliantly on the Meters-like instrumentals “Red Spark” and “Out of the Mud.” Gros gets a gorgeous B-3 organ solo on the former and Yamagishi plays his best choruses of the album on the latter. Toussaint’s stamp is also clear on the closest thing to a ‘60s R&B track on the record, Gros’ piano and vocal romp “Back Home,” a clear illustration of how he utilized that songwriting information he studied at Tropical Isle.

The band emerges from the fat mini-set of Toussaint-produced tracks into Drummond’s summation, the quick, airy instrumental “Rollo,” which appropriately “rollos” along on a crisply percolating bass line, and the finale, “Needle in the Groove.” This may be the most ambitious song Gros has ever written, and Drummond arranges the rhythm track to add drama to the story line.

Papa Grows Funk has established itself as one of the more popular New Orleans exports on the touring circuit, but the band’s ambition to become something even more led PGF to consult with two of the city’s great producers. The result is an album that defines the band once and for all.

James Singleton plays The Music Box in the Bywater. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

The dark, ramshackle house at 1027 Piety St. was a haunting presence on the block even before the flood. It was the oldest house on the street, dating back to the end of the 18th Century when it was surrounded by swamp and muddy sandbars built from the seasonal overflow of the Mississippi. Since 1999, wayfarers were constantly shuttling in and out of the place, congregating on the porch and playing an assortment of esoteric stringed instruments. At one point, a busload of clowns parked out front.

The punishing winds of the 2005 hurricanes pushed the old house closer to its demise, even as more artists and musicians came through. Caledonia “Swoon” Curry decorated the front porch with her ethereal wheat paste constructions. In 2010, Swoon came up with the idea of building what she called a Dithyrambalina—a house made with built-in musical instruments. With the cooperation of the property owner Jay Pennington (who works with bounce artist Big Freedia as DJ Rusty Lazer) and his partner in the New Orleans Airlift project, artist/curator Delaney Martin, Swoon constructed a small scale model of the Dithyrambalina and Martin began to organize the project.

Then the partially demolished house decided to make its own contribution.

Martin had approached the New Orleans Museum of Art, which had presented Swoon’s work “Thalassa” earlier this year, to help as a sponsor. “We had a meeting in the back yard and they were very supportive,” says Martin. “The subject of safety and insurance came up, and while we were assuring them that it would all be very safe, the building collapsed.”

The concept evolved into a series of nine shacks, including a quarter scale model of the Dithyrambalina, built out of the remains of the collapsed house and other material salvaged from post-Katrina ruins. Over the course of 2011, dozens of artists, musicians, artisans, builders and sound engineers—what Martin refers to as “our community”— built “The Music Box: A Shantytown Sound Laboratory” behind a fence covered by Swoon’s art with musical sculptor Taylor Lee Shepherd depicted at the center conjuring the Dithyrambalina.

By the time The Music Box opened to the public, it was every bit the little village its organizers dreamed of. At the head of the village is The Singing House, created by musical curator Quintron. A simple pole topped with a G-clef-design weather vane, funnels to collect rainwater, and a computer pad to reflect sunlight allows the weather to play the instrument, making sounds ranging from a clatter to a humming moan. “I’d been prototyping my weather-activated synthesizer for a while,” Quintron says as he pours water from a gallon jug labeled “Rain Water” into one of the funnels and nods approvingly at the sound it makes. “It has to be rain water because it’s more conductive than distilled water.” As we talk, a freight train rolls down Press Street and blows its horn. The Singing House moans in harmony. “It is in tune with the train whistle,” Quintron affirms. “It’s a major chord, E Major. We didn’t plan that. It was a nice coincidence. It’s the best idea I’ve had since the Drum Buddy, which was about 10 years ago.”

Mannie Fresh and Quintron at the Music Box. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

Across from The Singing House is Benjamin Mortimer’s Lookout Tower Drone Organ, a staircase-like construct built with pipes from the St. Matthews Church organ, which was destroyed during Katrina. Behind the tower is Micah Learned and Elizabeth Shannon’s small, beehive-shaped, glass-and-tin structure, Glass House, which contains the Tintinnabulation Station and Rattlewoofer. Angeliska Polacheck and Colin McIntyre built the Tintinnabulation Station out of what looks like a lace wedding dress draping the inside of the Glass House. The bells, chimes and percussion objects fastened to the fabric respond to the movement of anyone who enters the Glass House with a tinkling cacophony. Delaney Martin’s Rattlewoofer offers a bold contrast in sound. When the car subwoofer speaker installed into the back of the shack is triggered by a foot pedal, it literally rattles the house.

Further back, Jayme Kalal’s oyster shell-roofed Water-Organ evokes an ethereal, gurgling effect from keyboard-triggered sonic waves driven through water; and Aaron Taylor Kuffner’s The Gamelatron—Pendopo at the End of the Universe presents four Balinese gamelans triggered by an arcade button mandala. The random notes produced by this configuration are among the most distinctive and soothing sounds produced in the village.

Behind The Singing House are two structures by Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Nightingale House and Heartbeat House. Nightingale House includes the creaky-board Noise Floor by Rangit Bhatnagar and Patty O’Connor’s steel and copper contraption Echo Wall. Right next to it, and roughly at the center of the village, Heartbeat House contains the ingenious Thumper and Doppler by Rainger Pinney and Jonah Emerson-Bell. The simple instrument, a digital stethoscope connected to a set of spinning speakers, allows a heartbeat to set the base rhythm of any piece played by The Music Box orchestra.

Looming over the village is Eliza Zeitlin’s massive, two-story River House, which connects to Aaron Kellner’s Control Tower and Bridge. The River House is filled with musical curiosities, including a Percussion Lair designed by Ratty Scurvics; Rocking Chair, an evocative haunted house device by Simon Berz outfitted with strings that play through an old radio; and Ross Harmon’s Built-In Auto Harp and Bathtub Bass. Harmon also built a Hurdy-Gurdy Dulcimer into the structure.

Across the bridge into the Control Tower, Taylor Lee Shepherd’s Voxmurum allows people to talk, sing or rap into a microphone that creates audio loops triggered by mahogany panels fastened to the wall. The sounds emanate from behind the wall, creating the effect of listening to someone in the next room through thin walls. This versatile design was demonstrated to great effect when Big Freedia recorded some samples.

Theris Valdery in the Music Box. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

The village is open to the public on weekends and many visitors come to play it, but New Orleans Airlift organized three concerts with musicians from around the country who agreed to come and play the houses in three scores conducted by Quintron. The debut show on October 22 was a madhouse.

“We had people enter through the back on Rosalie Alley to keep from interfering with street traffic,” says Shepherd. “But the line still stretched all the way around the block to Piety Street.” Hundreds of people were turned away after the yard was completely filled. “People were offering $100 to come in,” says Shepherd. “Some people got really mad they couldn’t get in.”

Quintron was surprised at the response.

“Delaney envisioned creating a laboratory for sound and that’s exactly what this is,” he says. “It’s exceeded my wildest expectations of what it could be. This was my conducting debut. I’ve worked with the 9th Ward Marching Band, but this was true conducting when you’re looking at the performers and making eye contact and bringing them up or down in volume with the movement of your hands. We had an improvisational road map. I designed a nine-step sequence of events with a very loose set of signs that people could follow. In general, the musicians were chosen according to their ability to listen and improvise. My biggest concern initially was that the instruments would not be playable, but I wouldn’t have gotten involved if I didn’t think it would work. I really appreciate all the creativity that went into this.”

Mark Bingham of Piety Street Studios worked on the speaker system for the village and played the Gamelatron at the first concert. “We had three rehearsals,” he says. “We had a lot of plans, but as it turns out some of the houses were still being built at the last minute. We tried using monitors, but that didn’t work out so we relied on Quintron’s direction. There were parts where we all played together in a swell, then were some brief solo and duet parts. There was a score, kind of like one of those Glenn Branca scores from the 1980s where there’s no notation. It had to sound different depending on where you were. There were so many people there was no room, so they had to sit in the dirt.”

Quintron promises that The Music Box will close out its run with a bang on December 10.

“Probably my favorite improvisational drummer in the world, Michael Zerang, is coming in for that one. Andrew WK is coming from New York, although I know him from Detroit. A bunch of noise musicians from Detroit will be involved. This one’s gonna be noisy and as high energy as you can get on this stuff.”

The New Orleans Airlift plans to decommission the village after the final concert. But completing the Dithyrambalina, with the elements of The Music Box built into it, remains the long-term goal.

Bonerama. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

New Orleans is full of musicians who epitomize the genre-busting goal of turning old school New Orleans music into an egalitarian mash-up, and no one has done more to realize this goal than Mark Mullins. The suave trombonist paid his dues in the tradition, earning his funk stripes playing in bassist George Porter, Jr.’s band and his jazz props as a member of the Harry Connick, Jr. Orchestra. Back in the late 1990s, Mullins co-led a brilliant but ultimately failed effort to combine funk and rock with John Gros in the band Mulebone. Mullins was restless in his pursuit of a style that would satisfy his desire to play jazz, funk and rock in the same band, and when Tipitina’s French Quarter club offered him a mid-week slot to present his ideas, Mullins and his trombonist partner in the Connick group, Craig Klein, put out a call to their brass brethren and assembled a trombone orchestra that was quickly dubbed Bonerama.

Bonerama has evolved over its 13 years into a powerful live band and a valued brass section utilized on recordings by OK Go and R.E.M. among others. A longstanding relationship with the Radiators took on another aspect following the Rads’ breakup earlier this year when Radiators’ front man Dave Malone was asked to join Bonerama as a guest vocalist and guitarist. The first collaboration of what Rads fans are now calling Malonerama was a huge success; on a recent Wednesday afternoon in Lafayette Square, Malone sounded like he’s been in this band for years, joining in on Bonerama’s “Shake Your Rugalator,” singing the Radiators’ classics “Confidential” and “Like Dreamers Do,” and giving voice to great covers of “I Like It Like That” and “Whipping Post.”

“We try to allow ourselves to change our approach and take risks,” says Mullins. “We all come from different backgrounds and we’re not afraid to put those together. I grew up listening to a lot of rock and the trombone wasn’t necessarily well-suited to play all the things I had in my head. Craig comes from a different background—he’s well versed in the New Orleans music tradition. When you put those things together with what everyone else brings to the group, it’s fun to see what happens. People talk about the arrangements, but the arrangements I’m most proud of, like “Crosstown Traffic” and “Frankenstein,” are more like transcriptions, not all that different from the originals. It’s fun to see people’s reactions when they hear something in a way they never thought they would hear it.”

The addition of Malone to the lineup adds a powerful lead vocal to the mix, but the collaboration had been in the cards. Mullins sat in with the Rads so many times he was nicknamed the sixth Radiator.

“I’ve been a fan of the Radiators for a long time,” says Klein. “I used to go see them at Luigi’s on Wednesday nights when it was free.

“If we were on the road and we had a day off and the Radiators were playing at some club that was 50 miles away, we’d say, ‘Let’s drive out there, just show up and blast away.’ They liked it. Dave was always just outgoing, a fun person. He was always the guy throwing riffs at us when we were on the stage and we’d throw things back at him. When the Radiators broke up, it was a natural thing to say, ‘Let’s get Dave and do some shows.’ We’d already started doing Radiators songs when we knew the end was coming. We were on the road so we missed “The Last Watusi,” but we probably played four or five Radiators songs that night. Voodoo was the second show. There will more than likely be a few others.”

Bonerama featuring Dave Malone of the Radiators plays Sunday, October 30 at 8 p.m. on the WWOZ Stage.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

Shreveport may be at the opposite end of Louisiana from New Orleans, but both cities play a part in the state’s rich musical heritage. The great blues singer/songwriter/guitarist Leadbelly was a formidable presence in Shreveport’s blues clubs during the 1920s, and the region has also been a home for blues musicians such as Jesse Thomas, Dorothy Prime and the Bluebirds. But the biggest noise out of Shreveport in recent years is guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd, a dynamic soloist with a fierce delivery on the Fender Stratocaster that has earned every one of his recordings the number one spot on the blues charts.

Like a lot of Louisiana musicians, Shepherd took musical influences from his father. In this case, it was his father’s record collection that inspired the young Shepherd to pick up a guitar. In those days, Ken Shepherd was a disc jockey and promoter whose collection of blues records fascinated his son, but Kenny Wayne really got the bug when his dad brought him to see Stevie Ray Vaughan perform. After seeing Vaughan, the 7-year-old boy decided on the spot that he wanted to play guitar for a living.

Shepherd taught himself by listening to his father’s records and copying licks note for note. After making his public debut at age 13 when he joined Bryan Lee onstage at the Old Absinthe House, Shepherd progressed, releasing his debut, Ledbetter Heights, at 17.

Blues fans and rock guitar buffs alike responded to the youngster’s high intensity playing. “Blue on Black,” a track from his 1997 release Trouble Is, stayed at number one on the rock charts for 17 weeks while the album topped the blues charts at the same time.

Photo by Elsa Hahne.

After releasing Live On in 1999, Shepherd waited five years before putting out another album, The Place You’re In. Shepherd dug back into his blues roots for the 2007 set 10 Days Out, playing with elder bluesmen such as Bryan Lee, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, B.B. King, Henry Townsend and David “Honeyboy” Edwards, who died last month.

Shepherd’s just-released album, How I Go, is his first blues rock set in seven years, and it shot right to the top of the blues charts upon its release. Shepherd took time to talk with OffBeat just before he was to play his first Shreveport concert in several years.

Using How I Go as the title of the record makes it seem like this is a statement of purpose about who you are right now.

Generally, what I’ve done in the past is used song titles as the title for the album. My first album, Ledbetter Heights, we named for the area of Shreveport where I’m from. This time I tried to look a little deeper and come up with something that represents where we’re at right now, what we’re trying to say with this album. But rather than choose a song title, I listened back to the songs and reviewed the lyrics of the songs. I was surprised to find out that we actually wrote the words “That’s how I go” twice in two different songs without actually realizing it. So that was one of the deciding factors. It’s a slightly recurring theme in the record and it’s really unintentional, but it makes the statement, “This is who we are; this is how we do things.”

How does your songwriting process work?

I sat around for the past several years with my little iPhone. Any time I had an idea, I would record it. I accumulated over 300 different guitar riffs and rhythm parts. When it came time to start writing songs, I started working on lyrics, then went into my library of digital guitar parts and started choosing the ones that I thought would be appropriate for the songs.

For the most part, it starts with the guitar, and that dictates the mood of the song. Then we start fashioning the melody. I pay a lot of attention to the production side of the record because I wrote the songs and I know what I want them to sound like.

Photo by Elsa Hahne.

It sounds like you put more thought and focus into this record.

I think it’s a little more refined, a little more mature. I’ve made a conscious effort to be very selective about what I play and not get into the habit of overplaying. So many guitar players want to show off how many notes they can cram into a phrase. That’s not what it’s about to me. Listening back to my heroes, the notes they played that moved me emotionally and reached my soul were the ones where they were just bending this one note and milking it for all it was worth, leaving a big, wide open space so you could hear the rest of the band behind it. Those are the things that I want to present to my listeners. So it’s more about feel and space and selecting the right notes than about playing as many notes as you can fit.

There’s a whole lot of music on this record, 17 songs.

I figure the fans have had to wait a while for this record, so I wanted to give them a lot to listen to. I write 25 to 35 songs for every album, so we have some great songs that we still haven’t cut from this record. I try to mix up the tempos and textures; it’s like a book or a movie. I look at the album as a whole body of work. I think the listener should hear it from the first song to the last song, and there should be certain peaks and valleys. It should take you on certain emotional journeys, paint different pictures in your mind.

Are you excited about playing the Crescent City Blues and BBQ Festival?

I like playing in New Orleans any chance I can get. We plan on putting on a great show. Sometimes when there are friends of ours that live in New Orleans we try to bring people up on stage to jam, people like Bryan Lee, Art Neville. When I was 13 years old and I made my first demos in a studio in Metairie, Art came in and played Hammond organ on it. Nobody knew who I was back then. Back in the day before Gatemouth died, Gatemouth used to come out and jam with us too. Gatemouth was a character, a one-of-a-kind guy. He spoke his mind to everybody no matter what. He was an innovative player, for sure, a real genius at his craft, one hell of a guitar player. He used to come and hang out with us all night in the dressing room when we played at the House of Blues.

You also have had a number of exchanges with B.B. King. Any advice from him you can share?

He’s like a father to me. I’ve been playing blues since I was 15 years old and he’s taken me in, calls me son. He’s one of the finest examples of a human being. If there ever was a role model, I’d want to be like him when I grow up. He said a lot of inspirational things to me, gave me a lot of encouragement about my playing.

There’s a legendary story about you being discovered by Bryan Lee.

At the Old Absinthe House back when it was a real bar and not a daiquiri stand, I was down there with my dad and some of his friends. Me and my dad would drive down to New Orleans, sometimes on a weekly basis, to watch Bryan and his band play. On this particular evening, one of my dad’s friends went up and asked Bryan if he’d let me sit in. He agreed. He didn’t know who I was, but he said, “He can do two songs, then he’s got to get down because it’s my show and I’ve got to close the show.”

I did my two songs, and when it was time to get down he said, “You’re not going anywhere!” I ended up playing until two o’clock in the morning with him. I got my very first standing ovations. It was incredible. I’d never been on a stage before. It was a really good opportunity for me to see if I was cut out for doing this or not. It gave me the confidence to move forward. It was not very long after that that I found myself in the studio in Metairie with Art Neville doing my first demo, which we used to shop for a record deal. Then I put together my own band, and a year after that I signed that record deal.

So you feel New Orleans influenced you musically.

Absolutely. Some of the biggest turning points in my career happened down there. Playing with Bryan Lee, coming down there regularly to play, playing Jazz Fest and watching all those people down there—I was absorbing everything whenever I was down there. When I was doing my first record, we came down there and stayed in an apartment on Jackson Square. I wrote a bunch of songs for my first album down there in Jackson Square. I’d just sit out there on the balcony and write songs.

So you were listening to Tuba Fats play in the Square while you were writing songs?

Oh yeah. I got a lot of my musical influences from New Orleans.

Photo by Elsa Hahne.

Obviously your father was a very important part of your development. Did he interest you in music, or was it something that was just natural to you?

I think it was both. I was exposed to the music that I play now because of my dad. My family all loved the blues. My dad took me to all these concerts, and he worked for the radio, so I grew up hanging around the radio station and listening to all this music. I was constantly meeting musicians. My dad turned me on to all these blues players, and I really soaked it all up.

He told me the first concert he ever took me to was to see Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker when I was two years old. He took me to see Stevie Ray Vaughan when I was seven. I got to meet Stevie because my dad was putting on the Louisiana Music Festival that he did for a few years. The same thing happened to me every time I saw him play, and I saw Stevie Ray play several times. I was completely mesmerized by him and what he did and the way he played. I remember sitting there and not taking my eyes off of him from the moment he started to the moment he was done.

Hendrix is probably one of the other biggest influences on me as a guitar player and as a performer. Watching Jimi Hendrix gave me the idea of how to play outside the box and not be confined musically. You can see the influence visually he’s had on me as well when you see me onstage. That’s why I started playing the Strat, but once I started playing, it became like part of me. My first guitar was a wannabe Strat. The feel of that guitar is so natural to me that anything else feels a little bit awkward.

Everybody has their influences. We all started playing the guitar because somebody inspired us to pick up the instrument. When I started out, I spent many hours learning Stevie Ray Vaughan songs and ZZ Top songs and Jimi Hendrix songs, B.B. King, Albert King and Albert Collins. All of that is what taught me how to play the guitar, how to cultivate my sound as a guitarist. All of those people, their music is going to have a presence in my music. I don’t copy anything, but there’s no denying that those people are responsible for me playing the instrument, and all those years that I spent learning how to play and listening to all that stuff, it’s going to find a way into my music.

Are you influencing younger players in turn?

I get a lot of messages on Facebook and Twitter and stuff. Just the other day I got one that said, “Hey man, I saw you play. I’m 16 years old and you’re the whole reason I play guitar.” I remember what it’s like to be that kid, what it’s like to listen to these guys play and think they’re like Superman to me on guitar. Looking at them on the cover of guitar magazines and imagining what it would be like to be one of those guys.

And now you are. Is there anyone you haven’t played with who’s still alive that you would like to play with?

I haven’t had the chance to play with Clapton yet. I’d love to have the opportunity to play with him.

You said you’d like to keep playing until you’re 80. The music scene is changing all the time. What do you project for yourself down the road?

Blues never goes out of style. As long as I remain true to myself and my fans, I’ll keep going. Look at Pinetop Perkins, man. He just passed away, but he was 97 years old and he was still playing. Blues is 100 years old now. It has its ups and downs, but it never completely goes away and there’s always an audience for it. Blues players are lifelong players, you know?

All of that aside, I can’t imagine being alive without a guitar in my hands. It doesn’t matter how old I am as long as I can move my fingers. I can’t imagine not playing the guitar. Muddy Waters was great right up until the end. Hard Again, 1977, was one of the greatest blues albums of all time.

I’m 34. I don’t want to think about a legacy. I do want to leave something behind that we can all be proud of. I want to make everybody proud. My kids listen to this stuff. When you make records, they’re out there forever. I just want to do stuff that my kids will be proud to say that their dad did this.

Wardell Quezergue. Photo by Greg Miles.

On the bright late summer morning of September 12 the crème fraiche façade of Corpus Christi-Epiphany Church gleamed optimistically amid this still-blighted Seventh Ward neighborhood along St. Bernard Avenue. Inside the packed church, many of the surviving players from the glory days of New Orleans R&B gathered to send off Wardell Quezergue, an arranger so gifted he was able to transform New Orleans music using only a pen and his signature instrument, a tuning fork.

Quezergue’s funeral didn’t generate the massive public event that peers like Ernie K-Doe and Snooks Eaglin precipitated, but it was impossible to ignore the number of musicians who turned out to pay their respects.

“I can look out and see all the faces of the artists and musicians who are here today,” said Rev. Godwin Akpan, who celebrated the Mass, “and know that his life has not been in vain.”

Most of the musicians on hand had personal as well as professional ties to Quezergue. Deacon John delivered a tribute to Quezergue during the ceremony, tracing a relationship that goes back to childhood.

Wardell’s Finest

After Quezergue’s passing, OffBeat put together a six-hour playlist on Spotify of songs he recorded or produced, and people still told us about songs we missed. It would take an entire issue to write about all of his noteworthy tracks, but Dan Phillips from the blog Home of the Groove has selected some tracks that highlight facets of his work.

“The first time I met Wardell Quezergue was when I was a little boy,” he said, placing Quezergue alongside Allen Toussaint, Dave Bartholomew and Harold Battiste as the masterminds of New Orleans R&B. “My momma took me over to St. Mary’s Academy where my sisters played in the band. He was the band director. Later on I got to meet him professionally because Wardell wrote the string parts and did the piano playing on my very first recording session, ‘When I’m with You’ on the RIP label way back in 1962. He also did the arrangements on my last recording session, Deacon John’s Jump Blues and he can be seen conducting the orchestra at the live concert at the Orpheum. And also I’ve had the privilege of playing with Wardell on many of the recording sessions that he produced and arranged.

“Wardell was truly an inspiration and a tremendous asset to the music community,” Deacon John said. “He always tried to help somebody. He would never turn down a project. He gave his whole life to the promotion and promulgation of New Orleans culture. You can hear his signature on all of the recordings he produced and arranged. Wardell, he wouldn’t listen to the radio. He told me ‘I don’t want to listen to the radio because it’s going to mess up my mind. I don’t listen because it might make me think of that when I’m doing an arrangement, and I don’t want what I write to be like nothing else. I want to be influenced by what I hear in the real world.

“He was a prolific writer and arranger, one of the best minds this city has ever produced, and he came from such humble beginnings. He was born and raised in the Seventh Ward just like I was. Wardell was the Recording Secretary at the Negro Musicians Union when I first became a member in 1958. He was a lifelong member of the Musicians Union and he finally got to see me be President. I could talk about Wardell all night long but he was just a really nice guy. He never raised his voice and he knew how to get things done. Everybody in the house respected him.”

Mac Rebennack, who played in Wardell’s band the Royal Dukes of Rhythm long before he adopted the pseudonym of Dr. John, looked particularly solemn in a dark pinstripe suit as he left the church, stopping to greet his friend Smokey Johnson, who was seated in a wheelchair just outside the front door. Johnson was the drummer in Quezergue’s band when Mac played guitar with them.

Wardell Quezergue sheet music courtesy of Scott Billington.

“Me and Smokey and George French was his rhythm section right before I got shipped out of New Orleans,” said Rebennack. “We worked whatever gigs Wardell had and a lot of sessions with him. It was all cool. We backed Otis Redding when he came through and he had that first record he did, ‘These Arms of Mine.’ He was just starting out. Wardell didn’t even remember that. It cracks me up—somebody else said after all the people that the Royal Dukes of Rhythm backed up over a lot of years, it ain’t gonna be like he’s gonna remember one act out of a gajillion. He didn’t remember when I told him.”

Rebennack was filled with thoughts about Wardell, ranging from recording “Big Chief” with Professor Longhair (“Fess had never did a record where he did an overdub”) to a Joe Tex session the two did together that was never released, but which Rebennack recalled as one of the best things he ever did, to a track Wardell wrote for a session with Dave Bartholomew’s band.

“It was called ‘Concerto for Alto Sax’,” said Rebennack. “It was my favorite cut on that record. It just blew me away; Wardell just blew me away as an arranger. I played that record for two great arrangers, Slide Hampton and Joe Scott. Joe did all of the great stuff for Bobby Bland and Junior Parker at Duke and Peacock, and Slide Hampton did all that stuff with the great jazz bands. They both said he should be writing for Basie. They was right.”

Quezergue’s greatest moment with Dr. John may well have been the Grammy-winning Goin’ Back to New Orleans album, which opens with a jaw-dropping arrangement of Rebennack’s “Litanie Des Saints” inspired by Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Bamboula.”

“Wardell was like so special and so inspirational,” he said. “He was so spiritual in every direction; he was just an amazing cat. That’s the only record I ever had that was selling a whole lot of records in Africa and all around the Caribbean and all kind of places because it was a spiritual song. It was a spiritual piece and every time everything was done, it’s like it started from there.

Photo by Greg Miles.

“Everything I did with Wardell was a learning experience, from the stuff he did with the Neville Brothers, anybody we worked with, Earl King—it was always something special, something unique, it was always different. You never knew what to expect out of Wardell’s head. He’d take his tuning fork and write a chart; you never knew what to expect comin’ outta that chart. Even when he couldn’t see, when he was losing his eyesight, Wardell would dictate parts straight up. It was an amazing thing. His mind was amazing. He wrote scores in his head. I never did like that jacket for him ‘the Creole Beethoven’ because to me he was way more of anything than anybody could put a word on.”

When Dr. Ike Padnos asked Dr. John to play his old guitar-based material at the Ponderosa Stomp, Rebennack only agreed to do it when Padnos promised him Quezergue would be the arranger.

“I don’t think Mac was too enthused at the beginning, but he was happy with it at the end,” said Padnos as he joined the second line after the funeral. “Wardell had this uncanny ability when he was at a rehearsal. He could have the biggest band and he could always spot that one wrong note and he always had this tactful ability to point that out to the musician in a way that they wouldn’t get embarrassed but they understood what they had to do to get it right. It was remarkable to watch him take a song and shape it: Get this down. Okay, trumpets come in. Okay trombones. Gotta play that louder! You could just hand him anything and he knew what to do with it. How do you take ‘Morgus the Magnificent’ or ‘Storm Warning’ and arrange it for a big band? Wardell could do it.”

The second line after the funeral was a fitting tribute to Quezergue’s influence, a collection of many of the city’s greatest brass band musicians, including members of the Treme Brass Band, Preservation Hall, the Baby Boyz Brass Band and others. Roger Lewis was on baritone saxophone, Carl LeBlanc played banjo, Kermit Ruffins, Charlie Miller and James Andrews joined the trumpeters, Matt Perrine added sousaphone and the Bonerama front line played trombones.

“Wardell changed the way New Orleans music sounds,” said Mark Mullins, who writes arrangements for Bonerama. “I learned at a young age that an arranger’s stamp on a song can make or break it. Wardell did these treatments to New Orleans classics that are like a lesson book in how to take a great song and make it even greater.”

Quezergue’s total commitment to his art inspired the greatest loyalty in his musical peers.

“Any time Wardell called me for anything, I was gonna be there,” said Dr. John. “I don’t care what it was.”

His last call from Wardell was for a session with Will Porter, the last recording Quezergue worked on before his death.

“Wardell approved the final mixes of our project on Sunday, August 25,” said Porter, whose words about Quezergue’s historical importance at the funeral had members of the crowd shouting encouragement. “He cried and told me it was his best work. The tracks feature Leo Nocentelli, two duets with Dr. John, Bettye LaVette, Jimmy Haslip of the Yellowjackets, Barbara Lewis and the re-formed Womack Brothers. Twelve of the tracks are Bunchy Johnson’s last work. Doug Belote plays on the rest.”

Though Porter’s album is his last recording, Quezergue finished dictating the score of a final project within hours of his death, a second Creole Mass. As the mourners dispersed, saying final goodbyes, the church bells rang 12 times.

“He wrote a Passion of Christ thing,” said Dr. John. “That was kinda his goodbye. I really think there were some weird connections to all of that.”

Malone’s fans were particularly excited about plans to play with brother Tommy, best known for his work with the subdudes. The two have an interesting history together, as anyone who’s heard them as the Malone Rangers can attest. “That was more of an acoustic thing,” says Dave. “Tommy and I playing some country and folk songs from our childhood. We’re planning to put together a rock band and call it the Malone Sharks.”

Dave reunited with Tommy in September in both settings—an acoustic duo house show on Tommy’s birthday and a full band show at the Boom Boom Room in San Francisco.

Malone also announced a series of dates with Bonerama, including a performance at the Voodoo Experience on Halloween weekend. Bonerama’s Mark Mullins was a regular guest at Radiators shows, and Mullins and Craig Klein participated in the Rads’ final Jazz Fest set last May 8. Since the Rads broke up, Bonerama has been playing several of the band’s songs at their shows, so Malone should be a great fit.

Malone is also playing in a couple of high profile jam sessions combining various New Orleans musicians. On October 5, he’s part of a benefit show in New York City at The Canal Room for the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, joining Adam Deitch, former bandmate Camile Baudoin and Dumpstaphunk’s Ivan Neville and Tony Hall. Two nights later, Malone and Baudoin appear together at the Voice of the Wetlands Festival in Houma. The next day he’ll be the special guest with brother Tommy and the Mystik Drone (Johnny Ray Allen, Carlo Nuccio, David Torkanowsky) at Gretna Fest.

It’s a busy schedule, but nothing like that of the Radiators in their final months. “The idea behind that grueling schedule over the band’s last six months of existence was to keep us so busy we didn’t have time to think about the heartbreak of calling it quits after 33 years,” he says. “But when it was over, I really needed some time off.”

Five years ago, a lot of people were wondering what the brightest young star of New Orleans music, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, was going to do next. Music industry insiders in Los Angeles and New York urged him to go all in, but Shorty stood pat, touring constantly and rehearsing his band Orleans Avenue incessantly. He held firmly to a band concept he was developing: a hard-edged funk group schooled in hip-hop beats and rooted in rock dynamics but with plenty of room for improvisation in what was clearly a jazz tradition.

Shorty’s patience—the characteristic most important to the kind of stardom he wanted for himself—paid off in a jackpot last year. He got a major label deal from Universal affiliate Verve, and Backatown had elements of jazz, rock, funk, hip-hop and pop merged in a bouncy crunch that sounded like a lot of different New Orleans musical styles ranging from Galactic to the brass brands. It confused critics, but it jumped out of the stores, hitting the top of the Billboard Jazz charts.

Then Shorty did something even more shocking. Like a general well-versed in The Art of War, Shorty pressed his advantage, getting a new recording, For True, out while Backatown was still reigning atop the jazz chart. The record is of a piece conceptually with Backatown, but this time, Shorty has seasoned it with a mix of celebrity turns, bringing in co-stars from Ledisi to Warren Haynes to Kid Rock. “Buckjump” picks up where Backatown left off, a catchy funk/hip-hop instrumental driven by a punching horn chart from the Rebirth Brass Band and a big-voiced trombone solo from Shorty. The chanted vocal exhortations from 5th Ward Weebie work brilliantly off the rhythm track. “Big 12” (a tribute to older brother James “12” Andrews?) is another medium for Shorty’s trombone, while “Do to Me” rides on a trombone break and a great guitar solo from Jeff Beck.

Shorty doesn’t make you wait long to demonstrate his other instrumental skills, playing a dynamic trumpet solo through most of the driving title track and weighing in on organ, drums, piano, keys, synth bass and percussion across the album’s 14 tracks. The members of Orleans Avenue have grown along with their leader; bassist Mike Ballard co-wrote a couple of tracks on the album, while Pete Murano on guitar and Joey Peebles on drums continue to dazzle with their no-holds-barred attack. Dwayne Williams adds subtle but essential percussion textures, while Dan Oestreicher on baritone sax and Tim McFatter on tenor sax join Andrews on the blaring but intricate front line. Ivan and Cyril Neville help out on “Nervis,” and Lenny Kravitz reprises his cameo from Backatown with a guest appearance on “Roses.” Ledisi is terrific on “Then There Was You,” and Warren Haynes turns in a hot guitar solo on “Encore,” co-written by Shorty and Motown legend Lamont Dozier. Perhaps the ultimate example of Shorty’s greatness is his ability to make Kid Rock sound relevant on “Mrs. Orleans.”

Still, after two high quality albums a year apart, some claim to know what’s best for Shorty. People ask where Juvenile and Mystikal are, but we don’t have to worry about that. Shorty has peppered For True with showcases in exactly the manner hip-hop’s major artists do it, being generous with the limelight but in charge and aware of the flow. And we have no idea what Shorty is cooking up next.

Camile Baudoin. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

When the Radiators played their final shows in June, few would have guessed that the band member most prepared for life in a new musical context would be Camile Baudoin. The band’s soft- spoken, self-effacing lead guitarist was known for his intense, dexterous playing, but not for his stage presence or front man capabilities. His vocal chores were limited to occasional harmony parts, but the night after the Rads’ “Last Watusi” ended at Tipitina’s, Baudoin was back in action, playing a completely different kind of music for a packed house at the Hi Ho Lounge.

“I’m scared to death in some ways,” Baudoin admitted before the show. “But at the same time I’m getting so much positive feedback from people. Look, doors close and doors open, it’s really true. It’s a turning point. This will definitely make me more creative, keep my spirit and energy going. After doing the same thing for 33 years, it will be good to change it up a little bit.”

The Baudoin leading this group was an acoustic guitarist fronting an Acadian-style country band. His laconic wit and matter-of-fact tenor vocal delivery was more typical of a fais do do veteran from rural Louisiana than a rock guitarist. His comfort level with this material was almost astonishing as he sang in French and English, leading the crowd in a sing-along of “Ma Patate,” an “adult nursery rhyme” about potatoes and onions.

Baudoin’s musical partners in what he’s calling the Living Rumors are guitarist David Doucet, best known for his work with BeauSoleil, and violin player Harry Hardin from Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes. Doucet is a great musical resource who exhibits an extraordinary rapport with Baudoin on guitars, but it’s Hardin’s playing that is this unit’s most delightful surprise. The band’s repertoire is mostly taken from its Threadhead-financed debut recording, Old Bayou Blues, a mix of 1950s-era material from sources like Hank Williams and Fats Domino with instrumentals written by Baudoin and a song written by one of his musical relatives, Rosalie Toups.

The record is a masterpiece of simplicity. The band’s version of “Oh Lonesome Me” is a signature illustration of its virtues, a country song with a blues feeling sung in a conversational tone. Baudoin’s voice is completely unaffected as it sticks closely to the melody. Hardin’s violin is exceptionally expressive when contrasted with the honest, straightforward vocal.

The music on Old Bayou Blues reflects Baudoin’s childhood influences. He grew up during the 1950s in the urban environment of New Orleans’ Broadmoor neighborhood, but his parents were both raised in rural Louisiana, and every weekend the family would visit its country relatives. Young Camile came to think of country life as an idyllic alternative to the everyday world of the city.

“The idea for this album came about from the times when we evacuated for hurricanes to our friend’s place in Mississippi, where I was working on some ideas that turned into this album,” Baudoin says. “This was when the Radiators were still playing, so it was kind of a fluke that this came to be. As one thing was going away, the other one was being born. The songs on the record are the songs that we played in the living room when I was a kid. These are the songs that I learned when I was getting guitar lessons from my paran (godfather) when I would go out to the country every weekend.

“My father’s sister’s husband Alton was in the Dufrene Brothers Band. We bought a guitar from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and my father taught me a few chords. That’s where the Fats Domino songs come from. There was always music around the house, and my dad loved Fats Domino. I had an aptitude for playing. My dad said, ‘Next time we go out there, ask Alton to show you some things. He’ll teach you some guitar.’ And that was that. Aside from the hunting and fishing every week, he would teach me some different music.

“Back then, ‘Your Cheating Heart’ was one we played. ‘Just Because,’ ‘Jambalaya’—that’s not on this record but we play it live. Those songs, he taught me the chords and we would all sing along. ‘Steel Guitar Rag’ was the first song where I was taught a melody to play. It was a lead part, but it wasn’t a jamming lead, I was taught to play it just this way. I let David Doucet do the only solo on ‘Steel Guitar Rag’ purposely because I played it like he taught me.”

Baudoin began playing with Doucet some years ago at the Kingpin, where David did some casual solo gigs. They continued to develop their musical relationship at Doucet’s Monday night shows at The Columns.

“The reason David jumped onto this project,” says Baudoin, “is that BeauSoleil played some of these songs. He liked the versions. He liked the songs for the sake of the songs. He said, ‘Man, you’re doing some cool stuff here.’ That’s why it works. It’s really simple but it’s the good shit, man.”