Cedric Watson helped make the Pine Leaf Boys stars in the emerging Cajun/Creole “new wave,” recording a CD with the band, Blues de Musicien, which was quickly nominated for a Grammy award. Following that, Watson recorded three of his own Grammy-nominated CDs for Valcour Records (Cedric Watson, L’Esprit Creole and Live at the Blue Moon), [...]
There’s never been a recording quite like this one. Three highly accomplished Cajun revivalists—each representing a successive generation, each a musical pioneer, and each a highly respected bandleader in his own right—spontaneously coming together in an informal setting to pay their mutual respects to a musical heritage that has now become their shared inheritance. They [...]
UPDATED What happens when producer Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers translates rock classics into contemporary Cajun/Creole music? Alchemy, pure alchemy. Not that the originals by the Who, the Doors, Neil Young and more weren’t 14-karat to begin with, but try making something new out of any one of them that still retains a [...]
Maria Muldaur intuitively knows what a song needs to suit her vocal style. From “I’m a Woman” and the Memphis Jug Band’s “Garden of Joy” in the folk revival days to the sultry and seductive “Midnight at the Oasis”—a song now familiar to millions around the world. Throughout the 1990s, Muldaur recorded a series of [...]
The Lost Bayou Ramblers will perform with former Violent Femmes front man Gordon Gano at the Voodoo Experience on Saturday, October 29, and the night before they’ll throw a single release party at d.b.a. The evening’s festivities will celebrate the release of a 12-inch vinyl single “Bastille,” a track from the band’s upcoming Mammoth Waltz. [...]
[Updated] The collaboration between alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Billy Cobham blossomed into something more during a 2002 tour featuring Harrison, Carter, and Cobham with the late pianist James Williams. 2004’s Heroes is an extraordinarily reflective and intimate affair, interspersing three artful Harrison-Carter duets between a series of Harrison and Carter [...]
Come Get Some what? It’s a Rosie Ledet CD, so what’d’ya think? Sex, of course. Or, more precisely, decidedly female zydeco soul filled with double entendres and lots of hip-shaking grooves, a sound at which Rosie Ledet typically excels, especially in live settings. Based on her last CD effort, 2005’s Pick It Up, one veteran [...]
When Louis Michot and the Lost Bayou Ramblers set up shop to record their upcoming release, Mammoth Waltz, at Dockside Studios, he did what any good bandleader would naturally do: stock up on supplies. And one night he was struck with what he immediately recognized as a great idea: Why not ask the brewer of [...]
Unlike the vast majority of popular music historians today, first-time book author Preston Lauterbach admirably resists the temptations of “fan club worship”—complexly detailed biographies of popular entertainers— and “the new academia”—the same thing, but with impenetrable technical jargon. Instead, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock and Roll offers a colorfully rich portrait of [...]
The surprises on Adventures in New Orleans Jazz, Vol. 1 begin with the very first notes, a repeating figure on the balafon—the ancient West African ancestor of the xylophone—echoed in succession by plucked banjo strings, a plucked string bass, and the rhythmic texture of a shekere, the African percussive instrument made from a gourd and [...]
