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1 :::: Arts :::: Community :::: Bulletin Board :::: Mind/Body/Spirit |
New Cajun
music stars
pepper
traditional fare
By Thomas Staudter
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Photo courtesy of Pine Leaf Boys
New Orleans natives, the Pine Leaf Boys, will bring their Cajun sound to the Towne Crier Cafe the evening of Aug. 24.
Music aficionados generally acknowledged that the Pine Leaf Boys were the hot up-and-coming local act not to be missed at the 2007 edition of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
They were one of the first bands to play on the first full-day of Jazz Fest 2007 and though the five-piece Cajun band was featured on one of the smaller stages, once the propulsive rhythm section found a groove and notes from the fiddle and accordion started flying, a big crowd began to grow.
Infectious and danceable, the band’s sound is a cross between rootsy Americana and unbridled jamming – proudly parochial and highly energetic. Therefore, here is a note to fans of Cajun music played with a peppery flair: You will want to catch this quintet on Sunday when they visit the area for a show at the Towne Crier Café in Pawling.
Though the Pine Leaf Boys were making their Jazz Fest debut in 2007, the band began booking gigs in earnest the year before. They had already played numerous shows in many of New Orleans’s music venues.
Characterizing the outfit as “local” was a bit of a geographic misnomer, relatively speaking, said Wilson Savoy, accordion player, vocalist and erstwhile leader of the Pine Leaf Boys, as the band hails primarily from and around Lafayette, La..
Savoy and his band mates were in a celebratory mood last week as the news that Lionsgate Film, now branching into the music industry, had signed the Pine Leaf Boys and was planning to release their new CD in September.
“A while back I got an e-mail from someone who I thought was just a fan saying he loved our music and wanted to put out our next record,” Savoy said. “So I pretty much ignored the message. He e-mailed a few more times, and I figured I had better call him. Next thing, I was flying out to Los Angeles.”
The band is also still adjusting from some lineup changes. This spring, the band’s fiddler Cedric Watson departed to start his own band with a primarily Creole focus, and then bassist Blake Miller decided to eschew the itinerant life of a musician and remain in Lafayette to finish college. Savoy quickly rounded up Balfa Toujours fiddler Courtney Granger, an old acquaintance from their high school days, and Jambalaya Cajun Band bassist Thomas David to join “engine room” stalwarts Drew Simon (shuffle drummer extraordinaire) and Jon Bertrand (non-stop, chugging guitar) and keep up a busy touring schedule that has the band traveling nonstop around the United States and Canada, with their first tour of Ireland coming next month.
Cajun music began to distinguish itself as an identifiable subgenre in the early 1900s, derived mostly from French, British and Scottish folk music. Vocalists, like those of traditional bluegrass music, keep to a high range of notes but here sing mostly in a Cajun dialect of French. Musically, uptempo dance rhythms abound with fiddles and accordions providing the perpetually spiraling frontline solos.
Savoy grew up in a musical family. His parents, Marc and Ann Savoy (pronounced “Sah-VWAH), have been performing in the Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band since 1977 and more recently with Wilson and his older brother Joel (a fiddler and founding member of the Red Stick Ramblers) in the Savoy Family Band.
Strict traditionalists, the elder Savoys have worked hard to keep Cajun music pure and true to its roots, as it was first popularized by a Creole accordion player named Amede Ardoin. Wilson, however, took up the piano at age nine in order to sound like “Great Balls of Fire” piano rocker Jerry Lee Lewis, much to his father’s chagrin, he said. It was only while at college in Baton Rouge, somewhat homesick for his Cajun upbringing, that Savoy started studying the music his parents played.
“I’d pay a million dollars just to go back in time and hang out with Amede Ardoin for five minutes, and see him the way everyone else saw him,” said Savoy, now 26.
Savoy said the Pine Leaf Boys is a homage to Ardoin and other Cajun music pioneers, like blind accordionist Iry LeJeune, but added the ensemble has a penchant for letting its exuberance show.
“Things definitely get a little wild on stage,” he said, “but I know that the old timers would love what we’re doing.”
Pine Leaf Boys will perform on Sunday at the Towne Crier Café, 130 Route 22, Pawling, at 7:30 p.m. For tickets and information, call (845) 855-1300.
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