Of the 17 Louisiana acts appearing at this year’s Festival International de Louisiane in downtown Lafayette, none have more riding on their performance than Sacaulait, the Henderson-based old-timey trio led by the accordionist and former member of Tasso, Philip Allemond. Despite the release last year of their excellent Moi Tout Seul album (Swallow/Sacaulait), the group has met with underwhelming local response.
“I don’t know if it’s getting that much airplay, to tell you the truth,” laughs Allemond, “and I don’t know why not. I think it’s a good album. Actually, KRVS, especially Jules Guidry [the host of the “Bal de Dimanche” show] has given us a boost, but it’s not like we’re on the Hit Parade. Apparently, we’re playing to deaf ears.”
Moi Tout Seul features faithful renditions of songs made famous by Joe Falcon, Amede Ardoin and Dennis McGee, Mayeus Lafleur and Leo Soileau, and Joe and Anatole Credeur, and if southwestern Louisiana fans have been slow to pick up on the album, the rest of the world has not.
“We just got back from a real good tour in England,” says Allemond. “We played for some pretty fancy people too, including the Cultural Attaché to the American Embassy. We were just sitting there, like, ‘O.K. We gonna play a few songs,’ sort of like the Clampetts going to England. And they played us on the BBC! Somebody told me, ‘Yeah, they played you on national radio,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s pretty good! We don’t hardly get played locally.'”
The Sacaulait lineup has changed since Moi Tout Seul. Replacing Allemond’s cousin Faren Serrette and Allemond’s former Tasso partner Mitch Reed are Bobby Michot and Kevin Courville. Yet, according to Allemond, the trio’s goal is still (to quote Moi Tout Seul’s liner notes) to “reflect the music of the late 1920’s and the early ’30’s … when [it] was as pure and Cajun as it ever was.”
Allemond himself came relatively late to traditional Cajun music. Now 42, he began playing the accordion at 27, and it was only with the idea of adding novelty to the country band with whom he was performing in the mid-’80’s that he began playing Cajun music at all. “I thought I’d learn two or three songs,” he recalls, “but I ended up getting into it more than I thought I would. Then I started learning these old styles because Faren gave me some music that he’d recorded with Moise Robin. He said, ‘Check this out. This is the old style. You oughta see if you can get into that.’ I liked it and just kept on with it.”
For his source material, Allemond relies these days on a cache of rare, surreptitiously circulating Cajun recordings. “I got tapes with songs that were taken off ’78s. Actually, it was music that Bobby had gotten from [the French music writer] Gerard Dole, and he had gotten it from a guy in Germany. I’ve got other tapes that people have given me too. And Mitch has some stuff, so we kind of have a little library.”
One song from those tapes that turned up on Moi Tout Seul was “Nina One Step,” by Allemond’s fellow Hendersonian, Berthmonst Montet. “I used to go to his race track when I was about 10,” Allemond recalls. “He had got his arm blown off cleaning a shotgun or something, so he didn’t play anymore, but I ended up getting copies of his recordings, and, man, could he play! People who say that accordion players today are better than ones back then don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Jazz in Lafayette, Part Two
Vying with the Modern Jazz Movement (see last issue) for the title of Lafayette’s Jazz Ambassadors is the Garth Alper Trio, whose self-released debut CD, Canvas, an 11-song collection of Alper originals, has recently become available at Lafayette’s Barnes & Noble and Raccoon Records.
Alper, an assistant professor of Jazz Studies at USL, actually heads up two trios on Canvas, but anyone who can tell the Jay Ecker-on-bass trio from the Robert Nash-on-bass one is listening for the wrong things. The right things are the delicacy with which Alpert brings contemporary harmonies to bear on melodies that might otherwise pass for mere glass-clinking music (“Uncloaking,” “According To”) and contemporary rhythms to bear on songs that might otherwise pass for mere — well, jazz (“Arabica,” “Osprey”).
Not that every song is subtle. “Odyssey” and “One Page Samba” come out swinging, and “Meteorology” features several brief-but-attention-getting Jay Jackson drum solos. On the whole, though, the album’s strengths establish a mood by emerging gradually. And despite the fact that Alpert’s trios consist exclusively of university faculty members (Jackson teaches in USL’s Computer Science Department, Nash and Ecker teach bass at LSU and McNeese, respectively) there’s nothing “academic” about their music.
“My style goes go back to the ’40’s or ’50’s in that the style of jazz that I play came to prominence then,” Alper explains, “but the piano trio keeps evolving. For instance, some of the harmonies and rhythms that we use weren’t prominent back then. Those more than anything are what’s evolved.”
Alper, a Long Island native with a Ph.D. from the University of Northern Colorado, says that he recorded Canvas not so much to make money as to open more doors for the trio as a performing unit. “I did this CD mainly to get my music out to people who wanted to hear it and to get gigs. Right now we’re playing mostly in the Lafayette area, but we’re trying to branch out.”
Not that Alpert is averse to signing with a record label and selling lots of discs. It’s just that getting one’s jazz trio signed these days is a full-time job, and Alpert, who teaches five days a week, already has one.
“In January I went to the Association of Jazz Educators Conference in New York,” he recalls. “One of the workshops was ‘Getting Airplay for your CD,’ and another was ‘Signing with a Record Label.’ And the gist of both was forget it.”
Alper laughs. “People went in there hoping for some encouragement or some hints, and pretty much all they got was discouragement. The people from the record companies were basically saying, ‘I get 15 to 20 CDs on my desk a day’ — so there are a huge number of people trying to get signed to a very small number of slots.”
Nevertheless, Alper would like to record a second album (“This summer if I can raise the money,” he says. “I have a lot of originals that I haven’t recorded). Meanwhile, those interested in buying a copy of Canvas can call Alper’s USL office at 318-482-6018.
On the literary front
Those who’ve logged onto the OffBeat Web site have seen a link to the new book Let the Good Times Roll: A Guide to Cajun and Zydeco Music (Upbeat). The book is interesting for two main reasons: first, it’s the only record guide devoted entirely to Cajun and zydeco music; second, its three authors — Pat Nyhan, Brian Rollins, and David Babb — live in Portland, Maine.
“Brian and Dave are the ones who really know the music,” says Pat Nyhan, who wrote the book’s several hundred mini-biographies. “Brian, who wrote the Cajun reviews, used to live in Nova Scotia, and Cajun music is very big there because that’s where the vast majority of Cajuns came from. So he’s been listening to the music for 25 years. And David, who wrote the zydeco reviews, has been a fan of zydeco ever since he was a teenager listening to Clifton Chenier.”
No mere amateurs, both Rollins and Babb host their own Louisiana-inflected radio shows on WMPG in Portland (“The Rubboard Review” and “Bon Ton Roulet,” respectively). And, according to Nyhan, Rollins has the distinction of being a “champion collector” of Louisiana music. “Brian goes everywhere in Louisiana, to all the dusty little record stores, and buys all these albums. He has ancient, antique, weird old LPs and all the latest CDs. Everything. That’s one reason it wasn’t that hard to write this book: we had the actual albums right there.”
Aside from its Michael Doucet-authored foreword — as authoritative an imprimatur as any Louisiana-music book could have — the book’s chief strength is its handiness. Never has determining which Louisiana artist sang which song on which album with which group been easier.
Its chief weakness is its exclusion of albums released since January 1997 — the authors’ “cut-off date for albums.” “That’s how long it takes to get a book in production and printed,” Nyhan explains. “But if this one sells, we’ll probably do a second edition.”
Until then, the nearly 600 albums that the first edition covers — each of which Rollins and Babb re-listened to before writing their reviews — will save both novices in the field of Louisiana music and veterans at work on the perfect collection plenty of time and money.
