On Saturday, March 21, the Liberty Theater in Eunice devoted its weekly “Rendez Vous des Cajuns” live radio show to a celebration of the music of Amédé Ardoin and Dennis McGee, the “Godfathers of Cajun Music.” The evening was billed as a “centennial celebration” of Ardoin’s birth, the exact date of which had been unknown until writer Michael Tisserand recently discovered Ardoin’s World War I draft card and found that the seminal accordionist was born on March 11, 1898. “We’re celebrating the finding of his birth as much as anything else,” said Dr. Barry Ancelet, the show’s master of ceremonies.
The late accordionist’s cousin Bois Sec Ardoin along with his Family Band began the evening with 10 Ardoin-associated songs, including the Cajun anthem “Jolie Blon.” Now in his ’80’s, Bois Sec played sitting down and responded to Ancelet’s ‘tween-song questions in terse French phrases, but he sang with a poignancy appropriate to the occasion, and his rhythm section kept the waltz and two-step tempos crisp.
The biggest applause of Bois Sec’s set, however, went to Ancelet. “This man was one of the greatest composers in the history of Louisiana French music, but he died far from home in a hospital near Alexandria, and we can’t even figure out where he’s buried. We have about 500 people here tonight. How many here tonight would like the hospital to do as much as it can to find out where that grave site might be?”
After the applause died, he added, “Maybe that’ll convince them. You don’t get people like Amede Ardoin come along very often, but when you do you have to remember them and treasure them and put markers where they were and where they played and where they lived and where they are buried because those are our heroes. We have to remember that.”
Following the mid-show announcements (that the show was a sell-out, that Marc and Ann Savoy, Hadley Castille, Steve Riley, and Arhoolie Records’ Chris Strachwitz were present, that the holder of ticket number 8246122 won Amede Ardoin CDs) and special presentations (awards went to Ardoin’s four surviving nephews and nieces and McGee’s many surviving children), the fiddlers Eric and Clay Chapman — grandsons of McGee’s partner Sadie Courville — took the stage. Accompanied by Jane Vidrine on guitar, they performed two songs before being joined by the southpaw fiddler Bill McGee, one of Dennis McGee’s 15 children, for four more, including “Mon Chere Bebe Creole.”
Then came Michael Doucet “and Friends” — friends who turned out to include all the members of BeauSoleil and, for three songs, Ann Savoy. From the “Two Step de Midland” to the “Two Step de Eunice,” the most famous contemporary Cajun musicians in the world finished the evening with a seven-song flourish, and the sell-out crowd responded with the most spirited foot-of-the-stage dancing of the evening.
The reason for celebrating Ardoin and McGee together, of course, is that for years the two of them performed and made records together (Arhoolie’s 1995 Ardoin title, I’m Never Comin’ Back, contains exemplary samplings of their studio collaborations), pouring their energies into a musical miscegenation that has gone on to become the single most potent influence on the music of southwest Louisiana.
“You know,” said Ancelet, “these two musicians — one Creole and one Cajun — played together for many years, and they were flying in the face of the segregated South at the time. That wasn’t a common thing in a lot of places, but I’m proud that it happened here. And Cajun music is better because of Creole influence, and Creole music is better because of Cajun influence. It’s that wonderful blend of influences that came together because people like Amede Ardoin and Dennis McGee were playing together across the fence, so to speak, that gave us this rich, rich sound that we all appreciate today.”
It’s been years since the words “Lafayette,” “jazz,” and “scene,” have been spoken in one sentence, but the Bluerunners drummer Frank Kincel remembers those years. “I was in junior high. I don’t know when it began, but I know why it ended: the bottom fell out of the oil field, and everybody left. The reasons were totally economic. Some of the guys stayed, but the majority left and did other things. Dicky Landry was part of it, but he eventually left and did his own thing on the East Coast.”
Kincel and his other band, the five-piece Modern Jazz Movement, have been instrumental in laying the groundwork for a rebirth of the cool in Lafayette. Formed in January of ’97, the group began as a trio consisting of Kincel, the bassist Dion Pierre, and the saxophonist Denny Skerrett. Several months later, they added the pianist Shin Ishida and the trumpeter Jeff Martin. It’s this lineup that performs almost every Friday night at Cornwell’s Coffee House across the street from the Heymann Center for the Performing Arts.
“Our sets at this time are about 60 percent standards and 40 percent originals,” says Kincel. “And though we’re trying to write more originals — so that we can play a gig, for instance that would be all our own material — it’s not as if we don’t like to play the standards. We enjoy taking them and tweaking them and pushing them around a little.”
Currently prominent in an average MJM set are such standards as “Well, You Needn’t” and “My Favorite Things.” But ask Kincel whether their arrangement of the latter is John Coltrane’s or someone else’s, and he won’t know — not necessarily because drummers can’t be bothered with such details, but because the MJM’s approach to learning material is unpretentiously simple.
“We’ll sit down at rehearsal and open what they call a Real Book,” Kincel admits. “Our arrangement of ‘My Favorite Things’ is out of the book. I don’t know if it’s a Coltrane arrangement or not. I don’t listen to jazz all the time. I do when I get a chance, but since I’m on a really tight budget, I don’t have a lot of money to spend on records. Now, Denny will go home, find the recording, and listen to it. And Dion is extremely knowledgeable about jazz. So is Shin. He’s studying jazz theory right now in school.”
Kincel, who has his bachelor’s degree in Theory and Composition, finds the sensitivity that he’s developed in learning jazz rhythms and in studying 20th-century music in college applicable to his drumming technique in the decidedly non-jazzy Bluerunners.
“My training has taught me to listen to what they’re doing. I’m not oblivious to the guitar, bass, or accordion part. I went through this phase, just before I started with the Bluerunners, where I didn’t feel comfortable with my playing. So I started going back to my basics, and instead of putting in so many notes, I learned how to groove more. I learned how to push my bass drum out with the bass player but still maintain a steady snare-drum-and-high-hat beat so that Mark [Meaux] and Steve [LeBlanc] can have something to lock into and so that I can move things in and out of time instead of being so straight. In jazz you’ll have threes against twos, threes against fours. That’s a little extreme for the Bluerunners, but even in a song like ‘Blueco,’ instead of just making it a standard shuffle, or a standard swing, where it’s on top of the beat all the time, I try to relax and let the notes in between fall almost where they may, where they’re still in time with each other but not so strictly that they sound like a metronome.”
Last, the Maison de Soul label has gotten back on track with its latest release, Donna Angelle and Zydeco Posse’s Old Man’s Sweetheart. It’s not entirely fair to say that Angelle has only one thing on her mind; she sings about zydeco too. But sex is clearly her great subject — even her love for Boozoo Chavis has less to do with his music than it does with his being able to “still lick the jar” even though he’s “too old to cut the mustard.” Or try this from “Zydeco Rhyme”: “Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone. / When she stooped over, Rover took over.” She has her vulnerable moments too, and her Zydeco Posse proves equal to the task of shading in her several moods without obscuring their entertainment value. Can she sing? Yes. And if you think she gets the job done on the Clifton Chenier and Curtis Mayfield covers, you should hear the sex songs “Red Rooster” and “Chicken.”
