Cajun multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Zachary Richard is a musical chameleon who is at home in two different musical and geographical cultures. Often one guise in one part of the world is almost completely unknown in another part of the world, where he’s associated with yet another sonic persona.
As evidenced by this wonderful collection, they’re all good. Hopefully, with Silver Jubilee: The Best of Zachary Richard, the different characteristics of his muse will be accepted everywhere.
In the south Richard is best known, along with BeauSoleil’s Michael Doucet, as a cultural resurrectionist who captained a massive revival of Cajun heritage in southwestern Louisiana in the ‘70s. Gradually, the fiercely proud, French-speaking culture had become McDonald’s-ized by the influences of Creeping America, and Doucet and Richard became musical ambassadors for the old ways.
First, together in the Cajun-rock band Coteau, then later as separate artists, both have been enormously influential in the resurgence and evolution of Cajun music as well as Cajun heritage.
Richard has undergone varying degrees of militancy—for years he only spoke French—and has lived in both French-speaking Canada as well as France, accounting for what are two independent careers: as an English-speaking artist here in the states, and as a French-speaking star in France and Canada.
The underlying theme throughout is the Cajun musical flavor. Whether Richard is following his early, Stones-influenced rockisms or lushly gorgeous, acoustic French balladry, he’s filtering his muse through sonic ancestors like Dennis McGee and Iry Lejeune.
Silver Jubilee: The Best of Zachary Richard is an ambitious and overwhelming collection, and the surprise isn’t the number of great songs so much as it is how well the two sides of his bipartite career go together.
The high-energy, good-time rave-ups like “File Gumbo,” “Who Stole My Monkey” and “Crawfish” fuse curiously—but winningly—with the more atmospheric textures of “Cap Enrage,” “Dans Le Nord Canadien” and “Ma Louisianne.”
Overlooked in these stylistic generalizations is Richard’s lyrical content. For all the Saturday Night Party revelry he likes to sing about, he’s more than capable of writing about the genuine problems his people face with the grace and lyricism of a poet.
While it’s true Richard is a popular festival entertainer across America—his live shows are truly great to behold—he’s never been as successful in Louisiana with the beautiful and languid atmospherics of his Francophile guise. Perhaps this CD will help reconcile the two characteristics and boost Richard’s profile to the level it should be here in his homeland.
