I recently went to a wonderful Mardi Gras Ball in Rhode Island ball on the Saturday before with three of the top Cajun/Zydeco bands in the country. We were lucky to have them so close to Boston. Here are few photos of the bands.
First, the Pine Leaf Boys played. They are a favorite of mine and I have a bunch of their CDs. I first saw then at the 2006 French Quarter Festival andthey played a role in the HBO series, Treme. See below for the 2006 New Orleans photo.

More recenlty I spent a very plesant Saturday morning at the Cajun jam and the store owed by Marc and Anne Savoy, the parents of Wilson Savoy, the Pine Leaf band leader. He was there. See my post - Taking in Cajun Music in the Lafayette Louisiana Area. I got a chance to talk briefly to Wilson after the show thanked him for both the band's performance and that saturday morning.


Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys played next. I saw Steve and his Cajun band at the Rock n Bowl in 2006 and I have “Bon Rêve,”, which was nominated for a Grammy in 2004 and few others. Here’s what Dr. Barry Ancelet, professor of folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has to say about Bon Rêve:
"It's the Sgt. Pepper's of Cajun music. It's so strong in so many areas: performance/musicianship, the poetry, the conception, the whole album working together as a sort of a thematic unit. It's an incredible effort. What's really remarkable is that they're sort of competing with themselves. They're competing with their own last effort, and that's got to be hard to do. And yet they keep pulling it off."


The closing group was C. J. Chenier, and The Red Hot Louisiana Band. I saw him in New Orleans in the late 80s. He is the son of zydeco legend Clifton Chenier. I have a lot of Clifton's music. He joined his father’s band in 1978 and inherited his father’s place in the band when his father passed in 1989. Then created his on sound with a stronger rock influence. He likes to keep his audiences happy and moving and that was the case on this occasion.

