Doors at 7:30 pm; Dance Lesson at 8:00 pm with Cheryl McBride
Show at 8:30 pm
Tickets are $17 Advance / $20 at the Door
The Revelers, founding members of the Red Stick Ramblers and The Pine Leaf Boys — “unquestionably the two groups at the vanguard of the Louisiana cultural renaissance” — have joined together to form a Louisiana supergroup which combines swamp-sop, Cajun, country, blues and zydeco into a powerful tonic of roots music that could only come from southwest Louisiana.
As individuals, they are each in high demand having performed and recorded with T-Bone Burnett, Natalie Merchant, Linda Ronstadt, Preston Frank, Walter Mouton, Mamadou Diabate, the Duhks, Cedric Watson, and Tim O’Brien, to name a few. As a group they play with a sense of empathy and depth that can only be fostered after years of making music together. They have all appeared on the 2011 season finale of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, and they also were handpicked by David Simon (producer/creator, The Wire) to be featured musicians for the third and fourth seasons of HBO’s Tremé.
Long-time fans of the Red Stick Ramblers may find themselves very familiar with The Revelers: the powerful singing and songwriting of Chas Justus and Eric Frey, a mix of traditional Cajun and zydeco dance music, some of the swing that was such a strong focus of early RSR, the magical rhythm section chemistry of Glenn Fields and Eric Frey, and impressive musical virtuosity across the board.
Take what you know about the Red Sticks, add into the mix the crooning vocals of Glenn Fields, and the singing/songwriting of Blake Miller (founding member of the Pine Leaf Boys and unarguably the most prolific French songwriter coming out of Louisiana right now, the tightly arranged section of sax-fiddle-accordion, and you’ll start to get The Revelers' picture.
The depth of this band has only developed from digging deeper into the dancehall traditions of Southwest Louisiana and emerging with an arsenal we call Louisiana Jukebox Music. Music critics are wont to categorize music into clear genre styles, but that’s not really the way folk traditions develop — things are passed around, the lines are blurred — and particularly in a culture as unique as that of SW
