As we start our 20th year as a band, we look forward to one  last string of dates before taking our first ever planned hiatus, the longest break we'll have ever taken from touring! We had planned to start the hiatus a month ago, but had to keep the Kalenda tour going a little longer after the album won a Grammy in January.  We're very excited for our first ever break, and we're already excited to come back at some point next year, and we can all enjoy our own ramblin' pace and side projects until then. Here's what's happening, according to our (rad) publicist:

Lost Bayou Ramblers, the perversely progressive band rooted in Cajun traditions, are undertaking a victory lap this Fall, that begins September 7 in Lafayette, Louisiana and ends October 27, 2018 in New Orleans. Afterwards, the group goes on hiatus until April 2019 - their longest break from regular live performing in twenty years. 

2018 began with the band winning a Grammy Award for Best Regional Roots Music Album for their latest release Kalenda, produced by Korey Richey of LCD Soundsystem (a revolving member of LBR who also produced their Mammoth Waltz album). Soon after, Rodents of Unusual Size was released to great critical acclaim, a documentary with musical score composed and produced by singer/fiddler Louis Michot and performed by the Ramblers. During their “break,” they’re scoring another film, a Lost Bayou Ramblers documentary being produced by Worklight Pictures, slated for 2019 release. Outside of this last bit of band business, the individual members have plenty planned to keep themselves busy till they reconvene. 

Electric guitarist Jonny Campos is releasing a new album from the Carbon Poppies, the group he fronts. Rain On My Face comes out on Spain’s Elefant Records September 14 and once LBR’s tour wraps, he’ll be touring in support of this album. 

Band co-founder Andre Michot (accordion, lapsteel) will be performing with the Ramblers’ Eric Heigle as “Lost Bayou Duo” on the “Take Me To The River Tour,” Fall through Winter 2018/2019; this tour promotes the namesake documentary film which features the full band, performing Ani Difranco and Walter Wolfman Washington respectively. This pair will also be performing locally in their Uptown NOLA neighborhood as “The Riverbend Ramblers,” joined by Andre's wife, Joanna Divine. Any leisure time will be devoted to building “Michot” brand accordions to meet overwhelming demand which has already produced a LONG waiting list. 

Heigle, who provides electronics and acoustic guitar for the group, is producing and mixing records for The Soul Rebels, Lakou Mizik, Motel Radio, and the 79rs Gang, as well as finishing work on his own album of original material. He’ll also be playing drums with seminal New Orleans Bounce artists 5th Ward Weebie, PNC, and DJ Jubilee among others, as well as touring with "Lost Bayou Duo." 

Louis Michot will be shepherding the first releases from his Nouveau Electric Records imprint. This is an independent label founded earlier this year to promote experimental and traditional music inspired by the language, people and culture of South Louisiana. He’ll be performing live with “Triangle Club” a Creole-Zydeco band featuring his wife, Ashlee Michot, and Grammy-nominated Zydeco accordion player Corey Ledet. Louis’ electric string-band project “Michot’s Melody Makers” with fellow Ramblers Bryan Webre and Kirkland Middleton will be doing shows as well to promote the release of their debut album, Blood Moon by Sinking City Records. 

Besides appearing with the Melody Makers, bassist Webre plans on recording with his band Tonomono who celebrate the sounds of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora with an added electronic edge. 

When not playing with Louis, Kirkland will be working as part of the Nouveau Electric team... and finally learning French!

If you heard the song attached on part 1 of this blog, you can imagine it as a bridge between the first versions heard in the late 1700's in Congo Square, and Colinda the modern Cajun rock'n'roll song made famous by Rod Bernard in 1962. The inspiration to record this tune came from imagining how this song morphed from Congo Square to a lullaby in Lafayette, to Cajun rock'n'roll, and how many peoples of Louisiana and the Caribbean have their own version of the song and the dance. 

Here's a few of the historical references to the dance that can be found in researching the name in it's various spellings:

...........

In Louisiana, the Calinda was a war-dance in which men alone took part, stripped to the waist and brandishing sticks in a mock fight, while at the same time balancing upon their heads bottles filled with water from which one drop spilled put the participant hors de combat. Later the Calinda assumed more and more an objectionable character, until it was finally prohibited inthe Place Congo in New Orleans about the eighteen-forties. But I have it from the lips of an old darky once an expert at the Calinda, that there was much sport in it at the stage of dancin with water-filled bottles, and that the last remaining dancer well deserved to have the water in his bottle replaced by good 'tafia' (whiskey) to celebrate his victory." [p vii] 

Monroe, Mina 
1921 ed. with the collaboration of Kurt Schindler, Bayou Ballads: Twelve Folk-Songs From Louisiana, New 
York: G. Schirmer, Inc.

............

THE CALINDA. 
There were other dances. Only a few years ago I was honored with an invitation, which I had to decline, to see danced the Babouille, the Cata (or Chacta), the Counjaille, and the Calinda. Then there were the Voudou, and the Congo, to describe which would not be pleasant. The latter, called Congo also in Cayenne, Chica in San Domingo, and in the Windward Islands confused under one name with the Calinda, was a kind of Fandango, they say, in which the Madras kerchief held by its tip-ends played a graceful part. 
The true Calinda was bad enough. In Louisiana, at least, its song was always a grossly personal satirical ballad, and it was the favorite dance all the way from there to Trinidad. To dance it publicly is not allowed this side [of] the West Indies. All this Congo square business was suppressed at one time; 1843, says tradition. 
The Calinda was a dance of multitude, a sort of vehement cotillion. The contortions of the encircling crowd were strange and terrible, the din was hideous. One Calinda is still familiar to all Creole ears; it has long been a vehicle for the white Creole’s satire; for generations the man of municipal politics was fortunate who escaped entirely a lampooning set to its air. 
In my childhood I used, at one time, to hear, [p. 528] every morning, a certain black marchande des calas—peddler-woman selling rice croquettes—chanting the song as she moved from street to street at the sunrise hour with her broad, shallow, laden basket balanced on her head. 
[A MUSICAL SCORE IS INSERTED AT THIS POINT.] 
In other words, a certain Judge Preval gave a ball—not an outdoor Congo dance—and made such Cuffees as could pay three dollars a ticket. It doesn’t rhyme, but it was probably true. 'Dance, dance the Calindá! Boujoum! Boujoum!’ 
The number of stanzas has never been counted; here are a few of them. 

'Dans l’equirie la 'y’ avé grand gala; 
Mo cré choual la yé t b’en étonné. 

Miché Preval, li té capitaine bal; 
So cocher Louis, té maite cérémonie. 

Y avé des négresse belle passé maitresse, 
Qui volé bel-bel dans l’ormoire momselle. 

Ala maite la geole li trouvé si drole, 
Li dit, 'moin aussi, mo fé bal ici.’ 

Ouatchman la yé yé tombé la dans; 
Yé fé gran’ déga dans léquirie la.’ etc. 

'It was in a stable that they had this gale night,’ says the song; 'the horses there were greatly astonished. Preval was captain; his coachman, Louis, was master of ceremonies. There were negresses made prettier than their mistresses by adornments stolen from the ladies’ wardrobes (armoires). But the jailer found it all so funy that he proposed to himself to take an unexpected part; the watchmen came down’—

Ever wonder how accordions got to Louisiana? Andre Michot, accordion builder and player, wrote two of the key songs on the Kalenda album, which ended up getting their own vinyl single, which is the instrumental story of how accordions were introduced to the mystical land some refer to as "Down the Bayou"...Lafourche if you're nasty...a region that was known for it's own version of Cajun music, not the commonly celebrated accordion music of the Cajun Prairie, but a beautiful mending of guitars, drums, pianos, and most importantly steel guitars. Until one day, the accordion appeared on the shores of Golden Meadow, check out the video ALOHA GOLDEN MEADOW

In January of 2014 producer/rambler Korey Richey joined Louis Michot for a trip to wintry New York to begin songwriting for their next studio album. Mammoth Waltz had been out for 2 years, and made a splash (or more like a Mammoth size stomp) that carried the band well beyond the normal reaches of Cajun music's well defined genre expectations. The band had always been known for their sonic departures, while always remaining firmly rooted in the french music traditions of Louisiana, and this new project would prove to bring more experimentation in Cajun music. The two ramblers spent 4 days in the basement of DFA records in the West Village of Manhattan, laying down the framework for what would become KALENDA...the tune itself based off of a rare field recording by William Owens from the 1930's housed in the University of Texas archives, next to those of the Lomax collection. The collection was given to Louis by historian and long time friend and musical archiologist Kevin Fontenot, and was referred to by the two as "You Must Destroy This Record" a quote by Irene Whitfield, offended by the first song in the collection whose lyrics spoke of Mary Magdalene, judged sacreligious by the late ethno-musicologist.  This version of Dansez Calinda, sang by Vavasseur Mouton in Lafayette, Louisiana, was recognized by Kevin and Louis as a missing bridge between the original Place Congo slave dance, and the 1960's Cajun rock'n'roll version, and would serve as the basis for the title track of the album: