Customer Reviews

La Danse De La Vie

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Michael Doucet will most likely disagree, but I strongly recommend Danse De La Vie as the quintessential Cajun CD. We're talkin' Desert Island Disc material. This CD still generates calls and requests at our station after six years of regular rotation on the air. Danse De La Vie is an energetic collection of original songs, executed in traditional Cajun style and tinged with world beat percussion (on several tracks). Grammy awards notwithstanding, I truly believe it doesn't get any better than this. I don't see how it can. If you've never bought a Cajun CD before, start with this one. Beausoleil has been around as a band for 20+ years, and the maturity shows in this 1993 album (as well as the subsequent releases on Rhino). Once you've gotten into Beausoleil, branch out to David Doucet's solo recordings (Quand J'ai Parti; 1957) and Jimmy Breaux (Le Chemin Que T'as Pris). Great stuff. Enjoy!

This is band is the heart and soul of the cajun sound! La Danse de la Vie is a show stopping extravanganza of this most unique of musical sounds. I cannot stop listening to this album and this band!

I've owned this gem of an album since it was released. After nearly seven years, it's still a lot of fun. One particularly outstanding track is the instrumental L'Ouragon -- but the whole album is fantastic, especially on a rainy, cold winter day. This is an excellent introduction to Beausoleil's wonderful music.

Well, it is about time that I started to review some of the work of the good old boys and girls from the bayous down in Cajun country. Places like Lafayette and Lake Charles evoke memories of time and place in Cajun musical history. You know at the edges of the places where the likes of Hank Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis learned their crafts. And places where all kinds of mixes of music and races blended to form unique sounds all their own. Accordions, washboards, fiddles, guitars and what ever came to hand on those whiskey-drenched Saturday nights.

And on those nights come names like Clifton Chenier and Booboo Chavis that form the black influenced strand of the music. The Hackberry Ramblers and the likes of Waylon Thibodeaux form another, the good old white boys. French Acadian exiles, English "swamp foxes" of undetermined origin, black escaped slaves, "poor white trash"- it is all there mixed in one form or another. For the most part there were no serious conscious attempts to mix the strands but how could the intermixing influences be avoided in that small isolated area of southwest Louisiana. And all under the umbrella of what I call the "French blues". Get your dancing slippers on.

Elsewhere in this space I have gone on and on about my love affair with the blues, my admiration for the singers of the folk revival of the 1960's and my appreciation for the 1950's pioneers of rock `n' roll. I admit to a late interest in Cajun music sparked, a little at least, by the Dennis Quiad New Orleans-centered film "The Big Easy" from the 1990's. This modern Cajun-oriented group BeauSoliel became better known and caught my attention in the wake of that interest in things Cajun. The group, as far as I know, had as part of its mission to make this previously somewhat insulated music more accessible to non-Cajun and non-patois speaking audiences. They achieved some success in this endeavor. Witness here some nice fiddle work on the title track "La Danse de la Vie", "Quelle Belle Vie" and " La Fille de Quatorze Ans". Moreover, this is very danceable music. Feet up.