Rochester Cajun Zydeco Network

$Description: Description: C:\Users\Bruce\Pictures\Steve Riley 1.jpg$ Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys

THE world’s most exciting Cajun band
inspired, inspiring, driving, subtle, gritty, intense
Exploring, Respecting, Reinventing Cajun Music

COVER: $17 in advance (available at stores listed below) $20 day of show

The Bop Shop - 1460 Monroe Ave, Brighton

Stutzman’s Guitar Center - 4405 West Ridge Rd, Greece
The Music Store - 18 E. Main St, Webster

INFO: (585) 727-4119 ~ www.rochesterzydeco.com

** OUT OF TOWN OPTION ~ Advanced sale tickets ARE available by sending a check **
• PAYABLE to “RCZN” with a Self-addressed Stamped Envelope
• SEND TO: Bruce Handelman /175 Greenaway Road / Rochester NY 14610
• Must be received by Monday June 10th

NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series with - Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys
http://www.npr.org/event/music/134260832/steve-riley-and-the-mamou-playboys-tiny-desk-concert
March 7, 2011 - Steve Riley and his Mamou Playboys make sweet Cajun music together: music steeped in the French heritage of southwestern Louisiana and driven by accordion and fiddle. Watch the Grammy-nominated Cajun band play an upbeat yet bittersweet set from the NPR Music offices.

With their uncompromising respect for tradition and a forward-looking vision, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys have set the standard for modern Cajun music.
Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys began over 20 years ago with a reputation for excellence. Their stunningly clean and cohesive performance of Cajun French music from the backwaters of Southwest Louisiana propelled them into the world music limelight early on, and by their third release had garnered them a Grammy nomination in the worldwide field of traditional folk music, another in 2004, another in 2009 and most recently they were nominated for a Grammy in the Best American Regional Roots category in 2011. Never before in Cajun music has a comparable wealth of skills been brought to the same table.
The band is called Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys. The guy in the middle holds a button-box that squeezes like an accordion, but shouts hallelujah like a big brass band. The fiddle cracks wise and warm, the guitar falls off the edge of the earth, and the rhythm section is purring rumble like a Coupe DeVille of shark-fin vintage. It all flows as a liquid-smooth groove, topped with three heartfelt voices harmonizing in 17th-century French from the steamy sub-tropics.
South Louisiana’s Cajun culture has been under siege for 300 years and has survived. Through it all, Cajun music has been a fountain of joy and a focus of identity. A blend of accordions and fiddles, black and white, sorrow and celebration, back-porch reverie and Saturday night release, this music has inspired Cajuns and anyone else who hears it to lay down their troubles for a while and celebrate. Like all great forms of folk music, it is forged in great hardship and created for a great purpose – to remind the world and themselves that “we still exist and we will find a way to continue.”
When all that heart and all that skill focus on the revelry of a hot two-step, then turn on a dime and deliver an a cappella ballad, then play something that sounds like Howlin' Wolf fell in lust with a Creole girl, you've found the most Cajun music you can find in any one spot. You've found Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys

”Beyond soul satisfying, rather soul nurturing with the richest of ingredients” -- OFFBEAT MAGAZINE

"Riley's Mamou Playboys are clearly the best Cajun musicians of the younger, post-Beausoleil, generation." -- Washington Post

" . . . the best of the genre's past, present and future." -- Musician Magazine

" . . . a brilliant, vigorous expression of the joy of the music." -- Evening Sun, Norwich, N.Y.

“Mamou Playboy signature attributes - the riveting three-part harmonies, impeccable timekeeping and the insatiable throbbing picking rhythms” -- OFFBEAT MAGAZINE
Selected Album Reviews
Articles, Interviews, and Reviews - http://www.rockpaperscissors.biz/index.cfm/fuseaction/current.articles/project_id/537.cfm
OFFBEAT MAGAZINE – Review of their latest Album, “Dominos”

Maybe folklorist Barry Ancelet spoke too soon when he scribed in a 1993 festival guide regarding how Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys “constantly push the edge, raising the level of musicianship to hair-raising heights.” That was over 12 years ago, but little could Ancelet foresee how his observations would spiral several orders of magnitude from when those prophetic words were etched. Their eighth album, Bon Rêve, was a monumental triumph as another, even higher summit was conquered and homesteaded as their domain. Dominos continues the trend of inwardly mining forgotten treasures while once again raising the bar in the Playboys’ own inimitable style. At the disc’s very epicenter lies the domino concept that symbolizes previous generations influencing succeeding ones, leaning and falling like a series of dominoes. In the middle of this seemingly never-ending stream stands the Playboys’ metaphorical placeholder, which too leans upon and influences those emerging upstarts sprouting after them.
BATON ROUGE ADVOCATE– Review of their 2003 Album, “Bon Rêve”
Though Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys are relatively young, the group has been among Cajun music’s best bands for years. The band’s reputation can only grow with Bon Rêve. Following some musical experiments, including the cool Cajun-rock ‘n’ roll hybrid act Lil’ Band O’ Gold, Riley and the boys return to traditional Cajun two-steps and waltzes, but with a difference. This isn’t museum music, but the sound of inspired, inventive roots-connected contemporary singers and players carrying Cajun repertoire to the 21st Century.
Dr. Barry Ancelet, Professor of Folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette on their 2003 release, 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."

“They actually do what those old masters were doing. They improvise and create within the tradition, finding poetry in historical manuscripts and in the language of real life, and they manage to do this in a way that both innovates and preserves at the same time. Balfa challenged us all to ‘preserve the very life of the tradition,’ cautioning that we not try to preserve artifacts, but rather the process that produces the music and its makers. Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys answer that challenge with this stunning combination of brand new old songs and venerable new songs, all driven by breathtaking musicianship and deeply thoughtful creativity.”

In the down home dance hall the two-step and the waltz rule the night. On festival and concert stages the Mamou Playboys are more free to satisfy their hunger for variety and delve into diverse facets of Cajun melody and lyric. The swagger of the two-step can be balanced with some of the more delicate sounds intended for the hearth or the fields. All the ingredients of Cajun music are bathed in the concert spotlight- ancient ballads, twin fiddle tunes, zydeco, swamp-pop, rich harmonies, venerable new songs, and brand new old songs in a seamless blend of preservation, discovery and invention- and it can all be enjoyed without checking your sense of pitch at the door.

All these flavors included in one Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys concert silence the skeptics who think it “all sounds the same.” This band is from Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, south of the American south, and it is brimful of sounds as compelling, diverse and exotic as one evening of music can possibly hold.

Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys - Dominos video - Part 1 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDxltFDY-7I
This video contains interviews with the band and performances of "Ardoin Medley," "Marie Has Died" "Sweet Dreams" and "Wait Till I Finish Crying."
Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys - Dominos video - Part 2 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQxJRVPGgxM