Juliet Varnedoe Jazz Band - Cajun Bleu
Juliet Varnedoe Jazz Band - Cajun Bleu
Juliet Varnedoe, 2024
Cajun Bleu has been taking shape over the past 18 months as a series of strategic single releases. Finally, the entire six-selection extended play has been released giving us a look and listen to the finished and programmed product.
Juliet Varnedoe, the key operative of this project, may call New York City home, but her soul on Cajun Bleu is 100% Vieux Carré. She comes by this honestly with a Cajun mom who filled Varnedoe’s childhood with Acadian folk music, jazz standard, and piano lessons for the young lady.
Varnedoe received a Don Quixote Grant and MacDowell Colony Fellowship allowing her to return to her native Lousiana to study Cajun French and Acadian music in Bayou Teche (think Sonny Landreth and James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux). In that rich, black soil was planted the idea for this recording. Purge the suggestion that this would be a Zydeco outing or a Dixieland drag…no, not at all. These tunes possess as much Western European Classical Tradition as they do the melting pot that is southern Louisiana. This is where Zydeco and Dixieland came from, not the other way around.
Varnedoe adopts the traditions of the French chanson and French Carribian konpas and zouk. What she captures in her five original compositions is a feeling of place, her place from where she came, existing as an extension of that tradition. All elements are detected in “Sing High, Sing Low” (the disc’s showstopper…Art Pepper always said, “Never start a set with a ballad”). “Old Spot” bounces with the Acadian spirit of a street recital replete with accordion (Jon Dryden), clarinet (Dennis Lichtman), and guitar (Arnt Artzen).
Varnedoe’s performance of Sidney Bechet’s “Petite Fleur” sums up the singer/composer’s method, which contains as much of her as it does the tradition. Singing in the original and accompanied by Clark Gayton’s trombone and tuba, Rob Reich’s accordion, and Ben Rubin’s bass, Varnedoe summons all spirits in this dance of love and life,
“L’amour de mes parents
Et tous ces clairs matins
Faits d’heureux souvenirs lointains
Quand la vie
Par moment me trahit
Tu restes mon bonheur
Petite fleur”
Memory and nostalgia exist to inform us in the present. Juliet Varnedoe knows this, delivering a mood as informative and intoxicating as the smell of boudin and Dixie Beer.