Venue: Hotel Jama, Postojna
Concert date: 01.04.2009
Attendance: 250
Ticket price: 14 €
The 2008/2009 season of the Postojna blues festival has had a hard time sticking to the plans laid out last September. After plenty of guessing about who’d actually show up, something we’ve gotten pretty used to lately, last Thursday the rooms of Hotel Jama were finally taken over by Jeffery Broussard & The Creole Cowboys. As the band’s name already hints, the Postojna evening was once again one long, tireless echo of zydeco, with Jeffery Broussard & The Creole Cowboys inviting us to dance with a jolly repertoire of mostly unfamiliar tunes, most of them oddly high-spirited. Jeffery’s crew of thoroughly sour-faced musicians did prove to be a disciplined quintet, and their main attraction is of course Jeffery Broussard himself, a likeable little guy who’s supposedly one of the most influential accordionists in modern zydeco. All well and good, but the PR hymn of praise doesn’t change the fact that Thursday’s musical monotony, consumed more out of necessity than choice, will in the eyes of the averagely well-listened music fan stay at the top of the list of the least attractive gig adventures for a long time to come.
So what’s left to say after such an unpromising intro, apart from the already known fact that zydeco is first and foremost party music, built on a lively rhythmic platform around which everything is pretty much subordinated to the spirit of collectivism. Individual solo outbursts were, in Jeffery’s crew’s case too, more the exception than the rule, which is understandable in its own way. The only clearly standout element of the band is of course Jeffery Broussard, who besides slyly dictating the tempo to the other four also pulled all the strings when it came to keeping the crowd entertained. And with a fair amount of success! Vocally rather vague, the old man tended to bury his not exactly frequent vocal contributions in the comfort of the backing-vocal harmonies, led by a robust bassist with an unexpectedly soft voice who goes by the name of Classie Ballou. The band’s other gem, hidden in the racket of the gears of those relentlessly spinning hop-along tunes, was the wiry little guitarist D’Jalme Garnier. And with that, the short list of refreshing musical highlights from the Creole cowboys’ show comes to an end. Occasional moments of improvisation, when Ballou and D’Jalma crossed swords, were negligibly few, and they were the real melodic exotica of Thursday night. If you’re not exactly a fan of monochrome dance-floor stompers, then the synchronized on-stage swaying to the rhythm of dry accordion drone, often served up in one and the same key, may have put your patience to a serious test. Whenever things started to sound too alike and a whiff of monotony began to drift out of Broussard’s Creole kitchen, Jeffery would reluctantly reach for one of the predictable mood swings in his collection. The old guy’s favorite trick for keeping the stage action interesting is to send the band galloping off, practically without any warning, and every now and then he likes to grab the reins of the tireless zydeco machine and stop his crew right at the threshold of sentimental blues, Creole-flavored as can be, of course. That’s the mood we were greeted with on Bring It On Home, and Richest Man claimed its share of the tender balladeering too. Both turned out to be nicely rounded in terms of dynamics, and their improvised passages made up the two peaks of Thursday’s Postojna evening in their own way.
Jeffery Broussard & The Creole Cowboys delivered a rather unattractive set of strictly traditional zydeco toe-tappers in Postojna, served up with a sometimes downright tasteless disinterest that treated the audience in an insincere, not to say disrespectful way. Apparently in the eyes of plenty of performers, however obscure, we Slovenians are still seen as a bunch of clueless rubes you can sell just about anything to. The blame here certainly doesn’t lie with the artistic direction of the Postojna blues festival, which, despite a budget that gets tighter year after year, is doing everything it can to recruit performers of excellent musical quality, if not necessarily eminent names. With Jeffery Broussard & The Creole Cowboys the math just didn’t add up, in the strictly critical sense of course, even though the vast majority of the crowd left Hotel Jama with a smile on their face.
Photos: Mojca Perdih
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