Don’t stop at the title of this show: the musical revue New Orleans Blues, presented at Espace St-Denis, really doesn’t have the blues. It serves as a festive reminder that Louisiana is the cradle of popular music over the last hundred years, from Jerry Roll Morton to… Britney Spears.
There are two things that Normand Brathwaite wanted to avoid when he set out to stage New Orleans Blues: he didn’t want to make a didactic show, and he didn’t want to give too much space to Dixieland. This early jazz, marked by the sounds of instruments like the trumpet, clarinet, cornet and banjo, does indeed have a certain charm… but only in small doses.
The fanfare aspect is therefore more or less limited to the entrance on stage of the imposing cast through the hall. As for musicographic or historical considerations, they remain minimal. They are slipped into the interventions of Baron Samedi (Fayolle Jean Jr.), spirit of the dead in the voodoo cult who guides the audience in this show without downtime.
“For me, it was the atmosphere of New Orleans that interested me,” says Normand Brathwaite, who says he spent a crazy 48 hours seeing shows in the French Quarter before embarking on this adventure. He gorged himself on blues, was surprised by the funk he rediscovered there, but above all felt transported by the spirit of freedom that animates this city.
Joël Ferron, who made the musical selection, drew on a century of music to set the scene, but did not hesitate to stretch the elastic a little. His musical map of New Orleans also includes artists influenced by his music, but associated with other genres such as Elvis and even Britney Spears, born near the Louisiana border, whose Baby One More Time cover was covered by Élizabeth Blouin-Brathwaite.
Adaptations of When the Saints Go Marchin’ In and Down by the River Side have even become popular scout songs in our home…
It is therefore easy to let yourself be transported by these songs, played impeccably by the group mainly made up of musicians from the show Belle et Bum. Four performers take turns at the microphone: Leslie Snooky Alston, Élizabeth Blouin-Brathwaite, Franck Julien and Sarah-Maude Desgagnés (replacing Dawn Cumberbatch the evening La Presse saw the show). Energetic and necessarily versatile, they carry the show with obvious pleasure.
Normand Brathwaite himself goes behind the microphone to sing in trio O Marie by Daniel Lanois (who owned a studio located in the French Quarter for about a decade), one of the beautiful moments of the show. His presence is particularly striking when he plays the harmonica, his playing is so unusual. “It’s the way I sing,” he says, adding that he likes the instrument because it’s close to the human voice and easy to transport.
Let’s not quibble: the only real problem with this show is that the volume is unnecessarily loud. Everyone is at full volume throughout the evening, and this lack of modulation leaves little room for emotion.
Fayolle Jean Jr. is more nuanced in his role as Baron Samedi: his acting is as sober as his smile is predatory and his presence strong. The audience quickly became attached to his laughter with its disturbing intonations, which the staging, however, overdoes a little.
The audience seemed excited by New Orleans Blues the evening we attended the show. Many spectators even spontaneously got up to dance during the rock’n’roll segment of the show. The suite made up of Jambalaya, Great Balls of Fire, Johnny B. Goode and Jailhouse Rock, all performed by Franck Julien, turns out to be the most profitable sequence of the evening.