Categories: music
Tags: Music
Date: 18 July 2009 05:20:22
Last night went to see La Bottine Souriante, which was what won the vote about what gig I should go to as part of Durham Brass Festival. I really enjoyed, as expected.
The band play some excellent French Canadian folk music, which basically fuses Celtic, French, jazz and country together into a unique blend of kick ass tunes. They also have a dancer with them who comes out and does something that looks like it may have been adapted from Irish dancing, and is primarily tap based.
Musically they are excellent, visually they just look like a bunch of guys who should mostly be called Dave or Nigel (no offence to any readers named Dave or Nigel, but you know what I mean). The squeeze box player, who I think they may have changed since the picture below, was also the lead vocalist and I have to say he just looked like he should be presenting the Canadian version of Top Gear. The two exceptions were the bass trombone player who was in a sheriff's outfit and looked like he had wandered in from a Village People reunion tour and the sax player. Now the sax player was interesting. He looked like he should be called Chuck or something and had a real stage presence and just moved about the stage like he had played with some of the worlds top artists, doing stadium gigs. I'm ready to be wrong on that one, but he definately had something about his performance the other guys didn't.
The venue proved a bit restrictive. They are the sort of group you really need to be able to dance to; their concert is effectively set up as one big party. As it was there was no dance area, as there had been for the Destroyers on Wednesday and so you were sat in standard theatre type seating. Nobody stood to dance until directed to do so by the band during the last song. They are a band I would like to see again in a proper festival setting, like Cambridge Folk Festival or similar.
However, enough moaning...it was an excellent night which I really enjoyed. I leave you with a bit of their music:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE6m0hcb46s[/youtube]