Winter Cajun/Zydeco Festival at Hawks & Reed

289 Main St.,Greenfield MA 01301

15 January, 2023

Description

This Sunday afternoon event features Louisiana music at its best through live music performed by two bands: Back O’ Town Cajun Band and Planet Zydeco. Cajun music is melodic and uses a Cajun accordion and a fiddle to produce music perfect for two-stepping and waltzes. Zydeco music is more rhythmic and uses an accordion, electric instruments and a percussive washboard. You will not be able to refuse moving to this music. This event also includes intro and intermediate lessons for waltzes and zydeco dances. Back O’ Town Cajun Band is the latest project of Langdon NH musicians Pete & Linda Simoneaux, on fiddle & accordion, joining forces with longtime Greenfield MA multi-instrumentalist Michael Pattavina on acoustic guitar, and Brattleboro VT based bassist/guitarist Steve Frankel on electric bass. Back O’ Town Cajun Band plays traditional, acoustic Louisiana Cajun & Creole dance music, “straight up” with a repertoire ranging from the legendary recordings of late 1920s and early 1930s, through the postwar periods of the 1940s and 50s, and the great Cajun music revival of the 1960s and 70s. PLANET ZYDECO is an exciting New England-based zydeco band that captures the essence of traditional rural-style accordion-driven dance music as it is played in clubs and dance halls in southwest Louisiana today. Band members hail from Vermont and Rhode Island. The Planet's funky syncopated sound includes accordion, fiddle, electric guitar, bass, drums and rubboard. The rubboard, or frottoir, as it is known in Louisiana, is made of corrugated metal, worn like a vest and played with spoons or bottle openers, and is a rhythmic trademark of the zydeco sound.