French music celebrated at El Camino College

Acclaimed Cajun folk band Beausoleil stirred an appreciative audience with its original interpretations of traditional bayou dance rhythms at the El Camino College of the Arts Saturday.

As if they're concocting a batch of hot, spicy gumbo, the Grammy nominated Beausoleil updates Cajun music with a splattering of zydeco, jazz, Texas swing, country, blues and Caribbean rhythms.

Behind the direction of leader Michael Doucet, somehow it all holds together.

Beausoleil has been together for more than 20 years, and it shows in its tight, professional playing. This is a band that puts together music as seamlessly as pouring water.
 

Drums, percussion, upright bass, guitar and accordion provide an intricate and shifting backdrop for Doucet's searing fiddle.

Unfortunately, Beausoleil's intent is absorbed by a musical tradition that is essentially unchallenging and extremely provincial.

This is despite the fact that as descendants of the Acadians, French immigrants who settled Nova Scotia in the early seventeenth century, the Cajun people have a compelling story to tell.

In an episode known as "Le Grand Dérangement," British soldiers dispersed the Acadians from their land in 1755.

After an arduous voyage in which many perished, a significant number of Acadians arrived in Louisiana, where the Cajun culture evolved.

Apparently hoping to put this episode far behind, Cajun music is almost entirely celebratory. As Doucet puts it, "French people like to have fun."

The result is sweetly melancholic odes to the Acadian people and rollicking tributes to Cajun culture. Unless you're really inspired by a good barnyard dance, which many in the audience seemed to be, its difficult to appreciate this devoted expression of a rural culture.

Far more intriguing was Ad Vielle Que Pourra, an idiosyncratic quartet from Quebec whose fanciful renditions of French and Celtic folk music on traditional instruments is both enchanting and ambitious.

The set commenced with the abbreviated cries of a piercing violin and a shrieking horn, which eventually gathered together with deep, driving piano chords into a frenzy.

Rustic dance music this was not.

Like the defunct Irish group Dead Can Dance, Ad Vielle Que Pourra (a play on the French saying "come what may") has an instinctive talent for infusing intoxicating indigenous music with a modern sound and introspective intensity.

Whether its a Russian polka, a French waltz, a renaissance dance tune or a wedding march, Ad Vielle Que Pourra delivered with luminous beauty and charm.  The music rises from Nicholas Boulerice's piano, Angele LaBerge's synthesizer and Alain Leroux's violin, with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Thonon, who has created original instruments for Pink Floyd, alternating between the diatonic accordion, Flemish bagpipe, hurdy gurdy, and assorted wind and string instruments.

Add LaBerge's lush, soaring French vocals and you have trance-like music that is as authentic as it is artistically satisfying.

Ad Vielle Que Pourra's moving and transformative music seemed to embrace the entire universe, not merely the murky swamps of the Louisiana bayous.