New Stuff from Friday's Balfa Toujours show!

Friday night's Acoustic Cafe season finale at Grace Chapel harkened to the Louisiana bayou and the Appalachian mountains with the remarkable cajun band Balfa Toujours collaborating with Darrell Scott and the Orchestra Nashville string quintet. The Balfa family name is storied in Louisiana music circles, and the band includes Christine Balfa on guitar, Dirk Powell on accordion, and amazingly talented Courtney Granger on fiddle and most of the lead vocals. Powell and Scott have worked together before, and Powell was a force in old-time country music before distinguishing himself in Cajun music, so when he and Darrell opened the show doing a bluesy duet of Darrell's "Family Tree" with Powell on accordion, it made total sense. Balfa Toujours held the stage for the first half, offering Cajun two-steps and waltzes, which stirred some of the audience to come up front to dance. It is dance hall music after all.

In the second half of the show the full ensemble offered up some more complex works, brought in by Balfa and Scott, and richly orchestrated by Don Hart. The long song Annabelle was an extraordinary epic about slavery and a secret romance. It was a true collaboration between Powell and Scott, and Dirk tells the story in a new piece on Orchestra Nashville's Uncovered project. Also marvelous was Powell's "Waterbound," a tune that had to be re-scored on the day of the concert when an irregularity in the timing of the piece was discovered in rehearsal. Music director Paul Gambill narrates how, um, exciting it was to get that together. Don Hart amazed everyone by working in a major change on concert day, and we have rehearsal audio coming soon of the final rehearsal just before concert time.

This show marks Darrell Scott's final concert as co-artistic director of Acoustic Cafe. It's been a remarkable journey and it's really quite amazing how many new works or radical interpretation of old songs he's pulled off over these two years of concerts. Good thing there's a Best of the Season CD coming so that those magical performances won't be lost in time.