by Jim Kelly

Who: Swamperella
What: Authentic Cajun music
Where: Toronto, ON
To Contact: P.O. Box 90036, 1488 Queen Street West, Toronto, ON, M6K 1M4; Tel: (416) 588-9227; E-mail: swamperella@hotmail.com; swamp@swamperella.com; Web site: www.swamperella.com

The other day I overheard a kid ask her parents: “What did people do before they had ‘dance music’?” Okay, that didn’t actually happen, but it’s an easy, if perhaps vaguely unethical way for me to introduce the following idea: namely, THIS IS DANCE MUSIC! Cajun music is roll-up-the-rug-grab-a-partner-and-forget-your-troubles dance music. And nobody north of the 49th does it better than Swamperella. The Toronto band consists of Soozi Schlanger (vocal and lead fiddle), Conny Nowé (guitar and vocals), Peter Jellard (vocals, accordion and fiddle) and Rachel Melas (bass). They play traditional and contemporary Cajun music, but they don’t necessarily consider themselves a Cajun band. “We try and do it as authentically as possible,” says Schlanger. “We try our best because that’s the music we all fell in love with. Who are we to change it? It’s somebody else’s culture and somebody else’s music and you want to honour it.” They listen to the old-time records for inspiration, check lyric books for proper pronunciation and try to get everything sounding just right. But along the way they end up doing more than honouring the music-they bring it forward and add their own spices to the recipe. “We were following the tradition as best as we could, but we were putting our own hearts and souls into it, so it’s bound to be our own individual work.” So if you’re looking to kick up your heels to a fine gumbo of Cajun tunes … welcome to da Swamperella! Ai-eeeeee!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 8th, 2002 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Showcase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.