Our annual Mardi Gras concert! Buckwheat Zydeco blends time-honored Creole styles with a modern beat for an entirely new sound of zydeco music that’s both traditional and contemporary. Whether it’s a jazz ballad, dance hall swing or bordello blues, vocalist Catherine Russell can take any style of music and give it her own special touch.

Background:
Buckwheat Zydeco:
Buckwheat Zydeco is the first zydeco artist signed to a major record label, the first zydeco artist to perform on a national television show, the first zydeco artist to release a children's album, the first zydeco artist to launch his own record label, and the first zydeco artist to win an Emmy award.

By the mid-'70s, South Louisiana began to experience a grassroots cultural renaissance as zydeco and Cajun music gained appreciation as treasured cultural resources. As the demand for zydeco grew, Stanley ‘Buckwheat” Dural was offered a gig playing organ and piano with the King of Zydeco, the late, great Clifton Chenier. Buck (as he is also known) worked hard and learned all he could. After three years of touring, recording and accordion apprenticeship, he left in 1979 to lead his own group, Buckwheat Zydeco and the Ils Sont Partis Band. Like Chenier, Buckwheat has continued to blend traditional Creole zydeco with the latest black-contemporary styles, drawing on all of his rich and varied musical experience.

Catherine Russell:
Catherine Russell is that rarest of entities – a genuine jazz and blues singer – who can sing virtually anything. Her voice is full blown feminity incarnate; a dusky, stalwart and soulful instrument that radiates interpretive power yet remains touchingly vulnerable. She launches fearlessly into each tune, getting inside the melody and capturing every emotion. Whether she's shimmying through a barrel-house stomper, channeling fifties R&B, dragging her weary heart through a torchy juke joint number, or kicking up her heels honky tonk style, Ms. Russell can stand comparison to her greatest forebearers