The most useful music is music you can actually use, like EDM. utilitarian in the extreme, if you don’t utilize them you don’t quite understand and connect with what you’re listening to. This is true of Connolly’s monthly “Let’s Zydeco” evenings, first and hour of dance lessons and then three hours plus of dancing.
Zydeco dancing has it roots in early 20rg Creole dance, couples partner and each step take 8 beats, cut into 4 by 4, the couples mirror each other. At Connolly’s it looks like a kissing cousin to Western swing only more graceful and at Connolly’s on Saturday night, Li’l Mo And The Monicats, a country swing big band of the first order, made certain they were used properly!
I met Monica Passim last year at Lincoln Center’s “Americana Fest” through mutual friend Jahn Xavier and spent the following week catching up with a Urban Country girl catalog culminating in the astounding 2012 album Whole Lotta Lovin’. I only stayed for the first of three sets but all we got from the album was an early “Little Heart Attacks”, a song you can imagine Patsy Cline tackling and the western swing “Real Gone Jive”. But the hour plus set jumps from the rock and roll “Boppin’ The Blues”” to the early Passim country “Twice The Loving (In Half The Time). The atmosphere at “Let’s Zydeco” was more social community than music consumption, the dancefloor, a big wooden beauty, was always filled and friends seemed to be meeting and catching up, but while Mo was on the stage people kept on shifting and the band were such pros they knew that their job was to used. This was not “2A”, instead this was where popular music comes into its own, as one part of a larger community.
With a stand up bass, steel guitar, fiddler, three guitarist and drummer, the sound was big enough enough and the beat steady and jumping enough to keep everybody moving and while the result was Li’l Mo’s ridiculously great singing getting short shrift, staying in the mix while in other circumstances, certainly on record, her voice is on top of it. Monica is the epitome of a rockabilly singer from New York, on the album it manifest itself with one of the great New Yorker country songs “Lovely Miranda” but on stage, her husky, edgy, protean, where is this sound coming voice. On record, Li’l Mo is so soulful you wish she’d cover Curtis Mayfield, everything she sings touches you deep and keeps you coming back, on stage she leads her band with a sure hand through set pieces of sound (the following set she would have a 12 girl chorus joining her!) and the audience never felt short footed.
The Monicats themselves, especially the guy on stand up bass who actually plays the instrument BEHIND HIS BACK, kept us on the right foot as well. They swing em out one after another, tight and fast. But again, the band is here for a reason and the sense is we are getting Li’l Mo performing on the beat swing songs to be danced to and Mo the country balladeer isn’t to be seen. By the time Mo gets towards the end of the set, with a terrific banging piano on “Be Bop A Hula” and the rockabilly triumph “She Wolf” howling at the moon, the balladeer isn’t missed too much!
Grade: B+