Search - Savoy Doucet Cajun Band :: Sam's Big Rooster

The Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band owes its existence to marriage, specifically the joining of Ann Allen and Marc Savoy. The pair took their impromptu jams with Beausoleil founder Michael Doucet seriously enough to push toward a traditional Cajun trio--sans the drummer and (comparatively) elaborate architecture of Beausoleil. Savoy-Doucet's albums, then, are stripped-down Cajun songfests, with Marc Savoy's accordion and Doucet's fiddle playing waltzes and two-steps and Ann Savoy's guitar providing a kind of heartbeat for the music. She sings wonderfully, with Acadian inflections that reveal her intensive study of classic singers and recordings. Her singing wilts as phrases trail off, and she imbues lyrics with a yodeling warble here, a vibratoless clip there so they're delivered in a precise, unmistakable style that contrasts vividly with the fiddle and accordion. For their parts, Marc Savoy and Doucet play as though this is a set-up-and-go session, with tunes just popping up, gathering steam, and unceremoniously moving on to other tunes. Remarkably, it's difficult to distinguish the venerated classics on Sam's Big Rooster from the newly penned tunes, a true acknowledgement of Savoy-Doucet's stature. --Andrew Bartlett