Bayou Brothers Do Good-Time New Orleans Music at "Twilight in the Park" Concert August 14

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I went back to Balboa Park last night for the 6:30 performance of one of my favorite local bands, the Bayou Brothers, at the “Twilight in the Park” series in the Organ Pavilion. I first heard the Bayou Brothers when they played a holiday-music concert in the old Mission Hills Library in 2016 (I think), and they played an infectious mix of holiday songs and New Orleans standards. They call themselves a “Zydeco/Cajun” band and they’re able to mix those two related styles into an appealing blend. They opened last night’s concert with a song I’d heard them play at that holiday show as well even though it’s not holiday-themed: “Dance All Night (Stay a Little Longer),” first recorded by Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan in 1945 and best known today in Willie Nelson’s cover. I hadn’t realized it was so amenable to a New Orleans treatment until I heard the Bayou Brothers do it that first time. After that they went into a succession of songs about foods – co-leader and guitarist Paul Kastellanos even joked about how much of their set list was gustatory in nature – including “Boil Them Crawfish” (which The Smothers Brothers outrageously parodied as “Boil That Cabbage Down”), “Gumbo,” “Who Stole My Hot Sauce?,” and Hank Williams’s classic “Jambalaya.” The Bayou Brothers have a woman who plays the so-called “rub board” (actually originally a washboard, though with washboards having gone the way of buggy whips they’re now purpose-built planks of metal that hook on to the player’s shoulders) and they have a second rub board on which they invite members of the audience to join them on stage. There were two birthday girls in the audience who did that: Hazel on “Gumbo” and Frisky (she insisted that’s really her name!) on “Who Stole My Hot Sauce?”

After that they did a song called “High Rollers Zydeco” that was the title track on one of their albums (there are at least three: High Rollers Zydeco, Baptised in the Blues and Resurrected, though it’s possible judging from the religious titles of the last two that they’re by another band that calls itself the Bayou Brothers) and then a long jam that started out sounding like The Champs’ 1958 rock instrumental classic “Tequila” and ended up as a vocal number called “You’re Gonna Look LIke a Monkey When You Get Home.” This time their guest second rub board player was a woman named Anastasia, though after that they specifically asked for a male volunteer. They got him in a young and very sexy man named Alex, who joined them on “Hot Chili Mama” (another song that referenced food!) before they closed out with a song called “Jack Rabbit” and an encore of something either called “Zydeco Shoes” or “Zydeco Boogaloo.” Though they suffer from a common fault in bands like this – virtually everything they played sounded pretty much the same – the Bayou Brothers are a fun band and I’d give a special shout-out to their other co-leader, John Chambers. He spent most of his time playing accordion, thus giving their music the authentic zydeco sound, though he also sat behind an electronic keyboard and used it now and then. He and Kastellanos also trade off on lead vocals. I’ve seen the Bayou Brothers several times before, not only at the former Mission Hills Library but at previous “Twilights in the Park,” and they always put on a good show.