Experiences

 

Savoy Family Cajun Band in Concert

Saturday, March 27, 8:00 PM / Auditorium, Independence Hall, UACCB / $12 - $10 - $8

 

With the support of a major initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, the Ozark Foothills FilmFesti is honored to present a multi-disciplinary cinema/live music experience. This special evening concert is preceded by a screening of J'AI ÉTÉ AU BAL and MARC AND ANN, two classic Cajun music documentaries by Les Blank, at 3:30 PM.

 

 

 

The Savoy Family Cajun Band plays honed down, hard-core Cajun music laced with an earthy sensuality. Although insisting on a more acoustic approach to Cajun music, the band can hold its own amongst Cajun music lovers everywhere. Their repertoire is chosen carefully, popular dance hall tunes interspersed with soulful ballads, fiddle or vocal duets, or blues. But whether singing of sorrow and loss or the joy of the dance, The Savoy Family Cajun Band brings the raw energy of the southwest Louisiana dance halls to the stage.

Musically, they surely ain't no stuffy preservationists; whether a bitter lament or an earthy hard-driving breakdown, with Marc's squeezebox, Ann's guitar, and their highly capable sons Joel and Wilson on fiddle and keyboards, the Savoys cover the Cajun sprectrum with a dazzling mixture of spiritual joy and virtuoso voltage.  --Los Angeles Times

 

Marc Savoy and Ann Savoy

Ann Savoy is a musician, author, record producer, and photographer. Her most recent endeavor is the newly released Adieu False Heart, a CD of duets with Linda Ronstadt. Ann appears with her son Joel in the film Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and performs three of the cuts on the accompanying soundtrack. She has recorded twelve CDs on the Arhoolie, Rounder, and Vanguard labels. As a producer for Vanguard Records, she produced the Grammy nominated Cajun music compilation, Evangeline Made. Ann is the author of Cajun Music, A Reflection of a People, an exhaustive chronicle of the art form, utilizing interviews, biographies, photographs, and song transcriptions.

Marc Savoy was raised in the small Cajun prairie town of Eunice, Louisiana. He began playing accordion at age 10 and, after disassembling and repairing enough accordions he bagan building them. In 1965 he opened the Savoy Music Center in Eunice where he hosts a Saturday morning jam session and builds about six accordions a month. Marc has played accordion all his life, traveling and recording giants of Cajun music like Dewey Balfa, DL Menard, and Doc Guidry. He has performed at three presidential inaugurations, and at the John F. Kennedy Center, the Newport Folk Festival,and the Berlin Jazz Festival. In 1982 he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

 

FUNDED IN PART BY~

The National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.