There were maybe two dozen people in Cafe Nine on Tuesday evening when Jeffrey Broussard and the Creole Cowboys took the stage. Couples sat around the club’s high tables. Broussard, standing in the center of the stage, tested his equipment for a second. Then, without introduction, the band launched into its first song, and three couples sprang to their feet and danced across the floor.
For the next two hours, the dancing wouldn’t stop.
Broussard grew up playing zydeco with his father, Delton Broussard, a legendary accordion player in his own right. He started off playing drums in his father’s band, the Lawtell Playboys. Beginning in the late 1980s, he became a member of the influential Zydeco Force, before forming the Creole Cowboys. In short, Broussard knows his way around zydeco like few others do, and earned his progressive take on the Creole musical tradition honestly. On Tuesday, he and his band — D’Jalma Garnier on guitar and fiddle, Gerald Broussard on bass, Randy Jackson, Jr. on drums, and Jeffrey Broussard, Jr. on rubboard — showed how powerful the music could be when they honored the tradition by letting it live and breathe.
Brian Slattery Photo
A toothpick dangling from his lip, Broussard smiled as he surveyed the crowd that doubled in size by the third song and kept the dance floor full. The band moved from a medley of Stevie Wonder and Wilson Pickett to the Creole classic “Allons a Lafayette,” making the music warmer with every minute. With Garnier providing rhythmic yet lyrical solos, Broussard showed the range of expression on his diatonic accordion, sometimes unfurling cascades of driving notes, other times blaring out chords like a one-man horn section.
“It’s hot up here, bruh,” Broussard said at last, a third of the way through the show. “It’s like we never left Louisiana.” His voice then got serious, just for a second. “I always do this and I have to do this,” he said. He thanked God for letting them travel safely to New Haven to play. “Say a prayer for Texas and Louisiana,” he said. “We need it.”
Broussard switched to fiddle and proved himself equally adept at the style on that instrument. Then he and Garnier switched instruments so Garnier could show what he could do — and he could do a lot. The crowd would not stop dancing.
“Somebody scream!” Broussard said, and several people in the crowd obliged.
Some songs were laced with hilarity, punctuated by animal sounds that the band enjoyed making as much as the audience enjoyed hearing. Another number used the main riff from the theme to Sanford and Son as its backbone. Broussard also took advantage of the wireless mic on his accordion to range off the stage to the back of the club and back onto the stage again. But the band could also dig deep, as it did for a heartbreaking rendition of C.J. Chenier’s take on the Bill Carter song “Richest Man.” The musicians finished up with a pounding number that seemed at last to wipe the dancers out.
Broussard thanked everyone for coming. The toothpick was still there, along for the ride the whole time.