Getting ready to come back north from New Orleans for a spate of gigs around southern Connecticut — including at the State House in New Haven on Dec. 27 — Nardy Boy guitarist, singer, and bandleader Renard Boissiere reminisced about a night at the Acoustic in Bridgeport a few years ago. Nardy Boy was onstage on a Wednesday night. The band always had a microphone set up for someone who wanted to join them. A woman with short blond hair asked if she could sing with them. Boissiere agreed.
“She blew the room away,” Boissiere said.
The band followed her lead. Afterward she turned to them.
“You guys do that all the time?” Boissiere recalled her asking. She assumed they knew the songs she had sung already.
“No, we just made that up for you,” Boissiere told her.
The combination of discipline and improvisation that marks the way Boissiere runs the band hearkens to his upbringing. Boissiere was born and raised in New Orleans — a “full-blooded New Orleanean,” he said, “Catholic to the core. Lapsed Catholic.” He spent the first four years of his life living above a funeral home; his father is a funeral director and his uncle is an embalmer. “We do a service that other people don’t,” Boissiere said. It also meant that he grew up hearing jazz funerals.
He started playing piano at 4 or 5. Then “I realized I had a thing, a proclivity, for the woodwinds,” he said. He started clarinet at 8 and moved to saxophone, alto and tenor. He started playing guitar at 12 because “I wanted to play the bass,” he said. “People said, if you want to play bass, you got to play the guitar.”
When he went to college, starting at Loyola University in New Orleans, he “stopped playing my woodwinds … and stuck with strings and keys — guitar, bass, and piano.” His mother said he needed a more practical degree than music, so he studied English. He transferred to the University of New Orleans, then Southern Vermont College. He got into keyboards, into Philip Glass and Cecil Taylor.
“It was all downhill from there,” he said, laughing.
He returned to New Orleans after college and played around town, including a very brief stint with the Nevilles. It didn’t last. But “I was headed out of town anyway,” he said. He was married at the time, and had a kid, and his then-wife was going to graduate school in Albany, N.Y. He picked up work thanks to a college friend he had met in Vermont.
That friend was a “ne’er-do-well from Newtown,” Boissiere said. “He rounded up musicians for me in Connecticut. We started a venture.”
That was in the fall of 1996, starting in Danbury, then Norwalk, where he met and played with reggae and world music artist Mystic Bowie[http://www.mysticbowie.com/] “I’ve been working with him for 20 years,” Boissiere said. For a while he was going back and forth between Albany and Bridgeport. In 2003 he moved back to New Orleans, got into the software business, and had “two really solid clients and a lot of latitude,” he said. Between consulting and playing music, he was able to be “bi-coastal,” he said — between New Orleans and the Northeast. It was ideal.
Then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
“Katrina turned me into a full-time musician,” Boissiere said. His software clients dried up. There was no work. “Luckily I had a place to go, and that was Connecticut,” he said — downtown Bridgeport. He worked with Mystic Bowie and had a quartet with Chris Morrison on guitar, Steve Clark on bass, and Kurt Berglund on drums, playing jazz and funk around the state. He did a couple small tours with others. And somewhere in there he found himself starting Nardy Boy.
“It came through meeting these guys at the open mic at the Acoustic,” a music club in Bridgeport, Boissiere said. That would be Dave Porter on lead guitar, Terrel Brown on keys, Cassidy Hurley on saxophone, Mike Tepper on bass, and Michael Paolucci on drums. “It was about the people who were willing to show up,” he said. They were all younger than him, but “they knew the guys I knew.… That’s when I started to realize how interconnected” the music scene was, he said. It reminded him of the way things worked in New Orleans as well.
“They liked what I did,” he said. “They liked how I worked. We never rehearsed. You just kind of showed up and you played.”
Boissiere would call songs and changes on the spot and expect the band members to follow, which they did. Somebody might make a recording, and they’d listen to it and hone their sound accordingly. Before the musicians knew it, Nardy Boy was a professional band, gigging in Bridgeport, New Haven, and elsewhere in the state, laying down grooves for dancing crowds from Stella Blues and Pacific Standard Tavern in New Haven to New Year’s Eve bashes at the Acoustic to stages such as the Fairfield Theatre Company, Gathering of the Vibes, and Soupstock.
But then Boissiere moved back to New Orleans, in 2011. His daughter was in school here. “I came back to New Orleans and got into teaching,” he said. “I’ve been back ever since.”
He teaches at St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls’ Catholic school that opened in New Orleans in 1867 to serve the African-American community when the public school system would not provide for them. He teaches eighth‑, ninth‑, and tenth-grade English. He’s also finishing a graduate degree in education. That makes playing music harder.
“Outside of some consistent practicing, I’ve been trying to play with people to keep fresh,” Boissiere said.
But “I don’t necessarily like playing home,” he added. “There’s too many people who are looking for touristy stuff,” he said, the traditional jazz that people come to New Orleans to hear that is only a small slice of the music the city has produced. “There are people who come to build their chops, to build their repertoire” in traditional jazz, he said, and he bears them no ill will. But “I’m not looking for those kinds of places,” he said.
When he plays in New Orleans, he keeps it loose and intimate. He gets together with acquaintances he likes to play with. “We play jazz and funk for four hours and have a really good time,” he said. “We might get 5 people. We might get 50 people.” He’s not concerned either way. For Boissiere and other friends in New Orleans, he said, “it’s a love-hate relationship. Too much of a New Orleans thing can be a little bit of a tragic thing sometimes.”
His younger daughter is about to graduate high school in New Orleans and got accepted to Loyola University. When she goes to college, Boissiere said, “I need to get back to being bicoastal…. I want to get all that back on course.” That means splitting his time more evenly between New Orleans and Connecticut, and playing a lot more music in the Land of Steady Habits, and the Elm City. For now, he’ll settle for reconnecting a few times a year, and doing a flurry of gigs when he’s here.
What keeps him coming back? “The musicians I work with,” he said. “So far I’ve been fortunate. A lot of it just has to do with people who have big ears. They don’t overthink it.”
So what can New Haven expect on Dec. 27? Boissiere brought to mind a gig a few years ago with his jazz-funk quartet. Guitarist Morrison decided to mess with him by playing in a different key from the rest of the band. “He thinks he’s pushing my limits by playing a half-step above,” Boissiere said. But Boissiere just kept right on playing, and people kept on dancing.
“That don’t bother him?” Boissiere recalled Morrison asking drummer Berglund.
“You know what he listens to?” Berglund replied.
And at the break, Boissiere told Morrison that he had indeed noticed. “I was just waiting for you to go somewhere with it,” he said.
In southern Connecticut, Boissiere has found “people who are willing to take chances” — and know they can as long as the music has the rhythm it needs.
“That’s the part about being from New Orleans that helps me,” Boissiere said. “As long as you give them a groove, something they can dance to, they’re willing to listen to some good music. I feel that strongly about it.”
Nardy Boy plays at the State House with the Lost Tribe on Dec. 27. Visit the State House’s website for tickets and more information.