Keith Frank & the Soileau Zydeco Band
Live at Slim's Y-Ki-Ki
Shanachie

In Robert Mugge's 1994 documentary The Kingdom of Zydeco, accordionists Boozoo Chavis and Beau Jocque vie for the zydeco music crown left vacant by the 1987 death of Clifton Chenier (a onetime Houston resident). As the movie explores the friendly yet highly avid rivalry between the two, it compares and contrasts the music and attitude of both the seasoned veteran (Chavis) and the younger and talented upstart (Jocque). The unspoken point becomes the fact that both artists deserve royal stature, and how the continuing vitality of zydeco as it enters its second, third and further generations is rooted in a unique union between tradition and contemporary currency.

No other place in America is more steeped in regional and ethnic traditions than the Cajun country parishes of southern Louisiana, which are the birthplaces and homes of zydeco music. Yet at the same time, zydeco at its best continues to live outside the sometimes constrictive notion of folklore, thanks to the primary realm in which the music is made: the Louisiana dance halls where the spirit of the fais do do rules. Quite simply, you've never truly heard zydeco if you haven't enjoyed the energy and sweat of a packed show at Louisiana joints like Slim's Y-Ki-Ki in Opelousas, Richard's in Lawtell, the Habibi Temple in Lake Charles or El Sido's in Lafayette, to name some of the most notable venues. To witness zydeco's biggest stars in the music's truest context is to understand how it acts as the cultural counterpart to church, transmitting a sense of spirit, community and shared experience, and how it offers transcendence from the vagaries of day-to-day life. At its most potent, live zydeco sparks an infectious feeling of joy. Just like good boudin and crawfish étouffée, the full flavor of zydeco can be tasted only in Louisiana.

The corollary to all this is that zydeco recordings are, for the most part, a disappointing approximation of the real thing. And this isn't merely the eternal struggle to capture the evanescent and ineffable spirit of inspired music on tape, or these days, in digital bytes. Zydeco recording budgets are limited by the very nature of the music's audience share, and rarely if ever has a zydeco act tracked with one of those few skilled recordists who can bring life to the highly artificial process of making records. It's a tribute to zydeco's inherent élan that the music has traveled so far from the Louisiana borders at all, and the primary forces in spreading the zydeco gospel have definitely been the evergrowing popularity of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the domestic and overseas tours by zydeco's top acts.

Given all that, Boozoo Chavis has fared rather well on the recording front. He re-emerged in 1991 after three decades of musical semiretirement, releasing an eponymous album on the American Explorer series started and sadly abandoned by Elektra Nonesuch Records. After scoring zydeco's first genuine hit song in 1955 with "Paper in My Shoe," Chavis was instrumental in setting zydeco's canon until he put music aside for a successful career training racehorses in 1961. Due credit for reviving and enhancing Chavis's profile goes to Terry Adams of NRBQ, another musical act whose records never quite approximate its beguiling charm as the best bar band in the universe. The initial spark was the song "Boozoo, That's Who!" on the 'Q's 1989 album, Wild Weekend (the band's best studio outing), which featured Chavis on his own tribute. The albums Adams produced for Chavis, beginning with the American Explorer comeback, and followed by Boozoo, That's Who! on Rounder in 1993 and Hey Do Right! on Antone's/Discovery in 1996, are among the most vital studio waxings by a zydeco act.

That said, the latest release from Chavis, Who Stole My Monkey?, might sound at first blush like just another Boozoo album, which in and of itself is just fine, thank you. His warm and mellifluous accordion trots merrily through this 16-song set, strong on dance-floor grooves that his band, the Magic Sounds (which includes sons Charles and Rellis Chavis), plows into like the loamy soil of Cajun country. But such departures as a solo accordion/voice rumination on Big Joe Williams's "Baby Please Don't Go," which is pure bluesy pleasure, and a zydeco romp on Sonny Boy Williamson's "Bottle Up and Go" make clear just who zydeco's Delta country cousins are. And the inclusion of two cheeky X-rated dance-floor favorites, "Deacon Jones" and "Uncle Bud" (sample lyric: "18, 19, 20 years ago, Uncle Bud beat the shit out of Cotton-Eyed Joe"), help make this disc an essential Chavis release. Although the uninitiated might still be advised to begin with 1994's Live! At the Habibi Temple (also on Rounder), the Chavis charm is certainly in ample supply on his latest.