Time to Dance with Sweet Mary Cat & Their North American Friends

All of the New Orleans jazz pioneers stressed that the music they played was for dancing, not just for listening. The group on this CD have taken that to heart and “Time to Dance …” is aptly included in the title of the disc. They have clearly been listening to the foremost New Orleans bands of the 1940s through the1970s, such as those of Bunk Johnson, the Humphreys, Sweet Emma Barrett, et al. Sweet Mary Cat is not as well known as other European bands, perhaps, but it is a fine one and deserves wider recognition. As the band’s web site informs us, its name was derived as follows: “Sweet,” a nod to New Orleans piano player Sweet Emma Barrett; “Mary” to the leader, Marie Dandrieux; and “Cat” to the original banjo player, Catherine Gerdil. The band can range in size from a quartet to an octet, and what we have here is a trio from the usual lineup—only Dandrieux, her husband Christian Genin, and Jean-Pierre Alessi being from the Sweet Mary Cat band—but they meld extremely well with the others, the “American Friends”: Gauthé from New Orleans (originally from France), Bissonnette and Mark from Connecticut, and Kaiser and Bray from Canada. The last named three have played many times together as members of the rhythm section of the band led by Bissonnette, the Easy Riders Jazz Band. In keeping with the album’s title, all of the selections are played at dancea