The New Haven Advocate
New Haven, CT - October 12, 2006
by: Brian Slattery

Sticking Power: The Red Stick Ramblers Ramble into Cafe Nine

Traditional American music is easy to play, really hard to play well, and even harder to play in a way which can make modern audiences relate—and dance.

The Red Stick Ramblers are the real deal. The band can keep it simple, but doesn’t just groove and rock. They form clear, strong melodies, whether tearing through a raucous fiddle ride or sneaking around a double-jointed jazz solo.

At an August show in Clifftop, West Virginia, guitarist Chas Justus pulled down a guitar solo which consisted of one note, played maybe five times over sixteen bars. Every time, that one note was in just the right place.

Justus learned gypsy jazz and bluegrass in Baton Rouge. Linzay Young, who sings and plays fiddle, grew up in rural Louisiana and has played fiddle since he was 12. Chas Kevin Wimmer is a classical violinist who decided twenty years ago to dedicate himself to Cajun fiddle, and ended up playing in Balfa Toujours. The rhythm section—Eric Frey on upright bass and Glenn Fields on drums—are versed in a variety of styles. In one set, the band can switch from Cajun to blues to Western swing to old-time, and never seem as if they’re pretending. They also sound like they’re having a blast, fitting for a band that formed at Louisiana State University and got its chops playing parties and festivals.

“We all kind of bring our own thing,” says Young. “We started out doing a mixture of things. I did Cajun, Chas did gypsy swing—we used to do some Django Reinhardt. As far as making it all fit together, we’ve just been playing together for so long that we’ve managed to hammer out the styles and find the common thing between them. The hardest genre to get right would be the Cajun stuff, and we know it really well. Cajun music is real different than a lot of other types of music, in its rhythm and its simplicity. Some people try to make it too complicated.”

The Red Sticks are also developing a body of original material. “We write a lot of stuff, in the style of the older stuff we love,” says Young. But it’s getting them noticed outside of traditional circles. A Justus-penned song, “Rattle My Cage,” landed on Linda Ronstadt’s new album; so did Justus, Wimmer, and Frey as musicians. The band was also recruited for the All the King’s Men soundtrack.

At the Red Sticks’ Clifftop show, they played a harrowing song about Katrina. “We were in Philadelphia the weekend that it hit. We came back a couple of days after,” says Young. “I have my mom’s first cousins in New Orleans, and one of them got their house destroyed. They all stayed with us in Eunice, north of Lafayette, for three or four weeks. We hung out, cooked, played music, visited with family—just to look on the brighter side of things, give us a chance to cut loose and take it easy even though there was all of that going on.” The song was written at one of those parties, but it taps the spooky vein of old-time music laid open by the likes of Dock Boggs, personifying Katrina as a marauding, malevolent force.

But most of the Red Stick Ramblers’ music is sheer joy. “We change our set up depending on where we are,” Young says. “If it’s a sit-down crowd, we do more things that are listened to.” At Cafe Nine on the 13th, see if they won’t play something you can dance to._

The Red Stick Ramblers
Oct. 13, 10 p.m. at Cafe Nine, 250 State St., New Haven. $7. (203) 789-8281, cafenine.com.