Album Notes

\"...an honest live effort juiced with plenty of pep, vigor, and ambience...live performances are where the rubber meets the road, and here, there is no hydroplaning whatsoever. It won\'t be long before the Sauce becomes the boss.\"--Dan Willging (\"Beyond the Bayous\", Dirty Linen Magazine.)

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Sauce Piquante plays the traditional accordion-and-fiddle music of Southwest Louisiana. They play regularly for dancers, and they will get you on your feet. But they also honor the spirit of the past. They like to conjure up the old days, vieux temps passé, when everyone-Cajun and Creole alike-just called this \"French music.\"

The band is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to a rich and vibrant Louisiana French music community. The name \"Sauce Piquante\" was suggested by Louisiana-born accordionist Danny Poullard, who was the guiding spirit of the California music scene. When Danny died in April of 2001, the band lost a good friend and mentor. This recording, their first, is dedicated to his memory.



More About the Band

Blair Kilpatrick plays the accordion, and does most of the singing for the group. She picked up the Cajun accordion in 1991, after the first of many trips to Louisiana sparked her passion for the music. She has been fortunate to study with a number of Cajun and Creole accordionists (Steve Riley, Jesse Legé, Eddie LeJeune, Bois Sec Ardoin, Delton Broussard)--and of course the late Danny Poullard, her primary teacher and mentor. Blair is also the author of a music memoir called \"Accordion Dreams: A Journey into Cajun and Creole Music\" (University Press of Mississippi, January 2009.)

Steve Tabak (fiddle) played bluegrass mandolin for close to twenty years, going back to his bluegrass days in North Carolina. But he set it aside and picked up the fiddle in order to join Blair, a year after she discovered the accordion.

Blair and Steve eventually joined forces with the other members of Sauce Piquante:

Robert Richard (guitar, vocals) is a lifelong blues-roots-folk musician. He grew up in a French-speaking Acadian family in Maine, in a community with a long-standing musical soiree tradition.

Kathy \"KP\" Price (bass,vocals) was raised in Ohio, singing and playing piano. Her years of Cajun-Zydeco dancing in the Bay Area rekindled her desire to make music, so she took up the electric bass.

Kathy Dodge (drums) has been playing for over fifteen years, with a variety of local bands-jazz, rock, and now Sauce Piquante.

Sauce Piquante first played publically in the fall of 1999. Today they perform regularly at a wide variety of Bay Area venues and festivals. But they also love a good jam session, or just playing around the kitchen table.