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BiTS: [Laughing] That’s wonderful. At what stage did you start playing regularly, I mean like
dances or whatever it was, every Saturday night or something like that?

CL: Like I said, growing up, I got the job with Wilbert Thibodeaux and we were playing every
weekend. Grew up with that up until like high school and then even in Houston, I would get a gig
every now and then in Houston, but it wasn’t too often. After high school, after I graduated high
school, I moved to Parks, Louisiana where my dad’s side of the family is from and I started the
band, my band that I’m doing now, I started that at the beginning of 2003, so actually last month
marks 18 years that I started the band here in Louisiana and that’s where everything really started

picking up as a business and I started doing my thing for myself.

BiTS: Tell me something about the record you’ve just brought out? What was the influence for
that? Why did you do it?

CL: The influence of that was really paying homage to

my family’s musical background. Like I say, my dad
always did tell me that we come from a long line of
music, but it never really was specified how. They were
kind of nonchalant about it, they didn’t really make a big
deal out of it. Recently we discovered a couple of books
that documents my family’s legacy and actually, my

family’s legacy dates back all the way to the late 1800s
in Louisiana and it indicates that our family were some
of the first people to play jazz music because jazz music
is also a black music and New Orleans is known for jazz,
but a lot of people don’t know that in the Acadiana area,
and at the beginning of the 1900s, there were just as

many jazz bands there than there were in New Orleans.
Everybody thought I guess New Orleans was the big city,
you gotta get out the country, go to the big city and
that’s probably why New Orleans is the way it is, but
over here in the country land, in Creole country, that
was the style of music that they played, jazz, ragtime,

bebop, swing, all this stuff.

BiTS: Some connection with some famous New Orleans jazz musicians as well, I gather.

CL: Yeah, like my great grandfather played the upright bass with Bunk Johnson, which everyone

knows Bunk Johnson is basically one of the forefathers of jazz, originally from New Orleans but he
moved to New Iberia, which is in the Acadiana area in the countryside and the reason why he did
that is because in New Orleans when they were playing jazz, everything was written down. It was
sheet music, but when you come to the country over here, it was just improv and he preferred to
play music like that and that’s what my great grandfather and my grandfather, that’s how they
played music. They just played what they felt. So my great grandfather was there and then my
grandfather came along. He was a drummer, and he was a jazz drummer at first and he was in

several different jazz bands and these books that we just found, indicate that there’s several