New Orleans project 'Musique' packages Louisiana French and Creole songs into album, book and exhibition

The New Orleans Foundation for Francophone Cultures released Musique, a 12-track anthology of Louisiana French and Creole music, accompanied by a book of interviews and a short documentary, presenters said at a Library of Congress symposium.

The project, co-directed by Rudy Bazenet and Scott Tilton and funded by an American Folklife Center Community Collections Grant, sought to capture contemporary performances across Louisiana and to document how language and music are being transmitted to younger generations. "With that steeped language loss, music is one of the areas in which the language is being passed on through generation to generation," Tilton said.

Bazenet and Tilton described producing a two-songs-per-artist album that features established and community ensembles from across Louisiana, including fiddler Louis Michaud, singer Leyla McCalla, zydeco musician Sunpie, Sweet Crude, an 18-woman Baby Dolls group and Les Cenelles. They said selections reflect regional and stylistic diversity and that the project intentionally recorded material in Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole to preserve linguistic nuance.

The team recorded at Esplanade Studios in New Orleans in August 2024 (sessions ran August 10—631, with roughly six full days of principal recording and additional retakes). Scott Tilton noted archival precedents such as John Lomax's 1934 field recordings in the Library of Congress collections and said the project was conceived as a modern snapshot a century after the Lomax tapes.

Speakers highlighted production choices: the album was pressed as an LP with cover art by Katja (a cypress-tree design rendered as a risograph-style sound wave), and the project returned recordings and printed copies of the book to participating musicians. "We compensated well for their work," Tilton said, adding that proceeds have gone back into music education programs to bring artists into schools.

Presenters tied musical themes to larger community concerns. Explaining one track written by Louis Michaud's father, Tilton said the song addresses coastal erosion and its cultural consequences: "the loss of Louisiana's coast — which has been the size basically of Massachusetts — leads to a loss of language, which leads to a loss of community." The presenters used samples and brief film excerpts to show polyphonic styles and blended musical genres.

The project also produced a companion book with transcribed artist interviews, short bios and lyrics presented in French, Louisiana Creole and English. Presenters said several academic libraries, including Harvard, UC Berkeley and Tulane, have acquired copies. A short (20-minute) documentary drawn from hours of footage has screened at regional festivals and is being submitted to additional film events.

At the end of the presentation, audience members asked about Indigenous collaborations and language work; Tilton cited collaboration with Haley Dardar and the Houma Language Project and work with the Tunica-Biloxi in Marksville. Presenters said the project aimed to both celebrate traditions and compensate cultural keepers historically asked to perform without payment.

The presenters said the album has generated roughly 100,000 streams on Spotify and that they are pursuing awards consideration in regional roots categories. The project team described their work as a beginning, not an exhaustive survey, intended to create accessible resources for researchers and to support community-based music education going forward.