Hot Pepper

This is a documentary about famed Zydeco music artist Clifton Chenier. It is a music genre based out of Black Creole communities in Louisiana. It is a mix of blues, R&B, traditional Cajun with a healthy dash of French Creole. This has a lot of the community and everyday life.

First, I love the music. I feel like getting a beer and dancing the night away. I love the people and the culture. There is a great sense of the place and time. There isn't any narrator. The filmmaker probably is asking questions to prompt the interviews. There is text to accentuate important quotes or translate some words. This is a matter of great music subject.

Documentary about noted Zydeco artist Clifton Chenier (1925-1987). Based out of New Orleans, Chenier was the self-crowned "King" of Zydeco (a New Orleans musical hybrid containing elements of blues, folk and Tex-Mex music). Included are interviews with Chenier himself as well as relatives and friends, and scenic shots of the New Orleans area Chenier calls home, all of which is edited together by Les Blank.

Together with "Dry Wood", which Les Blank also released in 1973, you have a well-rounded portrait of Zydeco and New Orleans. This one focuses much more on the music than the culture, with plenty of footage of Chenier in action. Considering how few people know what Zydeco is, or perhaps have even heard of it, this is a crucially important document for music history.

Les Blank's documentary about Clifton Chenier, is a seemingly casual effort. It consists of following "The King of Zydeco" as he plays in clubs, cleans his back yard and jams with his cousin on a back porch: ordinary moments with no more obvious commentary than occasional titles translating the Creole and Cajun lyrics into English in a font that suggests it was made of twigs. The camera watches him, but it's up to other people to talk, until he addresses the camera directly at the 40-minute mark.

It's a documentary that calls more attention to its techniques, to its purity, than to its subject. Nonetheless, it is of obvious interest, both as a documentary of a particular time and place, and for the zydeco music that its subjects play in a fashion that seems as off-handed as the film.