Product description Monk Boudreaux is one of the most respected artists on the New Orleans music scene. He has sung for years on tour with The Wild Magnolias and is leader of The Golden Eagles, who are regular highlights of the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. They accompany him on this album of Creole Indian Mardi Gras music, funk and reggae. Featured guest performers include Dr. John, members of The Neville Brothers and Louisiana bluesman Tab Benoit. Amazon.com Following his 2002 collaboration with guitarist-vocalist Anders Osborne, New Orleans’s Big Chief Monk Boudreaux delivers this worthy solo debut. Produced by Osborne and boasting assistance by Crescent City usual suspects Dr. John, Cyril Neville, and Tab Benoit (who anonymously fade into the background), Boudreaux’s dusky tribal chants are pumped with simmering funk and swampy, primitive R&B. Less songs than free-form chants, Mr. Stranger Man captures the heart of the New Orleans Indian’s musical firewater. The percussion-heavy tracks provide an upbeat yet ominous atmosphere for Big Chief’s extemporaneous storytelling and droning, near spoken vocals. Even though some songs follow conventional structure, such as the Meters-styled "Shotgun Joe," Boudreaux improvises like a great poet as the band lays down a boiling, foot-tapping foundation. The rhythms vary, but the authentic, near hypnotic, body-swaying vibe and the chief’s moaning vocals resonate like classic reggae, a genre reflected on a couple of tunes. It’s not what he says but how he says it, and Boudreaux conjures a groove as pervasive and enveloping as the humidity on a midsummer New Orleans night. --Hal Horowitz