This album blows my mind
"La Bottine Souriante" are a French folk band who add big band sounds and so on, and they're great.
I got a bunch of CDs from Amazon recently, and I’ve just turned to the one I was vaguely doubtful of, the best of “La Bottine Souriante” (get it from Amazon).
Boggle. Andy (that’s Andrew Whincup, Shan Andy - I don’t have his email so I’m hoping this page will get Googled and he’ll egosurf at some point), you need to own this. If, of course, you don’t already know of them.
They’re a French folk group. Originally. But then they decided they should add a big band sound to it - which is, of course, obvious. (They’ve also got salsa, jazz and other type sounds as well.) I am slowly coming to the opinion that adding horns to any type of music is almost certainly good - in the same way that our roleplaying circle has decided that anything is cooler if it’s on fire, anything is cuter if you add a kitten, and that at certain points you just have to use italics.
They, incidentally, have a wonderfully complicated chart trying to describe all of the members of the band over the years, over which period they were members, and what instruments they played at that time. It takes two pages of the CD booklet.