Event

Le Chat Lunatique

As unpredictable, fearless, and entertaining as their namesake, Le Chat Lunatique purveys an addictive genre they call "filthy, mangy jazz," a signature sound that makes you want to smoke and drink too much if only you could get off the dance floor. Le jazz hot of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli is their north star, but they use that beacon to navigate
through a wide range of genres, blending Western swing, classical, reggae, doowop, and "anything else we damn well please" into strikingly original compositions and audaciously reworked standards alike.

Le Chat Lunatique is Muni Kulasinghe's theatrical vocals, his violin skittering across the music like beads of water on a hot skillet - inspired as much by a legless Polish gypsy he encountered on his vagabond travels as by the great Grappelli. It's the axe of guitarist John Sandlin, the classicist who fell under the sway of Reinhardt, felling bar after bar of music with ferocious dexterity. It's the slap-happy bass and slyly sweet vocals of Jared Putnam, the sinisterly innocent one whose dark past embraces both death metal and Western swing. It's the irresistibly deep-pocketed grooves of drummer Fernando Garavito, the mysterious and gracious Colombian who appeared by magic in New Mexico.

The group began prowling the nightspots of Albuquerque, that secret haven of hot jazz, back in 2005, spontaneously impregnating the ears of unsuspecting audience members, who found themselves unable to stop listening or dancing or making merry. From their earliest gigs, Le Chat Lunatique has offered swinging originals with ear-snagging hooks and stories to tellwell-constructed little gems that propagate earworms for ongoing pleasure.