A Lot of Gaul

Bruno Bischofberger is publishing, in a limited edition of one thousand copies, Jeannette Montgomery Barron, Photographs, a portfolio of

even with a translator. We will, however, get the perversity of a nine-man, two-woman, one-dog acoustic band playing a chaotic mix of Gypsy, North African, French folk, and Caribbean rhythms while acting out comic-opera punk fantasies onstage—the Marx Brothers meet the Pogues while Edith Piaf looks on. These rowdy children of Algerian, Spanish, and Italian immigrants produce music that sounds surprisingly French—or at least what you always thought French music should sound like.

Their whimsical songs tell stories with sexual innuendo and sensual panache—a fly with a libido and a hungry family that eats a vegetarian are two examples. But then, only a band with a well-developed sense of humor could take a name originally hurled at it as a racist epithet and make it a wry comment on French society.

K.M.