The latest casualty of the national economic recession: Festival International de Louisiane headliner Seun Kuti & Egypt 80. One of the more anticipated acts of this year’s festival, Seun Kuti recently cancelled an entire leg of his U.S. tour, FIL included. A band spokesman could not be reached for comment. Notices from other venues on the tour, which included west coast gigs in L.A. and San Francisco, say the cancellations are due to “economic reasons.”
Hailed as the new standard bearer of Afrobeat music, Sean Kuti is the younger son of Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti. Seun has been playing with his father’s raucous band, Egypt 80, since he was eight, and took over the horn-laden 16-piece ensemble after his father’s death in 1997. The group was scheduled to make its Lafayette debut tonight at Festival International. The band is still listed as a performer on the French-language version of Festival International’s Web site.
Festival International Director Dana Canedo says Festival International was notified about the cancellation back in February and that it was largely due to the economic hardships facing several of the venues on the band’s tour. “It was very dissapointing,” she says, adding that festival organizers hope to be able to bring the band in for next year’s event.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
The latest casualty of the national economic recession: Festival International de Louisiane headliner Seun Kuti & Egypt 80. One of the more anticipated acts of this year’s festival, Seun Kuti recently cancelled an entire leg of his U.S. tour, FIL included. A band spokesman could not be reached for comment. Notices from other venues on the tour, which included west coast gigs in L.A. and San Francisco, say the cancellations are due to “economic reasons.”
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