Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

I'm gonna say at the outset that Dave Holt seems to be a pretty good guy. NOW OR NEVER!, the latest release by the Dave Holt Band, is an aural business card, if you will, for a band from the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania area which plays a wide range of Louisiana music at festivals, weddings, and the likes, kind of a “Have Trumpet, Will Travel,” affair in case you don't want to. Looking at Holt’s itinerary I see that he has played a number of benefits for New Orleans of late, and is donating a portion of the proceeds from the sale of his CDs to Habitat For Humanity, which is busily building a Musician’s village (which something like 70 percent of the New Orleans musicians can't qualify for, due to bad credit, but that’s another story). The selection on NOW OR NEVER! is extremely intriguing. Holt could have recorded “When The Saints Go Marching In” and “Do You Know What It Means (To Miss New Orleans)” and, if he wanted to be daring, “At The Foot of Canal Street;” instead, he has selected a bunch of relatively obscure tracks (“Congo Square,” “Hard To Stop”) some better known but under-recorded ones “I Wish I Was In New Orleans”) and a couple of classics (“Iko Iko,” “Roll Mr. Jelly”) which represent a wide, if not completely inclusive, swath of Louisiana music.

The problem with NOW OR NEVER! is that in this day of amazon.com and e-music.com (and, what the hey, louisianamusicfactory.com) and the like that you can pretty much get the real thing as easily as you can get the Holt’s band approximation of same. Still, if you've never heard Kermit Ruffin play at “When I Die (You Better Second Line)” at Vaughn’s in the Bywater, or somehow missed the Neville Brothers (represented here by passable covers of “Voodoo” and “Grisha Dance” and Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927”), NOW OR NEVER! will give you a reasonably straightforward introduction. Holt’s vocals (or, for that matter, the occasional guest vocals of Rose Hudson) are not quite versatile enough to adequately cover the full range of Louisiana music, from jazz to pop to zydeco; if, however, you're looking to expose yourself to the culture for the first time and want to stick your toe into the pool gradually, NOW OR NEVER! Isn't a bad place to start.