Performing at the Covey Awards
Coming out of Bay St. Louis to amp up the party anywhere on the coast, Joni Compretta and Baytown Groove are delivering high energy live music with style. They’re a big band with a big sound, featuring seven members and including guitars, keys, horns, drums and bass with multiple singers and are able to perform a wide variety of musical genres and danceable hits in their own southern coastal flavor. For lead singer Joni Compretta, the Baytown style is the result of a lifetime of musical inspiration.
“I’ve been around music my whole life,” she said. “My dad was the frontman of a band from the time I was probably about 12 ’til the time I was about 35… we lived on a bayou, and I could remember hearing my dad and his band rehearse at night and I would lay in my bed and try to go to sleep, and I would just listen to them practice and practice… I could remember thinking to myself, ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna play music with my daddy and like my daddy.’ It only took me 35 years but I was finally able to… he’s actually in my band now.”
Joni’s dad Charlie plays guitar and sings in Baytown Groove, and is a major influence on Joni’s taste for the classics. The band as a whole takes their decades of love for music and blends them in ways that give the band an often completely unique sound, even when playing songs you already know every word to. You might hear a saxophone solo woven into something like Hank Jr’s “Family Tradition” or Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters,” or unique soul-infused vocal renditions of any number of time tested or contemporary hits.
