Carole Bausell and French Coast Café is a musical group from the Washington, DC area that performs French café jazz. With Carole Bausell on vocals and Larry Golfer on bass, guest artists join us in local performances. With a niche that is both traditional and contemporary, we play tunes mostly from France but also French-speaking Canada, Belgium, and southwest Louisiana.  A performance may feature diverse styles including gypsy jazz, jazz, samba, blues, Cajun, and Zydeco.  

French Coast Café started as a duo of Carole and Larry performing tunes in French for small audiences in the Lake Barcroft community of Fairfax County, Virginia in 2014 and early 2015. Carole, a native of Delaware, came by her love of French music while living in Paris where she sang French songs and studied acting at the Conservatoire Nationale d’Art Dramatique. She came to love the music of Edith Piaf, Georges Brassens, Django Reinhardt, Charles Trenet, Jacques Brel, and many others.  

Larry is a native of Washington, DC, a professional photographer, and also a fluent French speaker . He worked in the field of international development including projects in French West Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and these travels influenced his already growing fascination with world music. He is a big fan of samba, Afrobeat, blues, jazz, reggae and celtic sounds. After meeting Carole, he came into her sphere of French world music, including Cajun-Zydeco. DC has a great Cajun-Zydeco dance community and Larry and Carole are frequent dancers at local Cajun-Zydeco dances and concerts. That music started to have a strong effect on Larry and he joined Carole at Cajun Week at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, West Virginia and at Festivale Internationale in Lafayette, Louisiana.  Larry is French Coast Café’s bass man and also plays blues harmonica.

Here we are performing at a local Mardi Gras party.