Cover Story: CAJUN

Music Midtown’s event director Renee Perlstein decided to make “something very new and very different” for the “most vocal” of festival fans, the devotees of Louisiana dance music.

The schedule she assembled for a 12-hour fais-do-do (house party) on Saturday’s Ford/Fox 5 Stage looks something like one of the Crescent City’s beignet donuts: sweet white Cajun music in the middle, surrounded by the crisp zydeco prepared by (mainly) black Louisianans with some of the instruments, melodies and ornamentations of their white confreres mixed into the syncopations and vocal stylings of rhythm-and-blues.

The local opener, Zydefunk (1 p.m.) serves up a gumbo of Louisiana grooves, including Cajun, New Orleans Second Line, funk and blues. The Zydeco Boneshakers (2:15 p.m.) have helped pioneer zydeco gospel but also maintain traditional and “nouveau” iterations of the music.

Charivari (3:45 p.m.) reaches back toward the first recordings of Cajun music in the 1920s, which in turn echoed the folk music of the French settlers who’d come down from eastern Canada in the 18th century to settle the bayous and prairies of southwestern Louisiana. But Charivari also showcases the black Creole music which grew up alongside Cajun and parented zydeco. Bruce Daigrepont (5:15 p.m.), the second of the Cajun acts, has set himself up as a “new traditional” at the renown Tipitina’s in New Orleans, pumping his squeeze-box and wailing in the kind of high tenor which used to rise above the grooves of the old 78s.

Daigrepont’s diatonic button accordion makes way for Nathan Williams’ piano accordion, which allows for the blue notes on the song lists of Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas (6:45 p.m.). The Cha Chas honor Clifton Chenier, the late King of Zydeco, as well as reggae and other roots music. Rosie Ledet (9:45 p.m.) also pumps piano, but is a refreshing rarity as a spirited female zydeco bandleader. Geno Delafose (9:45 p.m.) is the handsome Prince of Zydeco, worthy to tie the fais-do-do together by embracing both Creole and Cajun performers and material.??