POP MUSIC : Haute Licks: Cajun Music on Club Menu

Now that Cajun food has become haute cuisine on the menus of San Diego’s trendiest restaurants, get ready for a second helping of Louisiana bayou culture, this one musical rather than gastronomical.

The Louisiana Cajun-Zydeco Revue will be appearing Friday night at the Bacchanal nightclub in Kearny Mesa. Performing will be Cajun fiddler Allen Fontenet and Zydeco minstrels Rockin’ Sidney and Al Rapone.

Sidney recently hit the Top 10 in Europe with an infectious ditty called “My Toot Toot.” Rapone normally plays with his sister, “Queen” Ida, in the Bon Temps Zydeco Band. The combination of Messrs. Fontenet, Sidney and Rapone figures to be as spicy as a batch of Cajun stew.

White Cajun music and its black zydeco spin-off are both rooted in the traditional French folk songs brought to North America by the French Acadians, who settled in what is now Nova Scotia in the early 1600s.

Driven out in the middle 1700s by the British, many of the displaced Acadians migrated south to Louisiana, then a Spanish colony where they were free to practice their Catholic faith.

Out there in the bayou country, the Acadians, or “Cajuns,” soon found their traditional French folk songs evolve into an entirely new form of music influenced heavily by neighboring cultures. From nearby German settlers came the accordion and the waltz; from black slaves on the plantations, the fiddle and the simple dance rhythms.

After the Civil War, many of the Cajuns began to interbreed with the newly freed blacks. Their mulatto, or “Creole,” offspring started adding elements of blues, jazz and calypso to Cajun music, as well as such other instruments as bass, drums and the more versatile “button” accordion.

By the early 1900s, this faster, more syncopated Cajun offshoot had been given its own name, zydeco, after a popular Creole dance tune of the time.

Today, Cajun and zydeco music, like Cajun food, are the latest rage in the Western world. Cajun and zydeco bands have invaded folk and jazz festivals throughout the United States and Europe. Doug Kershaw is known around Nashville as “the Cajun fiddler,” and, a few years ago, veteran rock ‘n’ roller Gary U.S. Bonds included an old Cajun tune, “Jole Blon,” on his critically acclaimed comeback album.

So rest up, stomach, from the blackened redfish and soft-shell crab. It’s Mardis Gras time for the ears.

Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, one of the most respected survivors of the early be-bop days of jazz, will perform Friday at Sea World’s year-old Nautilus Amphitheater.

Getz first achieved fame in the 1940s when he played alongside fellow saxist Zoot Sims in the late Woody Herman’s Second Herd.

His cool, lyrical solo on “Early Autumn” endeared him to jazz critics the world over, and in the early 1950s he went solo.

In town tonight are Jamaican reggae harmonizers Third World at the Bacchanal and bluesmen Smokey Wilson, Johnny Copeland and the William Clarke Band at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach.