Pop Music Review : Cajun-Zydeco Festival Happy Being Humble

It was pure serendipity, but the eighth annual Southern California Cajun & Zydeco Festival provided a nonetheless ideal counterpoint to a week of ultra-expensive superstar concerts.

On the opposite end of the musical scale from the Barbra Streisand and Eagles extravaganzas, the Cajun-zydeco fest was a timely celebration of humble music created simply to express an emotion or to inspire dancers to move their feet.

Accordionist and singer Walter Mouton made his West Coast debut at Saturday’s opening of the two-day fest. He is a revered figure in Cajun music who explained an essential difference when introducing the four members of his Scott Playboys band:

“We are not professional musicians,” he said. “We don’t make a living at music--everybody up here has jobs they work five days a week.”

Consequently, like most true folk musicians, Cajuns and Creoles by and large play first out of enjoyment. That was evident in nearly all the performances at the Rainbow Lagoon.

Take the hourlong midafternoon set by Mouton, the only performer on the five-act bill who hadn’t appeared at this event previously: Wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt and blue jeans, Mouton looked more like the truck driver he is five days a week than a festival-caliber musician.

But his band played exuberantly, minus the production flash and celebrity personality that enticed thousands of Southlanders to fork over hundreds of dollars a ticket to see the Eagles reunite or Streisand say farewell to concert touring.

The Scott Playboys also brought the most authentic taste of the Cajun-country brand of playing that local audiences have had a chance to see. Where traditional Cajun music is played with fiddle, the single-row button accordion and perhaps a guitar, Mouton’s band epitomizes the cross-fertilization of Cajun with country music that occurred in the early part of this century.

Along with those core instruments, the Scott Playboys use steel guitar, electric bass and drums. Steel guitarist Randall Foreman pepper-plucked his instrument in perfect complement to the choppy “chank-a-chank” accordion and fiddle technique that characterizes Cajun music.

You get the feeling that if a planeload of tubas went down over Louisiana’s Cajun country, it wouldn’t be long before some enterprising players would find a way to make those instruments fit right in too.

Singer, guitarist and composer D.L. Menard and his two-man Louisiana Aces represented the halfway point between Mouton’s Cajun-country hybrid and the straight traditional style that brothers Danny and Edward Poullard used to open the show.

Menard almost bubbled with joy during his stint on stage. Perhaps it was the recent news that he had been awarded a National Heritage Foundation $5,000 “master artist” grant that helped put him in such a spirited mood.

After singing “The Green Oak Tree,” one among many of his songs that have become contemporary Cajun standards, Menard acknowledged the crowd’s applause with a boisterous, “Hey! Thank you!!”

With it, he flashed a startled grin, like that of a man realizing he’s just set his own chair factory on fire--which, in fact, is exactly what Menard did last fall trying to rid the factory of a hornet’s nest. (Backstage later, Menard said the chair factory, which is his main means of financial support, is well on its way to being rebuilt.)

Though he doesn’t always include an English-language song in his performances, on Saturday Menard showed festival-goers why he’s long been called “the Cajun Hank Williams” with his soul-deep wail in an eerily Hank-like reading of Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

Steve Riley, one of the young standard-bearers of traditional Cajun music, seems intent now on becoming a Jack-of-all-trades. He included several zydeco tunes on which he exchanged his single-row Cajun button accordion for the two-row button instrument favored in the upbeat, rock- and R&B-infused; variant of Cajun music.

Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas concluded the day with a set that got most onlookers dancing, but which fell short of the musical virtues found in his predecessors’ sets.

Nathan Williams is a far more animated performer than he once was, but he still hasn’t developed the mastery of the accordion required to keep riff-driven blues-based zydeco songs interesting during extended jams.

The highlight, ironically, was an instrumental waltz he played alone, minus the rubboard-sax-guitar-bass-drums accompaniment he often struggled to keep up with elsewhere in his set.

Late in the day, festival organizer Franklin Zawacki estimated Saturday’s attendance at under 2,000, saying: “I don’t think we’ve hit the break-even point yet.”

But he quickly added a postscript that would have been unthinkable coming from a Streisand or Eagles concert promoter had they been gazing at a less-than-capacity turnout: “I’m still really happy.”