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What's Jazz Got To Do With It? Part I

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

There was a moment early in the afternoon of the last Sunday of New Orleans’ first post-Katrina Jazz Fest when it appeared to me that everything about the event, my perception of it, and even my hopes for the damaged city I’ve come to call home for the past ten years, changed dramatically. I was standing just outside the Economy Hall tent listening to the Trémé Brass Band, one the city’s oldest and funkiest old-time-jazz aggregations, when it started to rain.

Up to that point, the festival had managed to avoid bad weather. First, it outlasted an early heat wave that had collapsed a week and a half earlier, just as music fans began streaming into the city, then it successfully dodged heavy periods of rain that fell overnight on the first weekend. Another wave of rain showers had passed immediately north of the city on the second weekend. Now, however, it seemed the festival’s luck had pretty much run out.

I was fully prepared to call it a wash. To hear festival producers tell it, there almost wasn’t a New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this year, anyway. The site, an historic horse-racing track now owned by the Churchill Downs chain, had been badly flooded. Financial backing looked tentative, and the city’s ability, or even willingness, to host a major tourist event was very much in doubt. Local musicians were scattered; so were festival staff.

Same Old Jazz Fest?

In the end, though, sponsors were recruited, acts signed, the site made ready, and the crowds, for the first weekend at least, were as thick as they’ve ever been. A few changes may have been noticeable: a day cancelled from the traditional seven-day schedule, a couple of performance stages missing (mostly on the outskirts of the site), a handful of food booths MIA (from a total of 40-something), the racetrack’s towering grandstand out of commission.

But in the end, the event that took place in New Orleans the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May, the same time it’s held every year, looked and sounded a lot like the same old Jazz Fest, with Dr. John, Dylan, Hugh Masakela, Ani DiFranco, Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello, Juvenile, and Dave Matthews among the headliners on a weekend that featured more than 45 acts on eight stages positioned inside and just beyond the oval race track.

Jazz Fest PR liaison Matt Goldman probably had it close to right when he told the Austin American-Statesman, “[This year is] just like 2002 or 2003 -- only with tons more media.”

The first weekend even closed with a musical conflict of the first order -- The Boss, performing numbers from his Seeger Sessions CD live for the first time, had been scheduled as the last act on the festival’s largest stage opposite the Meters, playing only their second annual Jazz Fest reunion set, on the second-biggest stage located at the other end of the festival site, presenting a choice even King Solomon himself wouldn’t have wanted to make.

The Last Pocket of American Authenticity

Still, something wasn’t quite right. Here, after all, was a world-class festival being held in the midst of a city that has almost literally been brought to its knees, a city whose destiny may yet be to serve as the first abandoned American city, a metropolitan area flooded beyond recognition and never rebuilt, the northernmost capital of Caribbean culture reduced to the status of a colonial resort island.

“As scantily clad fans danced in the sunshine ... abandoned furniture and trash remained piled on the streets,” is how The Washington Post characterized the “jarring juxtaposition of revelry and despair.” I know. On the streets leading to the “back-door” pedestrian gate I’ve been using for most of the 18 years I’ve attended Jazz Fest, there are usually a scattering of neighborhood parties, backyard barbeques, and homemade parking concessions; now, there were only abandoned houses, FEMA trailers, and empty yards.

“Is this a revival or a memorial?” asked The Miami Herald’s pop culture writer, getting straight to the point. It’s a question that may not be answered for decades, but for those of us who love American popular music, it’s the main question worth asking right now.

My Own Private Jazz Fest

Jazz Fest season began for me early in April with a panel discussion on the New Orleans tradition of the jazz funeral, a scholarly attempt to remind us of the theme of death and rebirth. During the city’s annual French Quarter Festival, preceding Jazz Fest by just one week, I revisited past revivals, saw a couple of local bands (Walter “Wolfman” Washington & the Roadmasters, The Forgotten Souls Brass Band), and covered, for DownBeat, a world-premier by Wynton Marsalis, featuring the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and Odadaa!, a Ghanaian drumming and dance troupe.

The night before Jazz Fest, a world-music concert sponsored by Putumayo Records gave me the chance to finally hear The Skatalites live. The first weekend of Jazz Fest, I enjoyed surprisingly strong sets from Hugh Masakela, Etta James, Dylan, and Dr. John, not to mention local heroes Snooks Eaglin and Eddie Bo. I also heard a sublime set by The Meters, funkifying Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry” and ending with a guest appearance “Hey, Pocky Way!” by Jazz Fest MVP, 20-something trumpeter Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews.