Jazz Fest Part 1: Horns A-Plenty
The second weekend of the thirty-eighth annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival went by in a blissful blur of music, food, and extreme weather conditions. For me, it began Friday morning at the Cajun-centric Fais Do-Do Stage with the youngish Lost Bayou Ramblers' high-spirited contemporary Cajun sounds, and it ended at the same place three days later with fiddler Michael Doucet's majestic Beausoleil, who performed the same style with more than thirty years' experience and almost classical finesse.
Friday's inauspicious gray skies broke open shortly after noon, resulting in a monsoon of biblical proportions. The downpour would have given me the blues, except that we were fortunate enough to take cover in the Blues Tent. A slowly growing lake in the middle of the crowd provided a slightly ominous echo of Katrina as we passed the time with traditionalist blues brothers Po' Henry and Tookie, country bluesman Louis "Gearshifter" Youngblood, and zydeco soul slinger Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots as the torrent waxed and waned outside. As the water inside reached dancers' knees, we made a break for the jazz tent where John Boutte, a singer's singer who deserves to be much better known outside the Crescent City, was singing Stevie Wonder.
Saturday was sunny, hot, crowded, and nearly perfect. It began with college rock from Rotary Downs and the punky comic funk of the Morning Forty Federation. The latter geniuses bit the hand that booked them by referring repeatedly to the event they were playing as the "Shell AT+T Sprint Southern Comfort Acura Festival" in honor of the branding deals that keep this six-day, twelve-stage shindig afloat. We fueled ourselves with mini-meals of cochon du lait po-boys, tajadas (fried plantains and barbecued pork), oysters and spinach, muffaletta sandwiches, and several of the nineteen different crawfish dishes on hand as we wandered from stage to stage. Nicholas Payton played nearly as many different styles of trumpet in the jazz tent, and the blind guitarist Snooks Eaglin dusted off vintage R&B tunes much of the audience probably danced to in high school four decades ago. For the second time in as many years, the day ended with Donald Harrison's onstage transformation from suave jazz trumpeter into a majestically befeathered Big Chief of the Congo Nation Mardi Gras Indian tribe. David Letterman keyboardist-bandleader Paul Shaffer and British jazz singer Corinne Bailey Rae joined the chanting, stomping party and if there was anyplace better in the musical world to be, I couldn't imagine it.
I'll wrap up Sunday's highlights and the equally fine nightlife I stayed up way too late for a little later.