Music

At a crawfish boil during last years New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, I asked Paul Sanchez of rambunctious local rock group Cowboy Mouth which New Orleans musician he thought was most deserving of attention outside the Crescent City. "John Boutté," he said without a moment's hesitation. "He's the best singer in town." I didn't get a chance to hear Boutté until this year's Jazz Fest, where, backed by a jazz group, he sang tunes like Stevie Wonder's "You Haven't Done Nothin'" to a big crowd. I was highly impressed, if not overwhelmed, and looked forward to hearing him in a smaller room.

I was overwhelmed Friday night in Central Park's outdoor Delacorte Theater, however. In front of an audience thinned by an earlier shower, accompanied only by a guitarist and occasionally banging a tambourine, John Boutté sang a devastating set of tunes inspired in large part by Katrina and its aftermath. Boutté sings in a rough sweet voice that can take you places no other vocalist can. He sings jazz like a soul singer, and soul, folk, and rock tunes like the jazz virtuoso he is. His impeccable taste helps. Boutté opened his set with Rogers and Hammerstein's ironic antiracist song "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" (from South Pacific) and continued with Neil Young's unironic antiracist statement "Southern Man." He also sang Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans," a heartbreaking "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans," and Randy Newman's eerily prophetic "Louisiana 1927" (which you can see him perform with Paul Sanchez here). Somewhere in the middle he lightened up with Allen Toussaint's "Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)," a hit for r&b singer Lee Dorsey. Mr. Toussaint, who relocated to New York after Katrina and happened to be sitting behind me, beamed his approval.

For many, the eight hours spent roaming among the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival's twelve Fair Grounds Race Course stages is merely a prelude to equally rich nightclubbing in the city itself. While most shows at dozens of area clubs start at nine or ten, many kick off much later, at two or three; these entail either a post-fest nap or a commitment to a kind of ongoing fugue state if you plan on hitting the Fair Grounds in anything less than a zombie trance the following morning.

On Thursday, the evening prior to Jazz Fest's second weekend, our posse warmed up at the legendary Mid-City Lanes Rock 'n Bowl, where Geno Delafose & French Rockin' Boogie and Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band were playing Creole dance music like "He-Haw Breakdown" and "Stole My Chicken" while we rocked and bowled and ate rice and beans. Chicago improvising rockers Umphrey's McGee worked all kinds of complex grandiosity until 5 a.m. at the House of Blues on Friday night. Saturday night began with the Joe Krown Organ Combo's deeply satisfying funk at the Banks Street Bar, followed by a surprisingly fresh-looking 3 a.m. crowd for a live rap group whose name I never caught. And Sunday night at the Blue Nile belonged to Skerik, a versatile saxophonist-composer whose music sounds richer, fresher, and more daring each time I catch him.

The Sunday Fair Grounds were hot though less crowded than Saturday. The Black Eagles Mardi Gras Indians were in full plumage at the Jazz & Heritage Stage as we drifted in. After picking up coffee and beignets, we made our way over to the Congo Square/Louisiana Rebirth Stage, where Elder Edward Babb & the Madison Bumble Bees of Winnsboro, South Carolina, were praising the Lord with more than a dozen trombones and tubas. Babb, who used to lead New York's McCollough Sons of Thunder Brass Band, is an elder of the United House of Prayer for All People, and his music is a high-energy gospel "shout" tornado inspired by a literal interpretation of Psalm 150 ("Praise him with the sound of trumpet").

With the exception of enjoying Steely Dan with 60,000 others at the Acura Stage, I concentrated on local sounds: the old-timey Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band, Terrance Simien & the Zydeco Experience, Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas, the funky Soul Rebels Brass Band, and, last of all, Beausoleil. Jazz Fest, it has been said, is as much about the music you miss as the music you hear; so if I had to do it over again, and next year I probably will, I might try to find more time for Allen Toussaint, Harry Connick Jr. (seated behind me on our Jetblue flight home), Gilberto Santa Rosa, Dr. Michael White, Galactic, and on and on. Or maybe not.

If this year's edition of Jazz Fest is any indication, things are looking up a little in New Orleans. Attendance obviously exceeded last year's 250,000, and you could detect defiant optimist everywhere—not least of all in John Boutte's references to both Friday's monsoon and Katrina when he sang "They're tryin' to wash us away" in Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927."

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.

I made a bittersweet return to New Orleans last spring for the thirty-seventh annual Jazz and Heritage Festival, the best ongoing music celebration ever. Though I was a festival regular through most of the eighties and nineties, I hadn't attended since 2001 but wouldn't have missed last year's edition for the world. I had to see what had happened to this culturally complex and utterly unique American metropolis in the wake of Katrina, broken levees, and ongoing reconstruction problems. Another tough hurricane season could easily have scuttled forever this vital annual vessel for rock, soul, r&b, international music, and of course, jazz.

Outside the French Quarter and Garden District, the city looked worse than I'd imagined, with cars on top of houses on top of cars. Yet New Orleans' citizenry and Festival Productions, which impresario George Wein recently sold, delivered the goods with newfound enthusiasm and pride. I experienced yet another memorable weekend grooving to the likes of Donald Harrison, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Ellis Marsalis, and Kojo Taylor while stuffing my maw with many variations of oysters, sausage, and crawfish, washed down with countless cans of cold, fizzy macrobrew.

While the city itself is still beset by crime and, many would say, neglect, Jazzfest itself will return April 27-29 and May 4-6 with Steely Dan, Harry Connick Jr., Rod Stewart, Norah Jones, ZZ Top, John Legend, Van Morrison, the Holmes Brothers, Snooks Eaglin, Dr. Lonnie Smith, the New Orleans Social Club, James Carter, the Radiators, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Lucky Peterson, Darrell McFadden, Sonny Landreth, Danilo Perez, and about 500 other acts. The complete schedule is here.

And here's a heap of Jazzfest videos to get you in the mood.

Continue reading "Do You Know What It Means?" »