Jazzfest- NPSR
kapeman
Paul Simon, then you are interested in Jazzfest
Music
Scars Amid the Party in New Orleans
Times Topics: New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Stevie Wonder at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Jazzfest, which took place this year on seven days from April 25
through Sunday, revolves around familiar songs, distinctive rituals
and the time-tested recipes of its justly celebrated food vendors.
After 38 years there are also memories of Jazzfest itself. And no one
onstage or elsewhere at the Fair Grounds, where Jazzfest took place,
had forgotten about Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At this year’s Jazzfest
it was clear that New Orleans performances have added a new and
possibly permanent custom: an acknowledgment of the scars left by the
storm.
When Stevie Wonder headlined Friday’s lineup, he brought onstage the
New Orleans R&B stalwart Irma Thomas to sing his song “Shelter in the
Rain,” which she recorded after losing her home and club to the flood.
The New Orleans trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, leading the New Orleans Jazz
Orchestra on Saturday, ended his set with a hymnlike elegy to his
father, who drowned in the flooding after the storm. As Randy Newman
performed his song about an earlier flood, “Louisiana 1927,” he drew a
heartfelt sing-along on the chorus: “Louisiana, they’re trying to wash
us away.” Another New Orleans trumpeter, Kermit Ruffins, doing his
version of the optimistic “O-o-h Child,” rapped about growing up in
the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, and urged, “Clean up this mess,”
while the Dirty Dozen Brass Band added a few words about Katrina to
Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”
But musicians at Jazzfest didn’t linger over grief. They created a New
Orleans party, the kind that simultaneously defies sorrow, affirms
continuity, heartens the locals and draws eager tourists. The
festival, which scrambled to reassemble itself for 2006 and expanded
last year, has now returned to its full pre-Katrina length: seven days
over two extended weekends. (Last year the festival’s second Saturday
had Jazzfest’s largest one-day attendance since 9/11, about 90,000.)
The lineup this year included visitors like Widespread Panic, Santana,
the Roots, Elvis Costello and Jimmy Buffett.
Yet the most heralded event was the homecoming of the band that
provided Jazzfest’s finale from 1990 to 2005: the Neville Brothers,
whose members have been at the center of New Orleans music since the
1950s. Displaced by Katrina, the Neville Brothers had not performed
together in New Orleans since the storm. Returning to their regular
slot at the festival was a symbol of restoration for a city that
remains depopulated, particularly in the poor African-American
neighborhoods that nurtured vital musical traditions.
Individually the brothers were all over the festival. The keyboardist
Art Neville, leading his own band, jovially revisited songs he had
recorded half a century ago; Aaron Neville joined him onstage for a
few, making his return to New Orleans a casual family affair. The
percussionist Cyril Neville sat in with the Dixie Cups, whose hit “Iko
Iko” is based on a Mardi Gras Indian song. Aaron Neville performed his
own full set at the gospel tent, putting a second-line parade beat
behind songs like “I Saw the Light” and singing comforting ballads in
his gentle, aching voice. “I’m home,” he said. “Feels good.”
The festival’s aesthetics reflect ingrained New Orleans habits and
tastes: for horn sections, for two-fisted piano, for wry voices, for
dancing, for permeable boundaries between sacred and secular. Ms.
Thomas, who reappeared Sunday afternoon in a tribute to the gospel
singer Mahalia Jackson, said, “Yes I sing my rhythm and blues, but it
was God that gave me my voice.”
The city’s music, from jazz to R&B to funk, has transformed American
culture but never conformed to it. It has always been a culture apart,
sometimes intersecting the mainstream — the hometown rapper Lil Wayne,
who did not perform here, is a major hip-hop star — but never defining
it.
New Orleans songs, old and new, draw on rhythms that reach back at
least a century, with even older African, European and American Indian
roots. Parades representing the city’s traditions of brass bands,
Mardi Gras Indians and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs wound through the
festival, sometimes ending up at the Heritage Stage, where brass bands
and Indians performed full-length sets.
On another stage the Cajun and zydeco music of nearby bayou country
tootled and ratcheted through the day, with accordions and washboards.
Performers at the blues tent spanned styles from the old rural blues
of the Carolina Chocolate Drops to the roadhouse blues-rock guitar of
Kenny Wayne Shepherd to the clear-voiced affirmations of Ruthie Foster
to the deep soul of Bettye LaVette.
In New Orleans music, traditions mingle and can turn up anywhere. At
the gospel tent songs of praise sometimes rode funk grooves. The
saxophonist Donald Harrison started his set playing complex jazz tunes
and ended it with the band playing fierce funk behind Mardi Gras
Indian chants. By then Mr. Harrison was in full feathered regalia. He
is the chief of the Congo Nation tribe.
At Jazzfest, New Orleans doesn’t go mainstream; it helps visitors find
Louisiana connections. Smart ones, like Mr. Wonder, draw on the
sensational local talent. Widespread Panic brought the feathered
pandemonium of the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians onstage. Mr.
Buffett looked toward Cajun country, latching on to the world-class
slide guitarist Sonny Landreth and performing “U.S.S.
Zydecoldsmobile.”
The Roots, the hip-hop group from Philadelphia, were ready for
Jazzfest style on their own. They were backed not by a disc jockey but
by a funky live band that — like a New Orleans brass band — gets its
bass lines from a sousaphone. The Bad Plus, a jazz piano trio that can
grow abstruse, met its audience with compositions full of earthy
vamps.
Yet the heart of Jazzfest is its local musicians: the startling solo
voices that leap out of groups like John Lee and the Heralds of
Christ, rambunctious brass bands like Rebirth, thoughtful jazz
composers like Terence Blanchard, the two-fisted piano phenomenon
Henry Butler, the socially minded funk bandleader Ivan Neville, the
backbeat-loving bluesman Snooks Eaglin and the many Mardi Gras Indians
who hand-sew their costumes and take to the streets out of pure
devotion to tradition.
From the stages at Jazzfest performers called out, “Only in New
Orleans!” After Katrina that could be changing; some displaced
residents have started to transplant their cultural memories to the
places where they’ve resettled. But at Jazzfest, and in New Orleans,
all those memories and traditions are still dancing on home ground.
Bill Kawalec
"kapeman" <kap...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:5241cb50-7c17-48ae...@s50g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
My personal note- if you are interested at all in music, at all in
Paul Simon, then you are interested in Jazzfest
frankly, hell of an assumption