Today is clear and sunny, and in the lower 70s, which made for a perfect Jazz Fest day. Though the mud was still present and still an annoyance (particularly in the food serving areas-good call deciding not to put down sawdust or wood shavings as had been done in the crafts areas), it had dried considerably overnight. The paper said that John C. Reilly was at the festival yesterday. Shake and bake! Too bad I didn’t see Cal Naughton Jr. in person. Arriving at the now-usual 10:30, I found it a lot more difficult to find the good parking spots I’d found the previous three days. That was clearly an omen, confirmed when I arrived before 11:00 and found the joint packed literally from the word go. The combination of a perfect day, the Neville Brothers’ first New Orleans performance since the storm, and the last day of Jazz Fest created a sort of perfect storm (OK, bad metaphor) leading to every stage overflowing with sunburned, dirty, dancing people.
As now usual, I first arrived at the Gospel Tent for the morning devotional song ("What a Mighty God We Serve”) and opening prayer. This led into the New Orleans Spiritualettes, seven mostly older women clad in cardinal red suits and rocking it hard. I caught the first three songs, including Amazing Grace (the first of three times I would hear the song today), and If I had a Hammer. While the tent crowd was somewhat sparse at first, that didn’t last long.
From there I went over to the Jazz Tent for the Thelonious Monk Jazz Insititute Septet. This group is comprised of musician/students studying in a two year advanced ensemble program sponsored by prominent local musicians like Terence Blanchard. They intensively study all aspects of jazz, including style, theory, and arranging. This is real jazz, evoking post-bop groups of the 50s and 60s. Songs are structured, but with lots of room for solos. I’m certainly no jazz or musical expert, but its always struck me that jazz is undoubtedly the hardest music to play. It’s the only music that combines rigorous scale and accompanying structures and improvisation. The soloist may have an idea what he’s going to play before the song starts, but its certainly not written out in advance. The drummer is a full member of the group, not just a timekeeper as in most other musical forms. Ironically, while it requires the greatest musical skills, jazz probably has the least financial payoff. Its truly a tragedy that even now Britney Spears sells records, but Duke Ellington had to play high school auditoriums late into his career. Also, soul, and now rap music has long replaced jazz as the preferred music of blacks. Whites far outnumbered blacks at the Jazz Tent all weekend long. I’ve heard Wynton Marsalis bemoan this point virtually his entire career, and this weekend provided further evidence.
After leaving the Jazz Tent, I went towards the Fais-Do-Do Stage to check out the Lost Bayou Ramblers. While en route, I went through the Louisiana Folklife vendors and exhibitions, noticing that they had spread sawdust on the muddy spots in their area. Obviously they’d read my blog post from the day before to get that idea. What I can’t figure out is how the individual vendors were resourceful enough to come with sawdust, yet a supposedly slick operation like Jazz Fest, where the rains have become legendary, wouldn’t provide anything like this for the remainder of the festival grounds. Surprise! It can get muddy at the fair grounds after it rains. Jamie Lynn Spears thinks these people don’t plan ahead.
The Lost Bayou Ramblers also are a younger group, heavier on fiddle and mandolin. Not exactly Jazz Fest favorites the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, but they’ll do. They have a bit of a rockabilly sensitivity; the acoustic bass player looks a bit Brian Setzer-ish, and even apes Bill Black’s old trick of straddling the bass on its side and thumping it. The Fais-Do-Do area is packed to the gills at noon, not a great harbinger of the ability to gain premium viewing for later shows. People are dancing up a storm; the dance area has dried a bit, but still has that delightful hint of raw sewage fragrance. Kind of like downtown Houston after it rains. Or Bourbon Street any time of day or night.
From there I head to the Gentilly Stage to listen, for the first time ever, to the legendary Sonny Landreth. I say legendary as in, a guy I’ve always heard of, but never actually heard any of his music. Like Les Paul, or Ry Cooder, or Gram Parsons. Actually I have heard Gram Parsons-Sweethearts of the Rodeo is quite good. Anyway, Landreth drew a big crowd as well, to hear his slow blues rock. A bit like Eric Clapton but with rock and roll, and some swamp, thrown in. Landreth played a loud, slow nasty slide guitar on the three songs I stick around for. This is funny, because he looks a lot like Austin icon Jimmie Dale Gilmore (Smokey in The Big Lebowski), except not two dimensionally skinny.
This is not exactly my scene-too much like Antones circa 1983-so I hit the food stands again for creole tamales. These were overly bready but otherwise good. Still, the food this year overall has been something of a disappointment. The first day’s food was exceptional, but otherwise this year has not lived up to standards. Perhaps its because I’m desperately trying to keep my new 12 year old girl figure intact during Jazz Festival, an admitted mistake but now that I’ve sunk the money into getting my suits altered, my inherent cheapness is winning out over my gluttony.
Mmm, where was I? Johnathan Batiste is next up in the Jazz Tent. Batiste’s dad, Alvin, was a true New Orleans jazz legend, clarinetist supreme, and mentor to most every famous New Orleans musician in the last 30-40 years. The son has a four piece group, featuring himself on piano, along with bass, drums, and saxophone. Batiste’s ragtime-influenced piano solos dominated the music while I was there, and again, that’s not my bag baby, so I moved on.
On to something that, daring the risk of hyperbole, is truly one of those things that makes life worth living. Sherman Washington and the Zion Harmonizers. These guys would make that Girls Gone Wild guy follow Jesus. The Gospel Tent was absolutely packed, with about people standing outside the tent about 10 deep just listening. Washington, at 89, had given an interview to the Times-Picayune saying he thought he’d join the group for about a couple of songs, but he stayed on stage the entire 50 minute performance (in his wheelchair, singing every song). He soloed on “I Want to Be At the Meeting.” Truly one of the most moving things I’ve ever witnessed at Jazz Fest, or any concert, was when he sang the lyric “When I get to Heaven, I'll meet my mother there, she'll say God Almighty, here comes my child, he musta got here by prayer.” After singing that lyric, he started crying and couldn’t finish the song, and the rest of the group finished the song in his place. I thought of my own mother at that point, and wondered that an 89 year old man, whose mother must have died many years ago and who has lived such a full life, could still feel her loss so many years later.
After the Zion Harmonizers show, I went to the Acura stage to watch Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk. As the name subtly implies, this is a really funky, soul, bass and horn-dominated band. Lots of energy and dancing crowds. Good, but kind of a come-down after the last show, so I headed out for more food.
While I had some non-descript chicken, I did run across an enormously overweight guy wearing a t-shirt that said “I Beat Anorexia.” Would have made a great photo, but I was too slow on the trigger.
Next I returned to the Gospel Tent for the Mahalia Jackson tribute, starring New Orleans soul legends Marva Wright and Irma Thomas. Unfortunately, I literally could not get into the tent it was so full. So I stood outside for a bit listening to Irma Thomas sing some old spirituals, then, sadly, moved on to get to Santana before the crowd got too bad.
Now, I’ve got a lot to say about Santana, so apologies in advance. The show itself was pretty good, about what you might expect. The band was nimble, and Carlos Santana’s guitar playing remains sharp, and the sound is actually an improved version of what you’ve heard on record. He played most of the hits, including Supernatural from a couple of years ago. You know, its amazing that someone who first built their popularity in the 1960s can have such a big hit. The Rolling Stones, for example, keep coming out with new records, but never score any big hits. Dylan would be about the closest there is to someone from that era that can continue to sell new records, but that’s largely a by-product of them appearing on movie soundtracks. I’m still waiting for the new Moby Grape single. Anyway, the music itself was good, with long guitar solos in many of the songs. The video screen’s frequent depiction of music-video-like scenes featuring hot Latina babes seemingly brought to sexual ecstasy from Santana music were a bit jarring, particularly after Carlos launched into some random diatribe about this concert being a “holy moment” and how “we are the opposite of George W. Bush” in our concern for all those downtrodden folks. Guess that won’t stand in the way of some good old fashioned female objectifying. Santana had another of those fake “goodbyes” about 20 minutes before the scheduled end of the show, after which the video screen showed clips from their Woodstock performance, segueing into the band returning to play Soul Sacrifice (which, of course, was the song they played in the movie). Let me get back to the harangue I mentioned earlier. Lets put it this way-lots of the acts at the Festival would make gratuitous sideswipes at George W. Bush, but none were as insufferable about it as Carlos Santana and his three or four rambling, fairly non-sensical spews about this being a “holy moment,” introducing each of his band members as “Brother” so and so, and how “we stand with Barack Obama to usher in a new era” and decrying the fact that “we as a nation have never apologized” to a long list of every ethnic, racial and religious pigeonhole…essentially everyone who’s not a white, anglo-saxon male that owns property. He often implored the crowd to support Barack Obama. This is not why I spent so much money to get here. Call me crazy, but how much of a holy moment can it be when everyone paid at least $50 a pop to get in, and half the crowd is either smoking pot or drinking beer. Not exactly church-like. And I’ll apologize to, oh, say, the oppressed albino Greek Orthodox Hawaiian women our country has been oppressing when someone actually convinces me that I’ve been oppressing any of them. It’s a little tough swallowing this kind of sermonizing about how I’m so vicious to the poor from a guy who’s made millions for Columbia Records, playing to a sea of guilty white people who paid a small fortune to get in. I might also have been a little more receptive if this wasn’t one of the ‘60s rock stars who glorified drugs, which have taken an incredibly harsh toll on the same poor people he now berates only whites for abandoning. At the very end of the show, the video screen showed a white dove landing. I thought it had come to attack.
OK, coming off that mixed bag, I went to the Loretta’s Praline booth, and in visiting with the workers there found out that the correct way to pronounce the word is “prah-leen.” They assured me that only northerners (defined as anyone north of Opelousas) would say “pray-leen.” That knowledge alone was worth coming to this year’s Jazz Festival.
After a brief detour to enjoy the Wild Magnolias at the Jazz and Heritage Stage, and a spell at the Kids’ Tent watching an African drum outfit, I started feeling kind of bad. The heat and lack of enough food had combined to take a toll, so I went to the Grandstand to enjoy some of the cultural displays. These are photos of New Orleans scenes, kids’ art, Mardi Gras Indians displays, the Zatarain’s food stage, and the Lagniappe Stage. I caught just the last song by the Hackberry Ramblers, a cajun band fronted by its 95 year old fiddle player whose name I failed to catch.
This spell out of the heat, combined with some more crawfish bread, helped me revive a bit so it was on to the Neville Brothers. Jazz Festival head Quint Davis, with whom the Nevilles have feuded through the years, made an exceptionally extravagant introduction, basically along the lines of “we are all a family in New Orleans, all of us left and then came back in our own time, and we all come together as a family, and none of us are back until all of us are back.” He was obliged to do this because, quite frankly, the Neville Brothers gave up on New Orleans after Katrina. They left for Memphis and never looked back, having not done one show in the town where they are the reputed first family of music since Katrina hit in August 2005 (I think the Marsalis family might dispute Quint Davis’ assertion that the title belongs to the Nevilles). At times the Nevilles blamed their absence on Aaron’s asthma, Aaron’s wife’s cancer, and at other times criticizing local music fans and the city for conspiring to keep black residents from returning. Locals wondered why everyone else could come back to play Jazz Festival but the so-called “first family.” So there was obviously a bit of a tension in the air. But the crowd immediately seemed to get into it, and after the first song Cyril said “we never left y’all.” Well, OK. Aaron looked somewhat Transformerish-really incredibly muscular, much more so than I had recalled, and with an extremely short buzz cut. Oh, and sporting tattoos on his face, kids. The show started out with the Nevilles bringing the Wild Tchoupitoulas on stage for their song Meet the Boys on the Battlefront, then moving into Fire on the Bayou, Voodoo, and Aaron soloing on the old Sam Cooke song “A Change is Gonna Come.”
Truth be told, I’ve never been a huge Neville Brothers fan, so I moved on first to the Fais-Do-Do Stage to watch Amanda Shaw, then to the Gentilly Stage for New Orleans party band, The Radiators. Amanda Shaw had packed them in, quite a feat when competing with both the Nevilles and the Radiators in New Orleans. Shaw, who is 17, is something of a whirling dervish on the fiddle. Shaw looks a lot like Isla Fisher, the crazy sister in Wedding Crashers, and we all know I have a thing for crazy chicks. This is not cajun or zydeco music. Its more modern country music with a slight trace of Louisiana thrown in. But the crowd loves it and Shaw’s impersonation of Angus Young playing fiddle. Note to self, I really need to see AC/DC in concert. Shaw’s first song, Hank Jr.’s “The South’s Gonna Do It Again” really sets the tone. No one is dancing, until later in the set.
I had not seen The Radiators in 17 years, when I lived in New Orleans. They’ve aged, but the songs remain fun and energetic. This is a quintessential party band, and this crowd was definitely having more fun than the Nevilles’ crowd. They finished right on time at 7:00, and so I thought had my Jazz Fest. But I decided toleave via the Acura stage, to find out that the Nevilles had gone over time (all Jazz Festival days are scheduled to end at 7:00). The Nevilles, however, played til 7:30, giving me a chance to hear Aaron sing Amazing Grace (to a somewhat thinned out crowd), One Love (the old Bob Marley song), and a funked up Big Chief (with Trombone Shorty on trumpet) with Cyril dancing all over the stage.
That was it, except for the enormously huge and drunk lady wandering all over the grounds, who of course found me and kept telling me “this is the greatest day ever.” And the kid I ran into leaving the fair grounds who said he got fired for coming to the Festival, which allowed me to drop a “what do you need a job for” on him from Raising Arizona. But, there was a fantastic sunset, which allowed me to catch some great photos around City Park on the way back to my car.
This is already excessively long, so I’ll devote a separate posting to some Festival bests and worsts.
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