New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival: Lessons Learned

Here are some things I’ve learned about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

1. Your taxi cab is not coming. They’ll say they’re on their way, but they are not.

2. It takes about an hour to walk from the Bywater neighborhood to the JazzFest fairgrounds. There are a few desolate blocks along St. Bernard, but mostly it’s a pretty pleasant walk.

3. There are a lot of ways to prepare crawfish. Among those on offer at JazzFest are crawfish bread; crawfish etouffee; boiled crawfish; Cajun crawfish rice; shrimp and crawfish tails; crawfish remoulade; crawfish po-boy; crawfish sack (wrapped in a crepe and deep-fat fried); crawfish beignets; crawfish strudel; crawfish monica; crawfish, spinach, and zucchini bisque; crawfish enchilada; and crawfish pie.

4. You can’t see it all. Somewhere around 60 performances happen each day on JazzFest’s 12 stages, and there’s a lot more happening offstage as well (e.g. crawfish). Trying to see everything will drive you crazy.

5. The verb is “festing”. Webster’s may not agree, but that’s what they call it down here.

6. Levon Helm is gone but not forgotten. The recently departed drummer and singer was scheduled to play JazzFest on Thursday. He didn’t live long enough to make the gig, but a lot of people were thinking about him.

He was emblazoned on several t-shirts in the crowd, and I caught a few on-stage tributes too. Hurray for the Riff Raff, a great young New Orleans group that opened the Acura Stage on Thursday, played The Band’s song “Ophelia” in his memory.

On Friday, while finishing up a stirring rendition of “The Weight,” Mavis Staples sung his praises. “Levon Helm! Levon Helm! Levon Helm!” she called, with the cheering crowd urging her on.

“We miss our dear friend, but he’s left us so much. Just calling his name is a ray of sunshine!”

Midway through his set on Saturday, New Orleans great John Boutté echoed Staples’s sentiment.

While we’re on the subject, check out this video of Mavis Staples, Wilco, and Nick Lowe running through “The Weight” backstage in Chicago last year.

Pedrito Martinez plays the Jazz Tent on Saturday.

7. Pedrito Martinez may be the hardest working man in show business. The Cuban percussionist and singer played four sets over two days at JazzFest. This included a set with his own group on Friday and another Saturday, plus an appearance with Henry Butler on Friday, and an interview and percussion demo with the writer Ashley Kahn on Saturday. He also fit in three or four other gigs during his New Orleans stay.

In the interview, Martinez said his big break was being discovered on the streets of Havana by Canadian saxophonist Jane Bunnett. He’s gone on to play with a number of Afro-Cuban luminaries and pop stars including Sting and Paul Simon. He formed his own group in 2008.

His quartet plays a bright, percussive brand of Afro-Cuban song based in the timba music that groups like Irakere popularized in the late 80s. But American music has been a big influence too. In his conversation with Kahn, he described growing up listening to groups like Earth Wind and Fire, Lionel Ritchie, and AC/DC.  His JazzFest sets were more a lot more Irakere than AC/DC.

Here’s a video of the Pedrito Martinez Group playing at a Cuban restaurant in New York City.

8. You don’t need an electric guitar to shred. Nylon-string guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela had the highest-profile scheduling among the international acts I caught. They closed Thursday at the Gentilly Stage, one of the two biggest at JazzFest.

Backup musicians accompanied the duo for part of its set, but it was always Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero front and center. Sanchez was the more bombastic shredder, picking solos at breakneck speed and, by the end of the set, going topless.

For my money, though, Quintero’s percussive, rhythmically nuanced playing was far more compelling. The crowd filling the field at the Gentilly Stage insisted on an encore.

Check out this Global Hit about Rodrigo y Gabriela.

Follow @bwallace
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);