Mike and Cory: New Orleans Jazz Fest - Keeping the music Alive

This was our first Jazz Fest and already i'm planning our next trip! We were lucky enough to have friends Steve and Kim living down there who opened their awesome home to host us. I'd been down to New Orleans once in college and Mike had been when he was much younger, so we both had some fuzzy memories of it...(for different reasons - ha!)

What an experience being down there post-Katrina! I didn't realize that the entire city had been evacuated, whether or not your home was affected, you had to leave - the city shut down, no power, nothing. Many never returned. Out of half a million people, something like 250,000 came back. So everyone has a post-Katrina story. I didn't expect to be so moved, both through the music and artists referring to loved ones lost, a city as they knew it changed, as well as witnessing boarded up homes left and never returned to, spray-painted tags of # of people or pets left when the rescue crews (finally) came through. This flood is ever-present, even 2 and 1/2 years later, a city picking up its pieces, mourning its loss, accepting the reality of a flawed system that did not take care of its people, and turning to its people to take care of each other. All this while keeping the music alive which is, perhaps, the mortar in rebuilding this vibrant city of sound.
I had Randy Newman's phenomenal (IMHO) piano ballad "Louisiana 1927" playing in my head throughout the weekend. Maybe it's the way his piano chords rise in just the perfect mournful and beautiful way, or his husky, cracking vocals, or the fact that a song written in the 70's about a flood in the 20's can clairvoyantly describe the flood of 2005 to such precision that it can now be considered a "folk" song as Louisiana artists borrow it and make it the story of their own experience, singing it to audiences who, themselves, are moved to tears. I did not realize that this revitalization of the song was happening, that it had become an anthem - so to speak - for the city and, unfortunately did not hear any renditions live at the fest, though many were sung. But the song was in my head just he same.
Here's a link to Randy Newman's version, don't know where this is from or even when:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91Eb3FiebTs
And here's one by John Boutte done at JazzFest '06, adding his own lyrics in the second verse (instead of streets of evangeline, it's streets of the lower 9, etc. nice rhyme!)
http://www.myspace.com/johnboutte
Randy's piano is still my favorite!
Meanwhile being at jazzfest was like perusing an-all-you-can-eat buffet of some of the best music around. All at once! There is a "jazz tent" but other than that, there's not much jazz at all - everything from blues to funk to gospel to rock, zydeco, bluegrass... the mardi gras indians who i'd never even heard of - african americans dressed in american indian traditional garb that are, apparently a New Orleans music staple. Each genre with their own tent or stage. We'd be walking along and hear off in the distance Santana playing "oye como va" while we'd be entering a world of gospel as Irma Thomas belted "Down by the Riverside..." We stayed in the jazz tent to watch Bobby McFerren duet with Chick Corea while Steve and Kim caught Aaron Neville singing Amazing Grace in the gospel tent, his homecoming to New Orleans being front page news. Everywhere we went felt full of life and energy.
At night the air was thick with the scent of jasmine.
We'll be back...