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Our Man in New Orleans, Roger Hahn reports from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival 2009. You'll think you went!

The atmosphere surrounding the 40th annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival heated up a little bit early this year. Or should I say, the atmosphere surrounding the 40th annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Presented by Shell heated up a little bit early this year.

Ever since Shell got the naming rights other companies had pursued in the past by becoming the event’s most significant post-Katrina sponsor, it has insisted on formal recognition at all times, including the first reference in each and every Jazz Fest-related story printed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

And it was in the Times-Picayune on Friday, April 10, a full two weeks before the festival was due to start, that word first arrived of a new YouTube video featuring Dr. John—a/k/a Mac Rebennack, beloved son of Crescent City funk and soul—asking fans to help pay for a small plane and banner to fly over the festival site.

Flying banners over major event sites is an advertising strategy that has become fairly common, but usually the advertiser is a sunscreen company, or a liquor company, or a local bar (Daiquiris to Go at The Tropical Isle!).

The problem with this particular banner was that it would read: “Shell, Hear the Music – Fix the Coast You Broke.”

Ouch.

Primarily the brainchild of Louisiana native and “Mr. Bill” claymation animator Walter Williams—along with support from the Gulf Restoration Network, a consortium of organizations dedicated to rebuilding the Louisiana Gulf Coast—the banner has flown over the festival before. Last year, it was even accompanied by campaign-style pins handed out on the festival grounds that carried a similar message.

And, in point of fact, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands have been, and still are, disappearing at the astonishing rate of 24 square miles every year. According to the state’s Department of Natural Resources, total loss of coastal landmass amounts to roughly 1,900 square miles since 1930 and will account for another 500 square miles lost during the next half-century—landmass that serves as a first-line-of-defense to hurricanes and their associated storm surges.

Scientists lay the blame for this land loss mainly on three factors. First, Mississippi River levees that no longer allow silt to wash down to the coast. Then, coastal land that naturally compacts in the absence of new layers of silt, resulting in what is called subsidence. And finally, the devastation caused by the cross-hatching of work canals carved out by oil companies beginning in the 1930s.

Everyone agrees this is a huge problem. Unchecked, this loss of land will make New Orleans more and more vulnerable to hurricanes. And everyone agrees it’s a problem that will be very complicated and expensive to fix. Like tens of billions of dollars expensive. And for state-of-the-art flood protection (like the Dutch have), hundreds of billions of dollars expensive. The real problem, obviously, is that no one wants to be fingered as a likely suspect for funding all, or even part, of that.

So it could easily be argued that Shell’s prominent support of New Orleans’ premier cultural event is a public relations ploy, a good-neighbor gesture partly designed to head off potentially costly grassroots movements, which might easily result in something like hostile state legislation or even an expensive class-action lawsuit.

Then here comes Dr. John arguing on YouTube that Shell and other oil companies ought to bear a major portion of coastal restoration costs. “For some reason, Shell and their friends in the industry don’t think they owe anything,” he is reported as saying. “We got to let ‘em know we hip to ‘em.”

Five days later, in what was dutifully reported in the “Times-Picayune” as “a statement released by his manager,” the good Doctor recanted at great length, claiming he’d made the mistake of reading someone else’s script, affirming that he appreciated Shell’s financial support, and assuring one and all that, in no way possible, did he mean any harm whatsoever to the city’s cherished and noble New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Presented by Shell.

Almost as a coda to this incident, exactly one week later, and two days before this year’s Jazz Fest was due to begin, the “Times-Picayune” ran a center-placement, front-page story reporting that a 300-foot-long, $100-million yacht belonging to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was docked on the Mississippi River near the city’s convention center and that it had, naturally, been attracting a lot of attention.

The article explained the vessel sported two helipads— although only one was occupied at the moment—and that it contained its own movie theater, its own swimming pool, even its own lobster tanks. According to Port of New Orleans spokesman Chris Bonura, the yacht had previously been in town during Mardi Gras this year and was expected to remain in place for another couple of weeks.

Paul Allen, the “Times-Picayune” dutifully explained, is “a frequent visitor to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Presented by Shell.”

Even though I live in New Orleans and this marks the 20th year I’ve attended at least some portion of Jazz Fest, I can’t help feeling a little giddy the Friday morning of the first weekend. (Held every year on the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May, Jazz Fest comprises three days, beginning Friday, on the first weekend and four days, beginning on Thursday, the second weekend.)

All of a sudden, real time, work-a-day time, is suspended and has been replaced a pleasurable and floating sense of anticipation. Not the kind of anticipation that makes you want to hurry up, necessarily, but more the kind that makes you interested to see, or hear, or taste, whatever comes next.

I used to look forward to Jazz Fest for months, but now I’ve gotten pretty blasé about the whole thing, partly as a result of going so many years and partly because the entire nature of the experience has changed to such an extent that it’s difficult to predict how any day’s adventure might turn out. It almost always turns hot as soon as Jazz Fest arrives, or it rains heavily, and in either case, it’s not so much fun to be standing out in the middle of what, during the rest of the year, is a horse-racing track.

The size of the crowds attracted to the event has ballooned almost exponentially, too, and the physical layout has expanded to an unmanageable sprawl. You may want listen to a sublime set in the jazz tent, for instance, and then scurry over to the outdoor stage at the other end of the festival grounds to hear some bad-ass rocker, but the walk is nearly half a mile, and when it’s very crowded and very hot, the likelihood of coming back to visit the jazz tent again that day becomes pretty slim.

There’s a always a rush that first day finally setting foot on festival grounds just as the music begins (each day runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.) and the place is relatively empty. There it is, a small town risen from nothing that for two weeks will attract crowds approaching 100,000 on a big day, with more than 600 acts scheduled during the seven days of the fest and more than forty food booths doling out an endless supply of local specialties like fried chicken, jambalaya, and other gourmet treats.

So even though I don’t mean to be, I’m feeling giddy Friday morning and even a little more euphoric than usual, because this is the first time in something like a decade I haven’t had out-of-town friends visiting. Don’t get me wrong – I love seeing old friends and love sharing the Jazz Fest experience with them, but maneuvering anywhere from one to eight friends who are strangers to the fest through what is often a complex and overwhelming experience takes a little something out of it.

So, I’m on my own for the first time in a long time, I’ve already studied the daily schedule of between 50 and 60 acts, marking “must-sees,” etc., and I’m ready to go.

Once I finally get past the perimeter gate, my first order of business is a stop at the strawberry lemonade booth, near where I enter the festival grounds. I love the strawberry lemonade at Jazz Fest, and usually drink one or two large cups a day. Today, I’m feeling thirsty already, in part because the walk from the perimeter gate to the festivals grounds, if you use that “back door” entrance, is not short.

And just beyond the strawberry lemonade booth (they also sell fruit salad), is the Congo Square stage, named for an early gathering place of slaves and free blacks in colonial New Orleans and now the focus for African-American crafts and musical programming, from rappers to blues artists to the Ladysmith Red Lions of South Africa, a medium-size South African chorus that’s my first musical pick of the day.

They are incredibly cool, doing those close South African harmonies supported by complex polyrhythms and it’s clear they’re having a ball, dancing a little bit and forcefully announcing each number in that Euro-African accent that always sounds lovely and musical by itself.

My next musical stop is going to be the Gospel Tent, always a wonderful place to be, because you never know who or what you’re going to hear but it’s almost always amazing. This morning I’m going to catch part of a set by local group called The Como Mamas -- three large women, two sisters and a cousin, from Panola County, Mississippi, who sing a cappella and can really rock the house.

But first I decide to get some food in my stomach (another Jazz Fest ritual – no breakfast, Fest food only), so I stop on my trek across the big oval racecourse that contains the festival infield at a food booth.

For $9 buy a plate of—I kid you not—a big, fat, fried crab cake accompanied by “smoked tomato jalapeno tartar” (tasty, the color and consistency of thin Russian dressing); seafood mirliton casserole (mirliton is a pear-shaped vegetable native to Mexico and brought to South Louisiana by an influx of Canary Islanders); and catfish pecan menieure (which means covered in pecans and a browned-butter sauce).

I eat my plate of food in the gospel tent while I listen The Como Mamas carry on as soulfully as any R&B act you can name.

Then it’s on to the Jazz Tent, a relatively short walk past the blues tent, all three tents—gospel, blues, and jazz—occupying what used to be an open asphalt surface outside the race track proper. This time the performer is Marlon Jordan, a modern jazz trumpeter who had some success in New York in the early ‘90s when record labels were in a “young lions” phase. His musical New Orleans family is headed by patriarch Edward “Kidd” Jordan, a singular proponent of avant-garde jazz.

Son Marlon’s an exquisite trumpeter and he’s playing in a classic jazz quartet mode, anchored by the youngest member of the Marsalis clan, Jason, on drums. Jason’s been playing drums professionally since before he had a driver’s license and now in his mid-20s has become not only a remarkable, but a remarkably mature, drummer.

The strawberry lemonade stand is located at the very rear of the Congo Stage’s audience area. I need to trek all the way back to the Jazz Tent (maybe a quarter-mile away) for my next set, so I start walking away before Henry Butler’s set is done, order another large lemonade, and find myself drawn back to listening to the end of Henry’s set.

He’s in just the right groove today, and he’s managed to fit right into the Congo Square setting with his cosmic, electronic funk and blues, fusing grassroots African-American music across centuries, from 19th-century ragtime to modern-day jazz to heavily mixed, commercial R&B, all of it filtered through Henry Butler’s uniquely visionary New Orleans sensibility.

And the next set I’m headed for holds a similar kind of promise. Saxophonist Donald Harrison is among the most accomplished jazz musicians on the planet right now, and the likelihood is, you’ve never heard of him.

He and New Orleans trumpeter Terence Blanchard replaced Wynton and Branford Marsalis in the front line of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers back in the early ‘80s, when the “neoclassical” jazz movement was just beginning. Harrison and Blanchard also formed their own group, Black Pearl, and stuck around the New York jazz scene for a while, before choosing entirely different career paths.

Blanchard has become a national celebrity, best known for scoring several Spike Lee movies, while Harrison has followed his own muse, exploring the universe of musical rhythms and mentoring future generations.

Harrison can play killer straight-ahead jazz, but also likes to incorporate other musical worlds in his range of expression. He’s toured with Latin jazz pianist/composer Eddie Palmieri, melded Mardi Gras Indian songs with modern jazz (beginning with the early ‘90s classic Indian Blues), released entire albums of radio-tailored “cool jazz,” and stays close to the younger generation’s rhythmic feel.

(Harrison’s nephew, trumpeter Christian Scott, has already made a mark melding hip hop sounds with modern jazz; and Harrison’s core back-up band currently consists of highly accomplished players in their late teens and early 20s).

For his Jazz Fest set, Harrison has added master percussionist Bill Summers (a founding member of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters) and spiritual guru of the Hammond B-3 organ, the always-turbaned Dr. Lonnie Smith.

The set starts off with extended improvisation on a tune from Indian Blues, with added percussion on cowbells and tambourine, then swings abruptly back to a straight-ahead quintet—with New Orleans native Detroit Brooks playing amplified acoustic guitar—and more-formal improvisation on the lovely jazz standard “If I Were a Bell,” a favorite ballad of trumpeter Miles Davis.

Harrison then brings Dr. Lonnie Smith to the stage and the playing enters another orbit entirely, one in which Smith is improvising madly at the keyboard of his B-3, playing shorter and shorter phrases, until he’s basically improvising organ runs in thin air, his fingers moving crazily in absolute silence, which the audience entirely gets!

Then back comes Harrison, decked out in full Mardi Gras Indian regalia, with another member of his “tribe,” The Guardians of the Flame, and the whole vibe changes. The audience rushed the stage and the band breaks into a version of the classic “Iko, Iko” followed by The Meters’ “Hey Pocky Way,” both deep-in-the-tradition Mardi Gras/New Orleans favorites.

By now, the place has gone nuts and first-time observers are having a hard time believing what they are seeing. All kinds of people are boogying their asses off in front of the stage, those from New Orleans doing their only-in-New-Orleans moves, visitors doing their own thing, even the normally staid and serious security folks hip-swiveling and foot-stepping discretely.

The day has reached a point of obvious culmination and it’s barely 5:30, with a final set on all ten stages yet to begin!

I’m hungry now, so it’s a straight shot to the nearby food both that serves Trout Bacquet, a concoction by noted local Creole chef Wayne Bacquet that consists of a thin fillet of speckled trout (the kind you catch in marshes, not mountain streams), lightly breaded and sautéed, then topped with a mound of crabmeat that’s been heated in an almost pure-butter sauce. This is easily the most exquisite of all the food offerings at the festival.

I’m just about done in, but I catch a little bit of Louisiana native Tab Benoit playing the blues (more fluid and funky than I expected), legendary drummer Roy Haynes and his quartet of youngsters (sensitive and accomplished), and a huge gospel choir. Before my long trek back toward the exit gate, and even longer trek back to where my car is parked, I stop to grab a key lime tart (topped with whipped cream).

As I leave, Joe Cocker is holding forth on the main Acura stage (“She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”), but I’m immune. Walking out the exit gate I’m only thinking to myself, “I definitely got my fifty-bucks worth of Jazz Fest today!”

The cliché constantly repeated about the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival’s earliest years is that the musicians performing frequently outnumbered the people who paid admission. In its 40th anniversary year, the event presented more than 600 musical acts and tallied somewhere around 400,000 paid admissions.

Another, more sobering way of measuring that distance Jazz Fest has come is to recall that initially the event was staged at a site just north of the French Quarter considered hallowed ground for New Orleans musical culture—and African-American cultural history in general. This was the only place in America before the Civil War where slaves and free blacks were allowed, on Sunday afternoons, to congregate, trade wares, play African-derived music, and perform African-derived dances.

Always known to New Orleans’ black residents as Congo Square, the site was renamed at the end of the 19th century—at a time when Jim Crow laws were being instituted throughout the South—as Beauregard Square, in honor of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard. And it retained that name until white flight to the suburbs in the 1970s gave black New Orleanians political control of the city and the ability to challenge the most offensive reminders of a segregated South.

So, the cultural context for the festival has come a long way, from the tail end of the age of Jim Crow to the beginning of what promises to be a post-ideological era ushered in by the election of President Barack Obama.

But the most dramatic change over the past 40 years regarding the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has been in the very character of the festival itself.

As Quint Davis, the son of a prominent New Orleans architect and reigning director of Jazz Fest since its inception, told the “Times-Picayune”: “The festival started out to be the world’s greatest backyard barbeque, an indigenous self-celebration by a culture. Then, at some phase, it was to promote and celebrate the culture annually ... Now, two or three generations later, it is a cultural institution.”

And it has been the last phase of that transformation, from cultural celebration to cultural institution that has clearly been the most wrenching.

The best and most direct way of describing the way the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has been transformed from cultural celebration to cultural institution is to say that once it was a counter-cultural event and now it’s become a solidly mainstream cultural event boasting million-dollar headliners, corporate sponsorships, a new class of VIP ticket packages complete with special parking and special seating privileges, and, in just the past five years, a 100-percent increase in admission ticket prices.

This last phase in the festival’s transformation began sometime in the mid-1990s, as the event’s newfound national celebrity joined forces with a music industry anxious to draw new profits from a resurgence of “roots” music and a generation of young “jazz lions.” The advent of the CD was largely responsible for the former, as record companies reissued their catalogues at expensive CD prices and in expensive CD boxed sets; the latter was inspired by a “neo-conservative” movement in jazz that coincidentally focused on the “classic” jazz canon.

A new and more sophisticated approach to marketing also emerged around this time, attempting to target distinct market segments with pinpoint accuracy.

Festival producers rightly sensed the implications of these cultural transformations but, unfortunately, attempted to cash in on them in the clumsiest manner imaginable, by looking for a way of engaging a younger generation with music that might also fit in with Jazz Fest’s overall conception. The music they chose was the then-popular “jam band” movement, and the act they chose was the leading light of that movement, Phish.

As a result, 1996, the year Phish was signed a major headliner, will always be remembered as one of those years that nearly destroyed Jazz Fest.

A younger generation showed up, and showed up in considerable numbers. But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that they were mostly “neo-hippie” cult followers, showing up en masse solely for Phish’s performance, a phenomenon that felt less like a celebration and more like an invasion. Off-site they created incredible problems, too, sleeping in cars, inhabiting neighborhood streets, and generally behaving like an infestation of unwashed and uncivilized wandering gypsies.

That option having been exhausted, festival producers next began exploring a diametrically opposed direction, courting the denizens of corporate America.