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New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is America's premier Spring music trade show and party. Performing here is an immeasurable boon to any musician, and a pleasure to those fortunate enough to be in the audience.
Jazzfest, as it is commonly known, began as a small community event thirty-one years ago in the Congo Square corner of Louis Armstrong Park, on Rampart Street. Any one who was there will tell you how the first few years the musicians outnumbered the audience. This is sometimes said with pride, and sometimes with remorse.
Two distinct groups exist on the issue of Jazzfest's growth: "The winners," who control and praise the Fest, chalking up attendance figures surpassing one half million. Their point of view appears in newspapers and television stories regularly around the world. And "the losers" who stay home, perhaps in similar numbers, bemoaning The City's evaporating soul, and grumbling in Big Easy coffee shops and barrooms about how much better the smaller earlier event was. I have sympathy with both camps. But I go to Jazzfest.
Today's internationally acclaimed affair grew so large by becoming many things for many different folks. And "the things" we sometimes love are, alas, sometimes the things we also dislike.
One of the things Jazzfest has become, without dispute, is a huge cultural/music trade fair. This is just terrific if you make use of it, and terrible when you are in line for a beer or at home mumbling about it.
The truth -- good or bad -- is that on any given day you may find half the world's music talent -- stage and behind-stage -- performing or walking between the ten stages and countless food and craft stands scattered about the infield of what New Orleanians call "da Fairgrounds."
Dry-landers would call this sun-soaked Fairgrounds a racetrack, which, in fact, it is the other fifty weekends of the year.
Trying to recapture some of yesteryear's Fest, I rode my bicycle to the racetrack/Fairgrounds, staying off traffic snarled, temper flaring Esplanade Avenue. It was a quiet, shady ride through Faubourgs Marigny, Treme', and Bayou Saint John. Alas (or thank God), this route is not really feasible for ubiquitous gas-guzzling motor cars.
To encourage non-polluting less-congesting bicyclists, a safe parking lot is located near the front gate. There were thousands of bikes awaiting me there. Hearing complaints about higher prices for food (4/7$), drink (3/4$), and admission (15/20$) I feared this amenity might now wear a price tag, too. It did not.
Jazzfest's First Friday, with fitting echo of New Orleans Catholic School day's "First Friday Communions," remains a favorite for locals, and the day to hear wondrous sounds, like high school bands populated with the rhythmic seeds of The Big Swamp City's vast musical heritage. (Anytime, anywhere you get the chance to hear Saint Augustine High School's band, listen.)
Alas, I missed this year's First Friday at Jazzfest. It was preempted to print a 20" x 24" black and white photograph from my amazingly not-forgotten Bourbon Street Series. The image, titled "One Way," was bought by Jim Sears, University of South Carolina Professor of Curriculum (whatever that is), and author of Growing Up Gay in the South.
Sears and I actually attended the same Southern Illinois University in the fabled Sixties, but did not then know each other.
First Friday night I threw a Jazzfest party with free flowing communal wine, in honor of the art collecting Professor Sears. He declined my offer to ride bikes to the Fairgrounds, next day, and walk about under the broiling sun. He opted instead to speak at a convention of academic archivist meeting in the air-conditioned Morial Convention Center.
Too bad, he missed ridding past Ernie K-Doe's Mother in Law Lounge, and the rumpled Mother in Law road van, with his famous song lyrics painted on its side. Incidentally, K-Doe played Jazzfest for the first time after years of dispute with … I never found out who or over what. But his show was a predictable hit.
Returning to Squalor Heights on that same side-street route I rode behind a parade of Mardi Gras Indians seen earlier inside the Fairgrounds. This delighted porch sitting residents, and most stalled drivers. Well, certainly it delighted the porch sitters.
A little further, a tall light skinned man wearing African robes and an avuncular smile led a band of similarly dressed boys playing tall bongo drums under the shade of Interstate-10. This freeway is a painful stretch of Sixties' Urban Renewal that ripped out the once beautiful oak canopied heart of Claiborne, the grand avenue of this black neighborhood.
I stopped and listened -- a old white man on a bike, watching/listening to black cultural music at its best. Old white man on a bike remembering Jazzfest in Congo Square, when I was a young white man on a bike.
ONE MORE NOTE: They were not at Jazzfest this year, but Sisterbeat will be playing at a CD debut release party, June 25 (8 p.m.) at Café Brazil, corner of Frenchmen and Chartres. CDs and T-shirts will be on sale, along with libations from Faubourg Marigny's premier dance hall bar. Admission is free.
One more ONE MORE NOTE: I've had a lot of e-mails about the April, 2000 issue of SECLONDLINES, publication of the "New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, Inc." Yes, I wrote the two bio-sketches on the foundation's Executive Director, Wali Abdel-Ra'oof; and "Folk's singer," Sharon Martin. See for yourself at http://www.nojhf.org
Keep the faith, speed the day, at least take a coffee break.
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