2021 Starts with Silence from New Orleans' Springtime Festivals

Buku 2015, by Patrick Ainsworth

Buku announced its 2021 plans in early December; what are Jazz Fest and French Quarter Fest waiting for?

In the week after Thanksgiving, the Buku Music + Art Project announced that it had cancelled its 2021 festival, but that it will present “an immersive, one-time-only, alternative take on Buku” titled Buku: Planet B on October 22 and 23, 2021. The announcement on the Buku website says that the festival will return in March 2022 for its 10-year anniversary. 

The announcement merits attention for a few reasons. First, Buku continues to do the best job communicating with its audience of all the area festivals. The tone of this announcement is a little bro-ey for my tastes, and the eagerness to party vibe feels more forced than in the 2020 announcement, but unlike other festivals, Buku talks to its customers as fans and peers. At one point, the 2021 announcement reads, “We just can’t picture 25k of us partying together safely in March,” and that suggestion that we’re all in this together is very different from the more business-like messaging from the other festivals. Buku’s most recent announcement could have used a revision or two—“Ain’t nothing socially distant about Buku.” Ughhh—but the others earlier this year read like they were vetted by lawyers, with every additional syllable treated like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Information came on a need-to-know basis.

The latter continues to be true. Optimistic projections for the Coronavirus vaccine foresee much of the country being vaccinated by summer while other experts believe people will still be being vaccinated in the third quarter of 2021. Delays in distribution and inoculation mean that at the current pace, it will take 10 years to vaccinate enough people in the U.S. to get the Coronavirus under control. That program will likely speed up with a new administration, but it’s hard to see how it would speed up enough for New Orleans’ spring festivals. Still, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell only has the announcement canceling 2020’s festival on its website with no word about what will happen in 2021, and fqfi.org simply has a banner that reads, “French Quarter Fest 2021 Dates Coming Soon!” The Voodoo Music and Arts Experience website remains silent on the subject too, instead featuring information on the NOLA Drive-In Summer Series that it presented last July on the Lakefront Arena Grounds. But since Voodoo is not slated to take place until the Halloween weekend 2021, the festival has some slack. It’s in the fall window that the others tried to move into in 2020 and will likely try in 2021. 

It’s a tribute to Jazz Fest and French Quarter Fest that fans aren’t roasting them right now. They have engendered such loyalty that fans have been patient while waiting for word on what will happen, even though they’re unlikely to take place as scheduled.

At a time when there’s so much uncertainty, all of New Orleans’ festivals would earn themselves a world of goodwill by communicating more frequently and clearly with their audiences. Baby boomers moving into the demographic most threatened by COVID-19 would love to know that they don’t have to weigh out the risks involved in going to a festival in April, and that Jazz Fest and French Quarter Fest will take place later in 2021. In this period of economic uncertainty, a lot of people would love to find out that they won’t have to contemplate whether or not a spring festival in New Orleans will fit in their budgets. 

The festivals unquestionably value their faithful fans, but in this period of uncertainty, they haven’t acted like they do. A month after their announcement, Buku is still winning the messaging battle not only because of the way it talks to its fans but because it is talking to them at all.