MusicAlex RawlsMay 10, 2024jazz fest, jazzfest, new orleans, wrap-up, review, jazz, funk, Colombia, rock, rap, hip-hop, blues, Cajun music, roots of fire, Jon batiste, neil youngComment

Batiste, McCalla, Feufollet, and the Highs and Lows of Jazz Fest 2024

MusicAlex RawlsMay 10, 2024jazz fest, jazzfest, new orleans, wrap-up, review, jazz, funk, Colombia, rock, rap, hip-hop, blues, Cajun music, roots of fire, Jon batiste, neil youngComment

Hozier - the face of Jazz Fest’s future? by Barry McCall

A last look back at an eventful Jazz Fest, and maybe a look forward.

Notes on Jazz Fest 2024, now in the books:

We’ve now had three Jazz Fest’s since COVID, and it’s safe to say that we have entered a new phase in the festival. For much of the festival’s history, it took pride in putting a local act in front of touring headliner to give the local additional exposure. Throughout the second half of the 2010s though, Festival Productions frequently booked touring bands in the last two slots on the Acura (now Festival), Gentilly (now Shell Gentilly) and Congo Square stages. Those bookings seemed like a continuation of an effort to figure out how to grow the festival when a decade or so of almost automatic growth peaked in the late 1980s. Jazz Fest embraced the jam wave to try to catch that audience, and when it crested the festival jumped on the Americana bandwagon. When that peaked, Festival Productions’ partnership with AEG Live made it possible for the festival to try to spend its way back to growth, putting national headliners on the big three stages and, eventually, in the slots before those headliners.

Since COVID, Jazz Fest has been leaner, booking touring acts almost solely for the headliner slots, in the process shearing off a dozen or so national acts that used to play the penultimate slots on the big three stages. Because of that change, the festival puts a greater emphasis on local acts than it did. The crowds have been consistently impressive since the two years of COVID cancelations, and while you could attribute 2022’s attendance to people missing the festival in 2020 and 2021, the last two years of similar crowds says the plan is working. This week, Jazz Fest announced that more 500,000 people passed through the gates in the eight days of the festival. Knock out the 40,000 generally assumed to be attendance for The Rolling Stones and you have 460,000 over seven days or the ballpark of 65,714 a day. That’s respectable, and enough people that every day at the festival felt like an event.

What was different other than the decrease in national talent? Who that talent is. For a long time, it felt like Jazz Fest aimed at baby boomers, but this year was clearly different. Hozier packed the Shell Gentilly Stage with curious people wondering, What did he do beside '“Take Me to Church”? and young people who knew and squealed with excitement with every new song. That’s not a common Jazz Fest response, but it’s one the festival can build on.

This year’s headliners on the Festival Stage, Shell Gentilly Stage, and Congo Square Stage break down like this:

- 1960s - 2: The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones
- 1970s - 5: Heart, Steel Pulse, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Bonnie Raitt, Earth Wind & Fire
- 1980s - 1: Queen Latifah
- 1990s - 4: Widespread Panic, Stephen Marley, Juvenile with Mannie Fresh and Hot Boy Turk, Foo Fighters
- 2000s - 4: Kim, Fantasia, The Killers, Vampire Weekend
- 2010s - 5: Jon Batiste, Chris Stapleton, Anderson .Paak, Hozier, Greta Van Fleet

Jazz Fest found its legs embracing rock ’n’ roll’s greatest generation, and they were still on the Fair Grounds in a meaningful way—none more so than The Rolling Stones—but there’s clearly good business to be done by aiming at the nostalgia of fortysomethings and well-chosen younger acts. Stapleton, .Paak, Hozier and Greta Van Fleet have all built something new on classic bones, and that shift makes sense. Finding mission-appropriate acts from the ‘90s or 2000s make it more likely that young fans will discover the festival and middle-aged fans will remain its bread and butter.

After I tweeted, “22 New Orleans musicians can’t prop up Ronnie Lamarque,” he was the act and that was the wisecrack that people wanted to talk about. Admittedly, he makes a good punching bag, particularly in 2024, where another wealthy, aging white guy inserts himself in a space that’s not really his, and I was fascinated by how many people were certain that he had paid for his slot. The specifics of his set made the rumor seem plausible because he clearly hired a lot of talented musicians.

Still, I don’t buy it. I find it harder to believe that festival promoter Quint Davis would sell a slot than that he’d make an oddball booking. He has booked cover bands on occasion, and it’s easy to see Lamarque on that continuum. I don’t approach Davis cynically though, and genuinely believe that he believes in New Orleans, its musical culture, and the integrity of Jazz Fest. I don’t see him compromising the latter, and certainly not for $50,000—the price tag everybody seemed to land on—for an artist with so little long-term upside to the festival.

For those who saw my social media posts on Lamarque and think they missed something funny, you didn’t. It was simply live karaoke. Lamarque wasn’t obviously off-key or flailing around, but his voice lacked character and authority. When he tried Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page,” he couldn’t muster any of the dramatic world-weariness that makes Seger’s song compelling.

Leyla McCalla started her set at Jazz Fest with songs from her new album, Sun Without the Heat, and it flashed me back to her 2016 album A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey, although they’re very different projects. On Day for the Hunter, the simple, plainspoken language of Creole folk songs functioned symbolically or told stories that revealed larger truths. When she sang her new songs at Jazz Fest with similarly direct language, the songs sounded simultaneously personal and social and potentially political. Her almost transparently heartfelt vocals underlined that effect as she seemed to be so nakedly personal that she almost disappeared, making the songs’ sentiments available for anyone who needed them. She is one of the artists New Orleans—and the country—should be paying more attention to because she’s making bold, rich art that’s also immediately accessible.

One major disappointment this year was the lack of attention paid to the death of Feufollet’s Chris Stafford. On the Sheraton New Orleans Fais-Do-Do Stage, it was a meaningful part of the second weekend, and I heard him remembered from the stage by Zachary Richard, Cedric Watson, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys (who played Feufollet’s Saturday time slot with a wreath on a speaker), Michael Doucet, and Roddie Romero and the Hub City All-Stars. He was not, however, mentioned in any of Jazz Fest’s public addresses, and even though Stafford’s death forced a number of changes to the schedule, neither it nor the changes were acknowledged. I kept waiting for a push notice from the app at least to notify users of changes, but no. They simply appeared.

On Friday night at midnight, I checked the schedule to see if the Feufollet set might become some kind of tribute to Stafford, but saw that the more probable had happened and Colombian act Gregorio Uribé had been scheduled to fill that slot. It wasn’t until Saturday morning while I was at another stage that a friend got a text that Riley was playing Feufollet’s slot. I gather from what Riley said onstage that Stafford’s memorial was on Sunday and he wanted to be able to attend it, but it was pretty casual to treat changes that involve artists who have been part of Jazz Fest as long as Feufollet and Steve Riley like a bureaucratic amendment.

Riley moving to Saturday opened his Sunday slot, and it was filled by backing the Colombian band Cimarrón up an hour and slotting Michael & David Doucet avec ses amis into their slot, and again, a set featuring Michael and David Doucet with an ad hoc combo promised interesting possibilities from two giants of the modern Cajun music world, but it too was treated like a clerical change.

As I’ve written, I think Stafford and Feufollet did a lot at Jazz Fest to help music fans find a way into Cajun music, and since the band has played Jazz Fest since 2000, it has become part of the fabric of the festival. Jazz Fest should be embarrassed that it whiffed so completely on his passing.

Like McCalla, Jon Batiste has become crucial Jazz Fest viewing, and they feel plugged into where New Orleans in the 2020s in a way that the Neville Brothers codified the city through the ‘90s and into the 2000s. The Nevilles’ sets finished Jazz Fest by summing it up and restating the core musical principles of the city and festival, one of which was nostalgia. Batiste’s last four shows at Jazz Fest were very different from Neville Brothers’ shows because they were also very different from each other. Still, they shared musical, social and political values that feel au courant, and if they aren’t, they should be.

His set brought the Nevilles to mind because it made me wonder if he would want to be the artist that has the kind of iconic stature in New Orleans that they had. He started a New Orleans-centric stretch of the show by playing a James Booker-like solo piano version of “Tipitina” by merging it with a composition by Louis Moreau Gottshalk, drifting into a Toussaintian version played in a minor key, then moving to a fairly straightforward take on Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” before bringing the band back in for his take on “Big Chief.” Since New Orleans’ R&B greats are dying out, Batiste stepping into that space felt like a powerful statement as well as a big hug for the piano tradition he emerged from, and his interpretation of “Big Chief” echoed the Neville Brothers’ not in the way he played it but in the way he made it reflect his musical priorities in 2024, just as they did years earlier.

I don’t think he’s going that way because Batiste is thinking bigger musical thoughts than that, but it was a tantalizing idea that flickered in that moment. And really, I think I’d only want to him do a set of his take on the New Orleans music idea once because after his last four Jazz Fest sets, I want to see what excites him musically.

… and a shout out to a friend, Gallivan Burwell, who ID’ed Gottschalk in his review on Facebook of Batiste’s set. And credit to Batiste, who thought Gallivan summed up his set so well that he shared it on his social media!

Sometimes the old boys can’t catch a break. I thought Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s set came close to a greatest hits show for that combo, but one fan on Twitter groused that he wished Young would play some of the old songs. Since the set was almost entirely old songs with more than half of it coming from the 1970s, I asked if the guy was serious and what he wanted. He wanted stuff from 1972’s Harvest, which wasn’t a Crazy Horse album. The next day, I walked behind two guys who were glad when those hacks got out of the way so that he could play “Ohio” properly.

I’ve always respected Young telegraphing his intentions to his audience by signaling that the show will be quiet and acoustic or grungy and loud, but there’s not much to do with people who don’t read the signs.

I wrote about being blown away by the Colombian shredders in Cimarrón, but I didn’t mention my respect for them in the sticky heat of the second weekend dancing and playing hard while wearing what looked like the pleather-iest pleather of all time. It made everything they did seem all the more impressive.

By all accounts that I have seen and heard, The Rolling Stones day at Jazz Fest went as well as it could. I found it fascinating and disappointing to see some people on social media who simply couldn’t accept that it was a good time for those who were there.

I still think the idea was a high profile test drive to see if special Jazz Fest days like it are possible. If it really was a one-off, Jazz Fest did it in a way that didn’t impinge on the fun of people attending other days of the festival too drastically. It will be interesting to see when/if it happens again. I can’t imagine that it becomes a yearly event, but Festival Productions can now go to artists that they have yet to be able to book and show new possible ways to present them. I won’t be surprised if at some point Jazz Fest presents a special late start show so that the headliners can start at 7 or 8 p.m. and have at least some of their production.

This is spitballing, and considering the cultural romance we have with The Rolling Stones, it’s possible Jazz Fest went through all it did to put on the show for a one-off day, but it’s also equally possible that it can take what it learned and use it to build one more possibility into the festival’s future.

My Spilt Milk During Jazz Fest 2024

I’m proud of My Spilt Milk’s coverage of the festival. If you missed anything, here are links to the stories.

Since the international acts are frequently among my favorites each year, I picked the highlights of the artists from Colombia this year. I felt like my track record was pretty strong. Los Cumbia Stars were even better than I expected and had crowds going bananas, and the street party vibe of Grupo Aparte was even stronger than I suspected, and they would do almost anything to get over with a crowd. I enjoyed as respected Kombilesa Mi, but their set served as a reminder of how thoroughly hip-hop is roots in the culture it comes from, and how completely language-based it is. I liked the emcees working over live polyrhythms on drums, but without the language or awareness of culture-specific codes, I felt pretty superficially connected.
I interviewed documentary filmmakers Jeremey and Abby Berendt Lavoi about the long road to their film, Roots of Fire. It focuses on a younger generation of Cajun musicians including Wilson and Joel Savoy, Jourdan Thibodeaux, Kristy Guillory and Kelli Jones and their relationship to Cajun culture in the first years of the 21st century. Since Feufollet and Chris Stafford were their entry into Cajun music and the first band they shot, we were in touch during the second weekend after his death. The film is now streaming on Apple TV and other streaming services.
I covered the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra’s collaborations with indie artists in Louisiana including Tank and the Bangas, Big Freedia, ÌFÉ, and Alfred Banks, all of which played in New Orleans at or during Jazz Fest. I explored the intersection of two musical cultures and how they interacted. The results had enough in them that I had to break it into part one and part two to keep it from being overwhelming. One thing I didn’t address was the way the series played like a step toward signaling a new New Orleans musical hierarchy, identifying some names that people ought to take seriously.
I asked a number of artists to contribute their musical “Milky Way”—the eight songs that define their musical universe. It would have been nine songs had Pluto not been de-planetized in 2006. This year The Iceman Special, Lilli Lewis, Sierra Green, Silver Synthetic, Cole Williams and Lulu and the Broadsides contributed lists, and they really do give you a good idea where these artists come from. I looked at every one here and thought, Yep, that makes sense. At the same time, the lists were never what I expected. Some used the space to write explanations that really helped open up their art. If nothing else, these will turn you on to a lot of music that I’ll happily co-sign.