In its first year without long-time sponsor Acura, its lineup uses the memories of fests gone by to draw people to this year’s model.

If the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell wanted truth in advertising, on the lineup poster where it currently has The Who, Stevie Nicks, Foo Fighters, Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band, Luke Combs and hundreds more, it should simply write Jazz Fest, Jazz Fest, Jazz Fest, Jazz Fest, and Jazz Fest from top to bottom. The 2022 lineup sells memories of Jazz Fests past, so much so that a friend thought that crawfish bread should be listed in front of The Who since the chance to eat some for the first time in three years will sell as many tickets as Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend. 

That doesn’t mean the lineup is weak; it’s simply familiar, and that may be what Jazz Fest needed it to be. After two years off, the festival needs to welcome its core audience back before their knees and backs get too used to not tromping around the track for two weekends in the late spring. The lineup doesn’t give us Jazz Fest’s greatest hits, but it ticks the oft-ticked boxes. Aging arena rock legends. Check. Familiar Gulf South favorites. Check. Pop-friendly R&B hitmaker. Check. Jam-adjacent rock bands. Check. Country act. Check. Rock-friendly R&B act. Check, and so on. It promises a good time, but more than that, it reminds you of good times you’ve had at Jazz Fest in the past and that you can have again this spring.

One thing this year’s lineup doesn’t do is try to appeal to a young audience. Lizzo, H.E.R., Maggie Rogers and The Lumineers (*ahem, notthatyoung*) are off this year’s schedule with no artists of similar age and stature in their places. Reading between the lines of festival producer Quint Davis’ comments last fall when the October 2021 iteration of the festival was scrapped, you could infer that sales for that more youth-conscious lineup were soft and that Jazz Fest was going to have to rely on good walk-up ticket sales during a pandemic to make it financially viable.

Maybe that change is a good thing. Jazz Fest stands apart from the other summer music festivals because it is not obsessed with youth. Coachella, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and ACL are targeting young twentysomethings, and they and countless second tier festivals are booking a lot of the same acts and making festivals that look a lot alike on paper to try to reach the same audience. Jazz Fest lineups may look similar from year to year, but they look nothing like the lineups of their competition. 

In its way, Jazz Fest has also been gradually addressing the age issue. Combs is 31—a teenager by the festival’s standards—but it has been slowly folding in acts for the next generation of festival mainstays by beefing up the Gen X contingent, this year with Foo Fighters, Death Cab for Cutie, and Erykah Badu. CeeLo Green will bridge the old/older generational divide when he plays as “Soul Brotha #100” in a James Brown tribute. 

Really, the biggest news in the announcement comes in the announcement of its sponsors. According to the press release:

Shell is the Presenting Sponsor of the Festival. Major Jazz Fest Sponsors are Louisiana Office of Tourism, Miller Lite, and the Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots (A Churchill Downs Company). First Horizon Bank, Peoples Health, Coca-Cola, Monster Energy, AARP, Maui Jim Sunglasses, Ochsner Health, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel and WWOZ are also Official Jazz Fest Sponsors. 

Notably absent in that list is Acura, the long-time sponsor of the de facto main stage. Since the talent lineup doesn’t look much different than it did when Acura was a sponsor, I assume that someone stepped in with a reasonable amount of money, but that’s going to be something to watch going forward. 

In other news, there doesn’t appear to be a spotlight country funneling international talent to the festival, though there will be international acts. José Feliciano, winner for the Least Predictable Booking of 2022, will perform this year, as will Cimafunk from Cuba, Bombino from Niger, and Lakou Mizik from Haiti.   

Weekend ticket packages and VIP packages are on sale now. The Early Bird Weekend Pass for April 29, 30 and 31 is $210 while supplies last, $225 after that. The Early Bird Weekend Pass for the four-day second weekend, May 5, 6, 7 and 8, is $260 while supplies last, $275 after that. Those numbers tell us that the floor for single day tickets is $65, the per-day price of the four-day early bird package, and more likely they’ll be higher than $75, the highest per-day ticket price of the weekend packages. 

Next week I’ll run down the acts I’m most interested in, but the full first and second weekend lineups and ticket packages are up at the Jazz Fest website.