Mdou Moctar Wins Guitar Hero Day Sunday at Jazz Fest 2023

Mdou Moctar at the Cultural Exchange Tent, by Alex Rawls

The Tuareg guitarist from Niger’s mind-blowing set was one of the highlights of Sunday at the Fair Grounds.

On Sunday, Jazz Fest more or less worked as planned. The crowd took its time showing up considering how pretty the day was, but by 4 p.m., all the stages had good crowds—not crazy, but solid, respectable crowds that made the shows feel significant. On day three of a cashless Jazz Fest, the process was drastically faster and except for the usual suspects like the soft-shell crab po-boy, lines were very manageable. Customers seemed better prepared for the cashless experience, and vendors found ways to expedite the situation. One vendor worked the line of people waiting, cashing them out while they waited for their order to come up. Others clicked on their own past the pesky Tip screen, and most had found ways to make the process simpler and more stable.

Mdou Moctar from Niger delivered the most mind-blowing set of the day, certainly for fans of the electric guitar, and that was on a day that also included Gary Clark Jr. and Tedeschi Trucks Band. There were signs that something was coming before he stepped onstage in the Cultural Exchange Pavilion. The front rows for most sets are made up of men, women and children, some from the act’s home country, who are ready to dance. Moctar’s front row was thick with dudes there for a guitar hero.

Moctar’s music falls in the Tuareg tradition, and like Bombino and Tinariwen, he plays psychedelic, electric guitar-driven music. Comparisons to Hendrix and Prince are dropped in reference to him, and while there’s a little truth in both, he’s very much his own player with a very distinctive, often astonishingly heavy band.

His set started with some almost gestural playing, like he was fiddling around getting ready to start, but his guitar was more like the wind starting to blow, and within moments his noodling took shape and the band slammed in behind him with drummer Souleymane Ibrahim furiously pushing the band. The effect quickly became psychedelic and casually disorienting as the structure of the songs made it impossible to find the one and know where you are in the song, and subtle choices by rhythm guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane made it hard to be sure if he was still playing the same rhythmic pattern, and if he had changed, what was different. Over that, Moctar seemed to almost effortlessly explore musical thoughts on his Stratocaster, letting fleeting runs flicker then connect, moving in and out of the song’s central theme.

He presented himself as a showman from the start, giving us some lines played entirely as hammer-ons while his picking hand rested on the guitar body, and in a moment when Ibrahim throttled back the tempo noticeably, Moctar moved in slow motion onstage, then grinned, acknowledging the moment of stagecraft.

The band dealt with technical issues all set including a moment when the stage crew had to swap out the head of Mikey Coltun’s bass amp. They didn’t hurt the set at all, which moved fluidly but with relentless power. There were rarely fewer than a dozen cell phones up documenting the moment, and while that could be frustrating, I got it. The show was as close as we’re likely to feel to magic during Jazz Fest, not just in Moctar’s talent but the musical inexplicability. People might see better musicians, but they won’t see them in a musical situation that itself is alien so that the whole thing needs to be heard to be appreciated. At one point, Moctar led the crowd in clapping in what seemed like 4/4 time, but the moment felt like a trap. Nothing to that point sounded like 4/4 and when the drummer asserted himself, we sounded off-beat, even when we were following him. I understood everybody who wanted to record something that they could use later to show friends, Here, this is what I saw.

Moctar had a second set later in the afternoon in the Blues Tent, but after such an ecstatic set, I opted to pass on the second show. I couldn’t imagine it being better than the set in the Cultural Exchange Pavilion, and if it was, I’m not sure the band or I could handle it.

I skipped Moctar’s second set for the Lost Bayou Ramblers, who worked a related concept. Moctar’s music is clearly rooted in Tuareg folk music, and Cajun music remains at the heart of the Ramblers. At one point bandleader Louis Michot joked that Cajun Musicians’ Union regulations state that the band has to play a waltz every 45 minutes, and Louis’ fiddle and his brother Andre’s accordion define the band. They too have used electric instruments to frame them, with a Roland Octapad to add sub-bass percussion, Bryan Webre’s distorted bass, and Jonny Campos playing feedback and foot pedal noise connected to his electric guitar. The Ramblers look and read as more far out than they actually sound, largely because the traditional instruments, dances, and Michot’s Cajun country voice are foregrounded. The results were a 21st Century version of 19th Century music.

But it wasn’t all like that. At one point they veered into a kind of “Intercajun Overdrive” or “Set Controls for the Heart of the Bayou,” playing an exploratory version of Cajun  space rock, complete with Jonny Campos playing his guitar with a bow a la Jimmy Page. By that point, the Ramblers had built up enough equity with the audience to get a little room to mess around. As you might expect, there was no dancing to that one.

Actually, there was little dancing throughout the show near me, though two couples did the best they could with the space they had. I am a little sad that the days of the Cajun mosh pit are gone, and that there aren’t enough people who know the dances to hold the space anymore. The expanded accommodation of Americana on the Fais Do Do Stage I’m sure played a role since there now are whole sets where audiences fill in to watch, which would make reclaiming the space a bit of a challenge, but I think the decline in the frequency of zydeco nights in town and, as a result, fewer dancers has put a Jazz Fest tradition on the blocks.

Lost Bayou Ramblers’ Jonny Campos, by Alex Rawls

- “I hope Kenny Loggins wasn’t here to see that,” Joe Adragna of The Junior League joked when his bass player broke a string. It was the only flinch in a strong set that made a case for The Junior League being invited back more often. Jazz Fest’s default booking posture is good singing and good playing, usually in classic ways. The Junior League live in that sweet spot. Most of the songs had clear lineages to pop from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s, complete with clear, strong harmonies, and Joe Adragna’s songs had just enough unexpected moments to keep them fresh without seeming fussy.

- The most perplexing moment of the day came during Cyril Neville’s set, when he performed “Sunrise on the River,” which simply rewrote the Mardi Gras Indians’ classic, “Shoo-Fly, Don’t Bother Me.” Shortly after, he sang a song asking why you don’t visit no more, and you could clearly hear elements of “16 Tons” and “Hit the Road, Jack” in it, and I had a relevant Louis Armstrong song buzzing around in my memory that I couldn’t make land.

Since the source material was transparently clear in these songs, I wondered if there was something conceptual going on. Cyril thinks provocative thoughts, so I could see him locating himself and his music in the body of common American songs. As a listening experience, it was odd, and perhaps because it was a clearer experience, I enjoyed the way he used the voice of the ‘70s soul song to remember Big Chief Jolly. There too he borrowed, but it was clearly elegiac when he quoted, “I love to hear you call my Indian red.”