Set the Grand Marshall Pen Free at Jazz Fest! (for a While)

Could all that empty space be better used? By Alex Rawls

At the start of each day of Jazz Fest, the gulf between the fans and the band on some stages is the VIP enclosure. How do we make the experience better for everybody? Open it up for two sets.

Last week, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival made news by announcing that its 2024 edition will have eight days and will start on Thursday, April 25. This will undoubtedly make the Jazz Fest faithful happy, but if Jazz Fest really wanted to make fans happy, it could open the Grand Marshall VIP enclosures for the first two sets of the day. It’s an idea I first floated during Jazz Fest 2022, but I did so during the festival, so it’s understandable if it fell through the cracks. I’m pitching it again so that the festival promoters have time to think about how to make it happen.

As is, people who buy the Grand Marshall package get access to the area closest to the stage at the Shell Gentilly, Congo Square, and Festival Stages, but they usually only take advantage of those options at the end of the day. In 2023, fans bought the Grand Marshall packages to be up front for such stars as Lizzo, Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, Ed Sheehan, Jazmine Sullivan, and Kenny Loggins more than the likes of The Iceman Special, Xeno Moonflower, Atabal, and The Topcats, who opened those stages around 11:30 most mornings.

But really, what the Grand Marshall package holders bought is time. In the days before the Grand Marshall and VIP deals for festivals around the country, fans who wanted to be up front for the headliners had to be in line early to be one of the first people in the gates, then hustle to the stage their favorite artist was playing, then spend the day there, protecting their spot on the rail. That meant sitting through the other acts on the stage that day whether they cared or not. It meant passing up everything else the festival had to offer. Getting to the rail and holding it was a measure of that person’s fandom. The Grand Marshall and other festival VIP packages allow the buyer to pay to circumvent all the time-consuming parts of the fan’s experience.

You can grouse that Jazz Fest should do away with the VIP packages because they go against the democratic spirit of the festival and I wouldn’t disagree, but realistically, that horse is out of the barn. They are now a baked in part of revenue projections, and since there are few new costs incurred to make them available, they are almost pure profit.

Those enclosures are full for headliners, but they’re often empty or virtually empty for the opening acts each day. I can say from experience that the people who paid to be in the Grand Marshall pen for Lizzo didn’t show up to see Shreveport’s Seratones play from 11:30-12:45 on the first Friday this year. Because of that, when the band looked out from the stage it saw a 15 to 20-yard dead space in front of the stage, then a respectable number of early arrivers leaning on the rail that separated them from nobody, then 20 to 30 yards behind them, a thick cluster of people started setting up their base camps for the day.

For the Shreveport rock band Seratones, there were enough people and enough energy that the experience was still a good one for the band and its fans, but that’s not always the case. For lesser known bands, opening on the Festival, Congo Square, or Shell Gentilly stages can be a lonely experience. Artists accustomed to facing an audience right in front of them have to deal with a gap between them and their fans bigger than some of the venues they play. Not all bands handle that change well, and for fans of those bands, it’s hard not to feel for them. They get a Jazz Fest gig which is good, but it doesn’t put them in a position to show what they can do.

The first day of Jazz Fest 2022 illustrated this issue. Montreal’s Kizaba played a set of Congotronic dance music to open the Festival Stage, and it was a lonely experience. He didn’t have a strong local following to start with, and problems with the ticket scanners slowed down the arrival of many festgoers who might have been curious. The sparse crowd kept at a distance clearly affected Kizaba, who showed how compelling he could be an hour or so later when he turned the tented, more intimate International Pavilion into a dance party.

If Jazz Fest opened the empty Grand Marshall pens for the first two acts each day, it would have a number of positive effects. It would be an artist-friendly gesture that would give the acts the chance to have a better experience when playing on those stages. It would be a fan-friendly gesture because a closer audience is a more responsive audience, and that improves the likelihood that they get to see and hear a better show. It would also give fans a chance to get close to those stages, which is a bit of an abstract positive, but it’s real. For rock ’n’ roll fans, there’s something intrinsically cool about getting close to the stage, and even if it’s only temporarily possible and to see a band that they were seeing out of curiosity.

Opening the Grand Marshall pens for the first two acts would also help create a more egalitarian vibe. The best solution would be to adopt the set-up many festivals including Voodoo—when it existed—did by leaving some of the area in front of the stage for fans willing to do the work to get there, but letting fans of the music use them when they are largely empty helps Jazz Fest live up to the idea that the festival is all about the music. Leaving prime real estate empty in case the people who paid for access to it want it feeds the suspicion that in the end, Jazz Fest is just about the money.

Earlier this year, Philadelphia rock band Low Cut Connie didn’t accept the distance between them and the fans, and singer Adam Weiner left the stage, crossed the empty Grand Marshall space and got up on the front rail to play to the people who came to see them. The moment was on brand for Weiner, whose sweaty onstage persona is of someone bordering on out of control, but it wouldn’t work for everybody. And even though it made for one of the day’s highlights, bands shouldn’t have to work that hard to reach their fans.

Letting fans of the opening bands on the main stages get to the front is a win-win, and while I’m sure there are logistical challenges, they’re likely solvable.