The Chris Moeller Archives

La Nouvelle-Orleans

I just returned yesterday from a trip to New Orleans and the city's annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. The Paulin Brothers Brass Band wailed at Preservation Hall Thursday night, and our group took in the Festival on Saturday and Sunday.

Jazz Fest is always about making hard music choices. Despite having attended three days of the event over the last two years, the list of artists I didn't see just on those three days must rival the best of any of the other great music festivals around the world: Elvis Costello with Allen Toussaint, Al Green, Tim McGraw, Delbert McClinton, Hot 8 Brass Band, James Taylor, Wilco, Erykah Badu, Galactic, Dave Matthews Band, Etta James, Better Than Ezra, Mavis Staples, and Hugh Masekela.

This year I dedicated myself for the most part to seeing full performances of jazz figures appearing on stage in their most natural habitat-- that is, New Orleans. With few exceptions, jazz music should rule above all at the festival, and those that bring it here are saving their best for the city that gave it birth.

Trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, who has scored every Spike Lee film going back to "Mo' Better Blues," is carrying on the hard bop spirit of Miles, Monk, and Coltrane in the 21st century, chanteuse Stephanie Jordan covered half my karaoke songbook in her rousing tribute to Lena Horne, and A-list drummer Herlin Riley of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, played the Jazz Fest for the first time as leader of his own quartet and closed Sunday with a New Orleans classic, Sidney Bechet's "Petite Fleur." Blanchard, Jordan, and Riley are all New Orleans natives, as are about 80 percent of this year's Jazz Fest performers.

The highlight of the fest for me though this year was the Saturday evening performance of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by-- with respect to Blanchard-- the current trumpet/cornet king of New Orleans, Wynton Marsalis. You got the sense that most of the festival dignitaries were under the tent for the Lincoln Center performance, even though James Taylor, Wilco, and Erykah Badu were all playing elsewhere. (Marsalis also led the band there Friday night.) This year marks the 40th Anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz Fest and Marsalis led his group Saturday through an entire reading of Duke Ellington's "New Orleans Suite," a piece that was originally commissioned for the very first festival back in 1970 and performed at that time by Ellington and his bandmates. Marsalis introduced each individual movement of the suite, punctuating the performance with colorful oral perspectives on the history of jazz, the city, and the important figures of New Orleans. (Ellington's composition includes individual pieces with such titles as "Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies" and "Aristocracy a la Jean LaFitte.") When they bounced into the final movement of the Duke's masterpiece,"Portrait of Mahalia Jackson," a beautiful girl with a bright smile and long white gloves came out and lit the stage with her Mardi Gras-inspired parasol dancing.

One of the featured and standout performers in Marsalis' 15-piece band-- a collection of musicians, by the way, that also provides one of the best reasons to visit New York City-- is trumpeter Ryan Kisor, who Marsalis introduced on stage as one of the three great trumpet (or cornet) players ever to come out of Iowa-- the others were one I hadn't heard of and Davenport's legendary Bix Beiderbecke. After watching Kisor, with his shades on, blow his muted horn from the back row of Marsalis' bandstand, I'm convinced he has to be the coolest Iowan of all-time, right up there with Johnny Carson and Cloris Leachman.

Baritone sax player Joe Temperley, a veteran of Ellington's band, played a solo on one of the three songs that followed the New Orleans Suite, and he had many in the audience in tears playing a tune for his wife (seated in the audience) on the occasion of the couple's 25th wedding anniversary. As the trio (bass, piano, and drums) played the rest of the Lincoln Center musicians off-stage and most of the audience members out the door at the end, Marsalis wasn't done. Packing his horn away too slowly, he whimsically rejoined the trio with his trumpet, improvising (it seemed) a number that wove in and out of the refrain of "When the Saints Go Marching In," perhaps the best-known of several New Orleans theme songs. I doubt I'll ever see anything again at the Festival that quite compares, and every city should be so lucky as to have a global ambassador on par with the one New Orleans has in Marsalis.

As the aforementioned big music names imply, there's more than just jazz at the annual festival. Since the time New Orleans-style rag and "jass" music replaced parlor piano music as the American standard, almost all music that's come after owes something to this region of the country, and is therefore welcome on the festival schedule. You haven't lived until you've sung along with Pete Seeger on "Turn, Turn, Turn!", "Midnight Special," and "This Land is Your Land," as we did on Saturday afternoon, just eight days before Seeger's 90th birthday party in New York City. (Seeger's Newport Folk Festivals of the 1960s were the forerunners of Jazz Fest.) And you also haven't lived until you've grooved, as we did Sunday night, with about 60,000 people to the funkadelic sounds of "Earth, Wind & Fire." Let's groove tonight!

New Orleans must be the world's greatest city. It's certainly America's greatest, and increasingly so as the rest become more and more homogenized. The French Quarter offered more culture, color, and entertainment to us in three and a half days than you could find in a dozen trips to other popular U.S. vacation destinations. The two-hour walking tour of the Quarter on Friday was a blast, and our traveling party engaged Rue Bourbon in just enough carnal decadence as to not be out of step with the Quarter's rich social and cultural heritage. After all, it was that great literary figure, Blanche DuBois, who proclaimed (lamented, actually) that the bells of St. Louis Cathedral were the only thing holy in the Quarter. Ce soir, nous vivons!

New Orleans was so much damn fun I may have to make it back the next time before the commencement of next spring's festival. Once a year is proving to be less than enough. (In fact, it might be a gas sometime to experience the old Orleans.) If you're feeling the buzz too, the second of two Jazz Fest weekends for this year begins tomorrow.

posted by CM @ 11:07 AM