A Little Help From Our Friends

NEW ORLEANS JAZZ & HERITAGE FESTIVAL
April 28-30, May 5-7

Basin Street Records, a New Orleans indie label that’s home to jazz legends Henry Butler and Irvin Mayfield, among others, has a blatantly practical exhortation in its monthly newsletter. “Come to New Orleans!” writes label president Mark Samuels. “Ninety-nine percent of the things a tourist used to do are still here.” The tourists who filled the New Orleans Fairgrounds for the this year’s Jazz Fest weren’t here to tour the still-wrecked Lower Ninth or Lakeview; instead they packed Tipitina’s for late-night jam sessions and lined up at the fairgrounds to buy this year’s commemorative poster. According to festival organizers, the numbers were good: between 300,000 and 350,000, down only 50,000 from 2005.

True, there was plenty of muttering over details. The lineup included big-name acts that weren’t “jazz & heritage”; The Neville Brothers were conspicuously missing from their fest-closing set, and was it appropriate at all to even have the fest? But, just as with Mardi Gras, the city badly needed the injection of cash and good spirits, which it got—although Katrina was still the topic on everyone’s mind, and on many of the performers’ lips.

On the Acura Stage, Bob Dylan tore through his set with zero chatter. But he did include the apocalyptic blues tune “High Water (For Charley Patton),” a song set in a nightmarish dreamscape where dead blues legends are washed away in a catastrophic Delta flood. In the Gospel Tent, the McDonogh #35 High School Gospel Choir kept its 30-year-plus annual gig, with some former students back in the city for the first time since the storm.

During Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint’s set, a show which kicked off their summer tour in support of The River In Reverse, they performed Costello’s wrenching storm-inspired title track and their collaboration “Ascension Day,” a haunting, minor-key version of Toussaint’s famous “Tipitina.”

But the weekend’s standout performance was Bruce Springsteen’s hooting, hollering folk set, when—his face split by a huge grin for two hours—he reminded the crowd why he used to draw comparisons to Dylan. The high-energy set of traditional songs channeled the political picking-and-grinning style of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, especially with songs like Blind Alfred Reed’s 1929 lament, “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?” retrofitted with new, Katrina-inspired lyrics like, “Them that could got out of town / them that couldn’t stayed and drowned.” By the time the set ended, Springsteen had won the locals over—nobody complained that this outsider from Jersey closed with “When The Saints Go Marching In.”

The real disappointment of the fest was Fats Domino’s cancellation due to illness, though he appeared briefly onstage to greet fans and apologize for not being able to perform. Comparing the appearances of Springsteen and Fats is the best way to sum up the fest, and New Orleans these days. The out-of-towners have been great; full of empathy and energy, ready to roll up their sleeves and rally the crowds. The locals? We’re tired, and not really well. But we’re here.