John Boutte at Jazzfest

This is John Boutte’s moment. The New Orleans singer was named the city’s Entertainer of the Year at the April 25 Big Easy Awards, and the theme song that he wrote and sang for HBO’s Treme show has made him financially secure for the first time in his career and more famous than he has ever been.

As a result, the Jazz Tent at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival was overflowing for Boutte’s Saturday afternoon show. Every seat was taken, so people were sitting or kneeling in the aisles and standing at the edges of the tent. They were rewarded with an hour of music full of gorgeous technique and fearless imagination.

Boutte, a short and slender man, took the stage in a loose white suit and round-brimmed white hat. He began with the old jazz standard, “Way Down in New Orleans,” to remind everyone that he was coming out of a jazz background, and he allowed his horn players to take healthy solos to underline the point. But his third song was “City of New Orleans,” written by Steve Goodman and made famous by Arlo Guthrie, though in Boutte’s hands, the tune became something more than a train song. He stretched the phrasing and altered the melody to make clear that he was talking about his hometown, which was abandoned by the federal government when the levees broke in 2005. So when he sang, “Good morning, America, how are you? Don’t you know me? I’m your native son,” the words had an edge they’d never had before.

He introduced his own secular hymn, “Find a Meaning for the Message,” co-written with Paul Sanchez, by saying, “This is for all those in the Midwest floods who are going through what we went through—or at least a part of it. Don’t let them kick you when you’re down,” and here he added a big stage kick. “You have to get up and start all over again. This is also for the people in Japan.”

The highlight of the show was Boutte’s deconstruction and reconstruction of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” By half-talking, half-singing the verses as if he were challenging the chattering fairgrounds crowd to a duel, he silenced them. “You say I took the name in vain," he crooned in steely defiance. “I don’t even know the name, but if I did, well really, what’s it to you?” Boutte’s bell-like tone couldn’t have been more different from Cohen’s croak, and as his drawn-out vowels hung shimmering in the air, they exemplified the next lines: “There’s a blaze of light in every word; it doesn’t matter which you heard—the holy or the broken Hallelujah." He repeated that word, “Hallelujah," in a slowly rising, slowly falling, incantatory spell that was as sad and broken as it was celebratory and holy.

When the band struck up the opening chords for the Treme theme song, the crowd was on its feet before Boutte could sing a word. The singer was soon growling and shouting his party anthem as he slapped his tambourine on his right hip. “We’re all going crazy," he cried, “buck jumping and having fun," and the frenzied audience acted out those lines.