The Best Reasons to Attend the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

There are many reasons to go the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which returns to the New Orleans Fairgrounds this year April 28-30 and May 4-7. You can go for the out-of-state headliners (which this year include Lizzo, Ed Sheeran, Dead & Company, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Wu Tang Clan, the Tedeschi-Trucks Band and Herbie Hancock). You can go for the great food and ambience of the city itself.

For me, the best reason to go is to hear Louisiana acts playing for Louisiana audiences—and to become a part of a chemistry that happens nowhere else. This is an especially rare treat when the acts are those that seldom tour outside the state. No region boasts a more distinctive musical culture, a culture that can’t be fully appreciated anywhere but on its own turf. As happens every spring, many of those acts are releasing new albums to coincide with Mardi Gras and Jazzfest.

The highest profile of those releases is Touch My Soul, Ivan Neville’s first solo album in almost 20 years. Music is often a family business in Louisiana, and Ivan is the crown prince in one of the greatest of those families. He’s the son of the nonpareil singer Aaron Neville and the nephew of Art, Charles and Cyril Neville, who long performed with Aaron as the Neville Brothers. Ivan’s cousins include singer Charmaine Neville (Charles’s daughter) and guitarist Ian Neville (Art’s son). Ivan and Ian have toured and recorded together in the band Dumpstaphunk.

While that band emphasized funk grooves and rock guitars, this solo album is more song-oriented. Ivan isn’t much of a lyricist, so the tracks need catchy chorus hooks and the hometown syncopation if they’re going to work. When those elements fall flat, as they do on the lead-off track, “Hey, All Together,” not even the guest vocals of Bonnie Raitt and Michael McDonald can save the day. But when the hook and second-line rhythms are as infectious as they are on “Greatest Place on Earth,” the horn parts added by Trombone Shorty and members of the Preservation Jazz Band have a sturdy launching pad.

Also in the latter category is “Dance Music Love,” given a funky twitch by Ivan’s clavinet and guest Doyle Bramhall II’s guitar. Less successful is “Touch My Soul,” whose ballad arrangement calls too much attention to such cliches as “A light that shines on me.” Ivan wrote or co-wrote all the songs but one: the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place,” the album’s first single. The song is given new life by a dizzying island arrangement that reminds us that New Orleans is in many ways a Caribbean city.

If there’s a New Orleans musical family that rivals the Nevilles, it’s the Marsalises. Wynton and Branford are the best known names, but trombonist Delfeayo and vibist Jason are also top-notch musicians who have also inherited the spirit and high standards of their piano-playing father, the late Ellis Marsalis. In recent years, Delfeayo has been leading a big band called the Uptown Jazz Orchestra. On the new album, Uptown on Mardi Gras Day, the ensemble tackles the umbrella-twirling, sing-along standards that can be heard from marching bands, radios and barrooms all over the city during Carnival season.

Delfeayo Marsalis (Photo by Eric Waters, courtesy of BK Music)

Included on this album are two compositions from the brilliant Earl King (“Big Chief” and “Street Parade”) and two that featured pianist Art Neville on the original recordings (the Hawkettes’ “Mardi Gras Mambo” and the Meters’ “They All Asked for You”). Delfeayo adds four new compositions of his own, plausible candidates for the canon. It’s not easy to add sophisticated jazz solos and arrangements without spoiling the raucous bacchanalia of these songs, but Delfeayo and his bandmates pull it off. The vocals by Trombone Shorty’s brother Glen David Andrews are convincing, and the solos by Delfeayo, his brother Branford and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s Roger Lewis are a treat.

One of the highlights of Delfeayo’s album is the Carnival standard, “All on a Mardi Gras Day,” which was made famous by Monk Boudreaux and Bo Dollis, the big chiefs of the Mardi Gras Indian tribes the Golden Eagles and the Wild Magnolias respectively. These ensembles with their extravagantly feathered and beaded costumes and hypnotic chants are fixtures at both Carnival and Jazzfest. Now Boudreaux’s son, Joseph Boudreaux Jr., has formed a band called the Rumble with several of his former bandmates from the remarkable band, Cha Wa.

The Rumble’s debut album Live at the Maple Leaf successfully follows the approach of the Wild Magnolias and the Golden Eagles: marrying the chanting vocals and rattling hand percussion of street performers with an expert funk band. Except for Willie Tee’s Carnival standard, “New Suit” (also on Delfeayo’s album), the compositions are credited to Joseph Jr. and his bandmates, though they’re often based on older songs.

Joseph Boudreaux Jr. photo by Tiffany Anderson, Courtesy of Devious Planet Media

Joseph Jr. is a more versatile and sweeter-toned vocalist than his father, and the band plays with the virtuosity and discipline of their heroes, the Meters. This recording, taped in the sweatbox of a small club in New Orleans’ Riverbend neighborhood, sometimes suffers from the kind of shout-outs and broad gestures that work better in person than on an album. But there’s so much promise here that one hardly wait for their first studio project.

Joe Krown, a longtime fixture on the local music scene, tips his hat to such piano heroes as Allen Toussaint, James Booker and Dr. John by playing their compositions on a new album aptly called Tribute. Like his role models, Krown is able to get a different groove and a different melody going in each hand as he works the keyboard.

The Meters’ Leo Nocentelli adds guitar on Toussaint’s “All of It”; Ivan Neville turns in a terrific vocal on Dr. John’s “Such a Night,” and Krown’s longtime musical partner, the late Walter “Wolfman” Washington, does the same on Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Feel So Bad.” This project is a welcome reminder that New Orleans has been home to not only great players but also great songwriters.

New Orleans R&B is not the only indigenous local music that puts the “Heritage” into the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Cajun music from southwest Louisiana’s Acadiana region has proven equally valuable. Built around the accordion, fiddle and washboard, this tradition began with French immigrants who put a Franco-Celtic spin on every music they encountered, whether blues, rock ‘n’ roll or country. A good example of country-leaning Cajun music is the new album Live at La Poussiere by the 4Horses Cajun Dancehall Band.

This quartet features accordionist/lead singer Jamey Bearb and three veterans of Steve Riley’s bands—drummer Kevin Dugas and bassist Brazos Huval from the Mamou Playboys and steel guitarist Richard Comeaux from Lil’ Band o’ Gold. Recorded live at the ancient Breaux Bridge dancehall, named La Poussiere after the dust the waltzers stir up, the recording features both songs by such Cajun legends as Belton Richard and Lawrence Walker and by such country-music figures as George Jones and Lefty Frizzell.

The two sources complement each other surprisingly well, for the Louisiana syncopation gives a new perkiness to the country standards, which in turn lend an emotional urgency to the swamp-pop rhythms. Bearb’s baritone is big and persuasive, whether singing in French or English, and his accordion pulses with the pedal steel to keep the dance floor filled all night. And that’s the primary objective of nearly every working band in Louisiana.