That’s What I’m Talkin’ About: New Orleans JazzFest

There is an adage in the world of retail that can be traced back to entrepreneur No. 1 at the Garden of Eden’s first Apples ’R’ Us outlet. As it has been passed through the ages, there are three sacrosanct bases for success: 1) Location, 2) Location and 3) Location.

This came to mind after my editor reluctantly agreed to allow yet another annual column extolling the virtues of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the best of the music fests. Tell me why it’s so good, he ordered. And don’t fawn.

Location. New Orleans, the birthplace of American music, is a contradiction of wealth and poverty, the tug of the Mississippi, sweet magnolias along the St. Charles trolley line and the fetid excess and multicultural history of Vieux Carre. Africa’s polyrhythms found their first voice in the city’s slave markets; barrelhouse piano, the trumpet’s plaint, their first listen in the whorehouses of Storyville.

The Delta City’s air is fragrant with melody and percussion. I’ve never heard a musician anywhere who didn’t play better in New Orleans. For real. So, boss, location is reason No. 1.

And, if I must, here are the technical reasons why JazzFest rules and my touring party increases yearly. The “Jazz” in the title refers to the spectrum of music — gospel, cajun, zydeco, Caribbean, Latin, rock ’n’ roll, blues, funk, African, rhythm ’n’ blues, gypsy, acoustic plus jazz in its most commonly understood sense. Twenty-five bucks gets you 50 bands on 10 stages on each of eight days on the last weekend of April and the first of May. It starts before noon and ends before sundown. The sound systems are great (and blissfully quiet between acts). The stage schedules are staggered so you can hear part of Allen Toussaint, Henry Butler, Terrance Simien, Martinique’s Plastic System and the Crown Seekers in the Gospel Tent, even though their sets overlap. There are indigenous crafts booths and interviews and exhibits and films about music history and lots of people of all ages from around the world to meet and greet and the air-conditioned grandstand when it gets too awfully hot.

Plus, there is some seriously boffo Louisiana food to eat. Lots of it.

But, boss, what it really comes down to is this. It’s last Thursday afternoon and, to the delight of the assembled revelers, the 90 percent chance of severe thunderstorms rolled snake eyes. Former Crescent City buskette, Lousianne-bred Lucinda Williams, is playing the big stage at the Gentilly end of the Fairgrounds.

One of her older tunes sings: I see you now at the piano/Your back a slow curve/Playing Ray Charles and Fats Domino/While I sing all the words. From such psychic reminders do telling interludes evolve.

I slip from that venue toward the other end of the festival grounds. Past the clapboard Fais Do Do stage where the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars have shifted their messianic, epiphianic, psychedelic, Eastern European Jewish swing music into overdrive. The crowd — including a couple of Iranian ex-pats — has morphed dervish. It’s a swirl of second-line hora.

Past the vendor selling kewl-to-cool, “Ice-Cold JazzFest Bandanas” (several styles to choose from, almost all cotton, motley Mardi Gras patterns, dipped in a vat of freezing water to contain hot times).

Past Congo Square where dancing also reigns with Costa Rican Manuel Obregon’s Orquesta de la Papaya. It’s conga-rich and three marimbas to the wind. They harmonize in repetition, “Calling you sweet Africa.”

Past a gaggle of accountants from Des Moines who, unaccountably, are laughing uncontrollably as they daub each other’s scorched shoulders with portions of one of Cee Cee’s sublime chocolate cream snowballs under the theory — which makes sense, at least to them, at this particular time and place — that such balm will heal the sun’s damage to their fair Midwestern skin.

Past a woman scurrying to her hungry pals, balancing two paper-plated piles of boiled crawfish. When a passerby admires her dexterity, she winks and yells: “The four orders we had weren’t enough.”

To the big stage where home boy Fats Domino is tickling the ivories with his stubby digits, singing “Walkin’ to New Orleans.”

In that one short stroll — on a Thursday afternoon, mind you — I heard a rock ’n’ roll founding father, a future songwriting Hall of Famer, old world, third world and new world. I danced. I laughed. I had that magic feeling, nowhere to go, nowhere to go.

Boss, that’s what I’m talkin’ about — New Orleans JazzFest.

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