Jazzfest '06
For at least the last ten years, people who make assumptions have been telling me that I am just the kind of person who would love New Orleans's JazzFest (officially: Jazz & Heritage Festival) and hate Mardi Gras. I'm always a little skeptical about assumptions people make about me, because they tend to mistake my outward reserve for outright boringness, so since Mardi Gras actually did sound like fun, I figured JazzFest would be the exact opposite. But I had to go to New Orleans for work the week before last, and I had a free afternoon to spend at JazzFest, and it turns out that everyone neglected to tell me about this:
Already, every meal I'd eaten in New Orleans had skyrocketed to the top of my Ten Best Meals Ever list (a list I hadn't even really needed to make before). But--there was so much! All in front of me! And tragically, not enough time to sample it all. I really think I could spend an entire day at JazzFest eating. And then I could just get hauled out by the strike crew in one of the giant tuba cases.
Speaking of tubas:
The only reason I didn't ditch my associate and crawl into the jambalaya vat (by the way: I am fairly allergic to onions and garlic, both of which I assume were plentiful in all of the meals I ate in New Orleans, and I didn't feel an adverse reaction once. This is right after an unmarked pesto mayo in a Starbucks sandwich I bought at the airport laid me out for the first night. This is because New Orleans food is magic) was because JazzFest, as it turns out, is awesome.
It is not, as I feared, boring old smooth jazz for the "NPR is so noisy!" set. There was a great creole fiddler and his band (very strange to hear a dude switch off between near-perfectly accented French and English with a strong Southern accent), a fabulous local piano player who attracted a huge crowd at the main stage (although the place was packed, I can only imagine it wasn't half as full as it has been other years), an amazing high school gospel choir and, most awesomely, the guys in the photo above, Smitty Dee's Brass Band.
None of these kids could have been much over 20, if that, and they were all masters of their instruments. They even had a hype guy who rallied the crowd by asking if they were glad to be back in New Orleans, "the best city in the world and the only place where disaster go down and don't nobody care!" Smitty Dee got the crowd to perform a "line"--a term I've never heard before, but it's pretty much everyone walking in a line, dancing in time to the music and waving their hands around, with or without scarves. It was all fabulous.
I had no idea beforehand that it would be forty dollars worth of fabulous, though, and I balked a little when I found out that would be the admission price (and then they took my ticket!) I rationalized that I was reinvesting in the city's rebuild effort, especially as I had just walked through three blocks of houses with the FEMA spraypaint X on the side, marking the dead and/or missing who had once lived there.
I don't have much to say about the state of the city--it's every bit as disastrous as the news reports get across, and it's an absolute shame that progress has to be measured in the number of feet the garbage is now piled high next to houses on the ninth ward. But as cliche as it sounds (as it is), there is a real sense of hope among the people still there, evidenced by the giant and heavily promoted grand re-opening party being held in my four-star hotel as well as the signs (printed and homemade) on houses in Jefferson Parish, stuck in window grates well below the sludge marking the water line reading, WE ARE HOME! DO NOT BULLDOZE.
Already, every meal I'd eaten in New Orleans had skyrocketed to the top of my Ten Best Meals Ever list (a list I hadn't even really needed to make before). But--there was so much! All in front of me! And tragically, not enough time to sample it all. I really think I could spend an entire day at JazzFest eating. And then I could just get hauled out by the strike crew in one of the giant tuba cases.
Speaking of tubas:
The only reason I didn't ditch my associate and crawl into the jambalaya vat (by the way: I am fairly allergic to onions and garlic, both of which I assume were plentiful in all of the meals I ate in New Orleans, and I didn't feel an adverse reaction once. This is right after an unmarked pesto mayo in a Starbucks sandwich I bought at the airport laid me out for the first night. This is because New Orleans food is magic) was because JazzFest, as it turns out, is awesome.
It is not, as I feared, boring old smooth jazz for the "NPR is so noisy!" set. There was a great creole fiddler and his band (very strange to hear a dude switch off between near-perfectly accented French and English with a strong Southern accent), a fabulous local piano player who attracted a huge crowd at the main stage (although the place was packed, I can only imagine it wasn't half as full as it has been other years), an amazing high school gospel choir and, most awesomely, the guys in the photo above, Smitty Dee's Brass Band.
None of these kids could have been much over 20, if that, and they were all masters of their instruments. They even had a hype guy who rallied the crowd by asking if they were glad to be back in New Orleans, "the best city in the world and the only place where disaster go down and don't nobody care!" Smitty Dee got the crowd to perform a "line"--a term I've never heard before, but it's pretty much everyone walking in a line, dancing in time to the music and waving their hands around, with or without scarves. It was all fabulous.
I had no idea beforehand that it would be forty dollars worth of fabulous, though, and I balked a little when I found out that would be the admission price (and then they took my ticket!) I rationalized that I was reinvesting in the city's rebuild effort, especially as I had just walked through three blocks of houses with the FEMA spraypaint X on the side, marking the dead and/or missing who had once lived there.
I don't have much to say about the state of the city--it's every bit as disastrous as the news reports get across, and it's an absolute shame that progress has to be measured in the number of feet the garbage is now piled high next to houses on the ninth ward. But as cliche as it sounds (as it is), there is a real sense of hope among the people still there, evidenced by the giant and heavily promoted grand re-opening party being held in my four-star hotel as well as the signs (printed and homemade) on houses in Jefferson Parish, stuck in window grates well below the sludge marking the water line reading, WE ARE HOME! DO NOT BULLDOZE.