New Orleans Hopes Jazz Fest Can Cure Katrina Blues

By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS — Raucous jazz, rhythm and blues and zydeco are synonymous with New Orleans and now the struggling city is looking to its famed annual celebration of all things musical to kick-start post-Katrina healing.

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival starts Friday with a huge roster of international and local stars, aiming to help residents, visitors and artists look beyond the devastation.

New Orleans’ musicians were hit hard by the hurricane. Many remain displaced and have new gigs in cities across the country after floods wrecked their homes and, for some, their instruments.

The first Jazz Fest after Katrina will bring together about 4,000 of them. It will allow artists to reconnect with fans and colleagues after months of uncertainty, said Roger Lewis, veteran baritone saxophonist for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

"It’s going to be very emotional. It’s going to be the best," said Lewis, 64. "The vibe of the music is going to be really spiritual and really uplifting. I think it’s going to bring people close together."

Dirty Dozen, the outfit credited with rejuvenating the brass band tradition, was on tour when Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast on August 29, killing 1,300 people. The band’s families fled to cities throughout the southern United States.

Lewis’s house in the city’s Gentilly neighborhood was damaged in the floods that submerged 80 percent of the city.

Musicians and fans are looking to the event, which runs April 28-30 and May 5-7, as an important step in recovery.

Local stalwarts like Dirty Dozen, Fats Domino, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint will be joined by the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Herbie Hancock, big names who wanted to be a part of the recovery.

MARDI GRAS WAS A TEST

Jazz Fest will be the second major test of New Orleans’ battered tourist industry. The city put on a successful, albeit scaled-back, Mardi Gras in February that drew about 400,000 visitors compared to the usual 1 million.

Half a million people normally take in eclectic music and Louisiana dishes like Crawfish Monica at the fest, injecting $200 million to $300 million into the region’s economy, according to state officials. Organizers are relieved ticket sales are at about 75 percent of last year’s numbers.

There were initial fears that Jazz Fest would have to be cut back or canceled, striking a blow to a city where music permeates life and, as its jazz funerals show, even death. As it turned out, organizers had to scale back only slightly, cutting the number of stages from 12 to 10.

"Some of that was just the psychology of trying to figure out how we would have a festival of the magnitude that we always have, and of the size that we think is representative of this very large culture, in a city that itself was not its normal size," said festival associate producer Louis Edwards.

Even today, New Orleans’ population is less than half the pre-storm number with parts of some neighborhoods still uninhabitable.

But organizers won major new sponsors, including Shell Oil Co. and American Express Co., allowing the show to stay on its feet with a large program.

Big-name artists agreed to perform for less than their normal fees. Hotels and restaurants then showed they could handle an influx of tourists for Mardi Gras.

Many musicians have relied on artist relief foundations that sprang up after Katrina to stay afloat financially, find housing or acquire new instruments. Now, the musical community is counting on Jazz Fest for a some therapy, said singer Irma Thomas, the "Soul Queen of New Orleans."

"Every Jazz Fest is important, as far as I’m concerned," said Thomas, 65. "But this one will have extreme significance because it will reunite a lot of musicians and friends who have been displaced because of the storm. So, yes, this one will be a lot more special that previous ones."