[Dixielandjazz] N.O. (non-) Jazz Festival?

[Charles Suhor]

I got the impression that Norm Vickers' criticism of the New Orleans Jazz &
Heritage Festival wasn't a demand to change it but a recognition that it
has moved beyond his taste for a jazzier jazz festival. He and the
Pensacola group have rightly voted with their feet, or rather, their
chartered bus, as they go in earlier for the French Quarter Festival.

Yes, Jazzfest long ago became an amalgam of what-have-you and
God-knows-what. The headline spots are celebrity-driven, aimed at bringing
in popular audiences. Then there are groups that have zero, nada, cipher to
do with jazz & heritage, like Trout Fishing in America.

The up-side is that people get to hear kinds of music they never otherwise
would. This hear I heard an eclectic Klezmer band and a Central American
marimba band with a rock-beat drummer. The down side is of course
comparative the lack of...jazz.

Another up-side--though it's a cluttered and incoherent program, it's a
better party than it ever was. Music, food, drinking, babes in skimpy
outfits, people of all classes, races, and genders. You could do worse. But
is it a jazz festival?

One of my major gripes with the NOJ&H is that the festival promoters claim
to have started it in 1970. The 1970 event was the beginning of the current
administration but it was the third big local festival. The 1968 and 1969
Jazzfests were the models and the impetus for 1970 and after. In a section
called "The Strange Case of the Jazz and Heritage Festival" in my book on
Jazz in Postwar New Orleans I trace the origins even beyond that to some
failed efforts.

For example, a 1965 plan was canceled because of fear that the city was too
racist for black musicians and fans to feel comfortable. The ball was
picked up and dropped the same year in a bogus festival held by a
cigar-chomping, eccentric lawyer named Dean Andrews who was also part of
the JFK assassination fiasco. (John Candy underplayed him in the JFK movie
where Kevin Kostner had a bad dialect coach in playing Jim Garrison.) As so
often happens in New Orleans, it was high social drama and farce all rolled
up into one.

That's a-plenty for now--

Charlie Suhor