[Dixielandjazz] New Orleans Jazz & Heritage festival is On for Spring

[Steve barbone]

Great News for both the Jazz & Heritage Festival and for New Orleans. Why?
See the bottom line in the last four paragraphs.

Cheers,
Steve


New Orleans Will Hold Jazzfest This Spring
Fats Domino and Irma Thomas will be among the local performers at the New
Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, to be held at its usual site.

NY TIMES -  By BEN RATLIFF - February 16, 2006

After financial hardships, dislocations and storm and flood damage to their
site, the producers of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival yesterday
announced details of the festival's post-Katrina return over two weekends in
late April and early May.

Contrary to organizers' initial fears in the months after Hurricane Katrina,
the festival, known as Jazzfest, will be barely diminished, offering both
big-name acts and even more local musicians.

At a news conference at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Quint Davis, the
Jazzfest producer/director, said the festival this year will take place over
six days ‹ April 28 to 30 and May 5 to 7 ‹ as opposed to its usual seven.

One of the festival's main events will be a performance by Fats Domino, the
kingpin of the city's R&B history, who was saved by rescue workers during
the storm. Other marquee attractions include Dave Matthews, Keith Urban,
Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Allen Toussaint with Elvis Costello,
and Yolanda Adams. The festival's core heritage elements ‹ Southern blues,
R&B, gospel, Cajun music and zydeco, brass bands and Mardi Gras Indian bands
‹ will be represented even more strongly than before, Mr. Davis said.

The festival will be held at the Fairgrounds Race Course, in the Mid-City
neighborhood of New Orleans, as it has been for 34 years. It has taken on
Shell as a presenting sponsor, which means that the festival will be
officially referred to as the 2006 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
Presented by Shell. (In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Davis said the
company's presence would otherwise be signified in the festival's literature
and posters by logos, not by its name.) American Express has also agreed to
be one of the festival's larger corporate sponsors, particularly of the
stages showcasing the local musicians. In the last few years, the festival
has cost over $10 million to produce.

Last September, in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, Mr. Davis
declined to say whether there would be a festival this year; he was too
concerned with the safety of his local staff members and with finding out if
they could resume work in time to book the acts. For the month of November,
the Sheraton New Orleans put up a dozen members of the Jazzfest staff while
it regrouped; the first thought was to put on the festival elsewhere in
Louisiana, or maybe even in Central Park in New York. "It seemed hard, when
we looked at the logistics," Mr. Davis said. "The labor pool, getting
trailers, getting the Fairgrounds fixed."

Even though much of the Mid-City neighborhood survived fairly well through
Katrina, Mr. Davis explained, the roof and the ends of the grandstand
building at the racetrack were torn off by the storm, and there was a great
deal of water damage to the building. Restoring the electrical network to
the area inside the racetrack oval alone, he said, cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars. (These costs were borne by Churchill Inc., which had
bought the fairgrounds out of bankruptcy a month before last year's
festival.) As recently as five weeks ago, organizers still had not secured
the new sponsorships necessary to put on a festival of a size comparable to
those in recent years. Shell committed to its sponsorship only around
mid-January, Mr. Davis said.

Most of the event's food vendors ‹ a big draw for festivalgoers ‹ are
returning, despite tremendous hardships to their homes and businesses. And
the local musicians themselves, spread all over the country, had to be
tracked down by the festival's staff.

Those musicians and bands will be back in force in Jazzfest 2006: about 330
of the 360 acts on this year's festival are local, Mr. Davis said, a
slightly higher percentage than in past years. The list includes Irma
Thomas, Buckwheat Zydeco, Rebirth Brass Band, Snooks Eaglin, Clarence
Frogman Henry, Walter Wolfman Washington, Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans
Jazz Orchestra, Trombone Shorty, Big Chief Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias,
Eddie Bo, Soul Rebels Brass Band, D. L. Menard and others.

Before 2005, the festival used almost no national advertising; word-of-mouth
was strong enough. But now, to lure visitors back to the state, the festival
will have a sizable advertising campaign, thanks to support from the
Louisiana Office of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. Mr. Davis said the city
would have almost double the usual number of hotel rooms available for this
year's festival because of a drop in convention business this spring.

Jazzfest is an important moneymaker for the city: about 400,000 people
attended the festival last year, and Mr. Davis estimates that the festival
generates $200 million to $300 million for New Orleans, second only to Mardi
Gras in its local economic impact. (The Mardi Gras parade season this year
has been slightly abbreviated with shorter routes.)

"The festival is the ultimate musical benefit for a destitute city," Mr.
Davis said.