Sometimes it seems to me that there are two types of jazz festivals in the world. There are those that deliberately distance themselves from jazz "tradition," that see jazz at the end of the 20th Century as a world-wide musical form, and align themselves with contemporary European art music's notions of radical experimentalism and a rejection of past styles. These festivals tend to book a lot of European improvisers-musicians at home in the great concert halls of Europe, who see jazz as primarily an art music, cerebral in nature, and largely divorced from show business and entertainment.

And then there is New Orleans, where music is a part of life.

New Orleans is probably the last place in North America to possess an identifiably regional jazz style. This is possible because the larger culture of South Louisiana - its food, its architecture, its unique speech patterns and social customs - stands so resolutely apart from the homogeneity of American culture at large. Music in New Orleans possesses the same rich complexity and variety as a good gumbo, wherein the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts. Music in all its functions (art, entertainment, ceremony) cuts across social barriers, both racial and economic. From Chalmette to Gert Town, a randomly picked native New Orleanian will be able to sing all of the verses to "Iko Iko."

Local saxophonist James Rivers is a virtuoso with a variety of instruments, including the bagpipes, which he taught himself to play. Another of his instruments is a harmonica attached to his flute. He sings R&B, blues, and jazz standards. Rivers has also scored and appeared in several Clint Eastwood films.

A real showman; with one foot in a blues-based vocabulary, and the other in straight-ahead jazz.

The city possesses a strong teaching tradition and, as Neville Brothers Band saxophonist Charles Neville states,"Music is so much a part of life in New Orleans that it's something kids can get into easily. . . everything from a birth to a death, there's music involved."

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is an outdoor event. It is held in the infield area of the city racetrack in a series of tents and stages with names that reflect their corporate sponsorship (Fox8/Sprint PCS stage, Ray Ban stage, Tulane Hospital/Rhodes Gospel tent, and others). The Jazz tent is sponsored by the world's hippest radio station - WWOZ New Orleans.

The major problem with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is that it's impossible to be in two (or three or four) places at once. This means some tough choices have to be made. Do we see Count Basie's Band or The Wild Magnolias? Branford Marsalis or AI Grey with Benny Powell? It's enough to break your heart (and your endurance).

Due to scheduling constraints, we were only able to catch the second week of the festival. Because of this, we missed a number of performers we very much wanted to see - Irvin Mayfield, Irma Thomas, Dr. John, Dave Brubeck, Terence Blanchard, Joshua Redman and Nicholas Pay ton, among others. Friday morning, April 30th, we headed up to the festival for our first full day of music.

One of our stops was the Tulane/Rhodes Gospel tent to see the Southern Travelers. There's a saying among Jazzfest regulars, "When in doubt, head for the Gospel tent;' and it's easy to see why. The Travelers, who hail from Houma, Louisiana, were burning the joint down, and the atmosphere in the tent was electrifying. If this music doesn't move you, there's something wrong with your central nervous system.

Jazzfest generates a substantial profit, and these monies are directed back into the community in a multitude of ways. One of the prime beneficiaries is the music program at the New Orleans Center for Creative Art s - New Orleans' fine arts public high school.At the Sheraton WB 38 Fais DO DO stage, the school presented a program of outstanding jazz students, with NOCCA instructor and trumpet guru Clyde Kerr Jr. acting as M.C. Of particular interest to me was young altoist Adam Moore and trumpeter Navarrio McGhee. Both turned in fine performances on an uptempo "Cherokee:'

Randy Cole is a big-time Klezmer fan, so we headed to the Fox 8/Sprint PCS stage to catch the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars. The Allstars were busy whipping up the crowd ("There's still some people over there not dancing"), bringing a friend on stage to do an insane spastic dance that threatened to disconnect his arms from his body, and putting on a generally manic performance of New Orleans style, post-modern Klezmer. One thing I've noticed about musicians here is that no matter what style they're playing, it always has that funky second-line stutter to it.

At 2:25 PM it was time to see Astral Project at the Jazz tent. Astral Project is comprised of pianist David Torkanowsky, Tony Dagradi on saxophones, guitarist Steve Masakowsky, bassist James Singleton, and Johnny Vidacovich on drums. The band has been a local institution for 20 years, and all its members are leaders in their own right, in addition to being first-call session players on New Orleans' active rhythm and blues recording scene.

From the very first tune, the musicians displayed a near telepathic rapport. On "Foxy Roxy;' pianist Torkanowsky's solo ranged from Bill Evans' post-modernism to Hughie Smith's R&B style. Torkanowsky generated funky cross-rhythms by slamming the piano lid against the body of the instrument. On "Burgundy;' he managed to quote both French impressionist Claude Debussy and New Orleans piano funkmeister Professor Longhair in the same solo. Drummer Johnny Vidacovich displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of New Orleans street rhythms and their contemporary applications (he played on the late Professor Longhair's last album, "Crawfish Fiesta"), and handled the M.C. duties ("Buy our new CD, Voodoo Bop. The proceeds go to help needy families - ours!"). At one point during "Sombras en la Nocha;' he took out his house keys and created amazing percussion effects, shaking the keys into the mike and using them to wash over his cymbals and toms. Dagradi, Masakowsky and Singleton each displayed sterling technique and ceaseless inventiveness. By the end of the set, the tent was levitating.

Finally, at 4:30 PM, it was time to see the Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indian Tribe, who are not Indians at all but black people who mask as Indians. Their parades represent quite possibly the most uncorrupted version of West-African Pagbo (village parade) tradition in North America, and their music and songs have had a huge influence on the New Orleans jazz and blues tradition. The musical and social traditions of the Indians are an integral part of the life of New Orleans. Musically, the Indians bear some resemblance to West Indian rhythm bands, heavy on the homemade percussion instruments and call and response vocals.

The Eagles opened up with the classic "Indian Red;' which starts out in slow drag tempo. Half-way through, the drummers doubled up the time and the place was jumping. One of the most endearing things about the Indians is their inclusion of children in all of their events, and this performance included a retinue of wide-eyed "Little Chiefs:'

Early the next day, we were back at the Jazz tent for 3 Now 4, a quartet featuring tenor saxophonist Tim Green and the only jazz pedal steel guitarist I've ever seen, David Easley, as well as Astral Project's rhythm team-bassist James Singleton and drummer Johnny Vidacovich. Easley is an amazing player, coaxing complex chromatic passages out of an instrument not really built for that sort of thing. The nature of the instrument allows him dynamic possibilities unavailable to guitarists playing the standard axe, and the slide adds additional expressiveness. Drummer Vidacovich is, if possible, even more amazing than yesterday. His playing is so melodic that at one point a two-bar quote from "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" flew out of his drums so clearly it was as if he had leaned over and hummed it in my ear.

At 2:45 PM, Alvin Batiste and the Jazzstronauts took the stage. Batiste is quite possibly America's premier clarinetist in the modern jazz context, with a recording and performing career stretching back to the mid-fifties. He has recorded with Ornette Coleman, Ellis Marsalis and Cannonball Adderley, and is a near-legendary figure in jazz education in the state of Louisiana. In addition to his more high-profile former students, such as Branford Marsalis and Wessel Anderson, there are literally hundreds of working musicians who have studied with him over the years.

On Saturday, May 1, Batiste took the stand and gave us a complex and riveting jazz history lesson. on "Banjo Noir" - Batiste's adaptation of the Creole folksong "Misieu Banjo" - drummer (and ex-Batiste student) Herman Jackson set up that funky New Orleans stutter while bassist Ed Livingston occasionally implied a straight-four swing feel, creating a delicious rhythmic tension. Batiste's solo seemed to grow organically out of the angular theme. It was both elegant and funky at the same time. At one point, his wife Edith, "Poet in Residence," read some of her verse, in which she spoke of music as "the heart crying out for the release of the soul." This seemed a perfect description of Batiste's tone on the ciarinet - liquid and transparent.

In conversation after the set, Batiste told us that the rhythm system used in the piece is a "Bamboula," a forerunner to the parade grooves that form so much of New Orleans' music, so that there are "at least three rhythms going at the same time."

John Doheny: Two's against three's against two's.

 

Alvin Batiste: Well, you have a "Nanigo" against "Bamboula" against swing time.

 

J.D.: Randy and I were over at the N.O. Klezmer Allstars show today, and I suspect that sometimes people hear you play the clarinet and think "Klezmer music," when in fact all they're hearing is the instrument, not the vocabulary. If they heard the same vocabulary on tenor sax, they'd say, "Oh, how Coltranesque'

 

A.B.: Yeah, I hear ya. It's cool, Klezmer. I think the sounds emerge out of the Yiddish language. And so you have sounds that are microtonally in between what we might say in English or French or Spanish or whatever. But at the same time, in the African tradition, that same sound is used by forest people in Zaire.

 

J.D.: So what you're suggesting is that jazz vocabulary comes out of language.

 

A.B.: Yeah, it does.

 

J.D.: I noticed your own vocabulary tends to have some. . . almost 20th century classical constructions, like serialistic sort of things, and a heavy blues usage mixed in there. In fact, I noticed that, more than some jazz players working today, you employ a great deal of blues vocabulary.

 

A.B.: Well, I guess I've lived long enough, you know. I have to practice what I preach, 'cause I try to make the kids mindful of the fact that all of the melodic and harmonic things that we touch. . . from where I'm approaching it, when we identify ourselves as players in the jazz tradition, the blues will come through.

One of my favourite moments of the 1999 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival occurred during a performance by Jesse Davis. Davis, a young alto player who has worked extensively with Nicholas Payton, and whose muscular, confident style falls somewhere between Bird and Cannonball, was working his way through a medium-bounce tempo version of "I Love Paris." Outside the tent, one of the Black "Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs" whose parades, complete with brass marching bands, snake through the Festival grounds throughout the day, began to approach. Rather than getting upset as the conflicting music outside increased in volume, Davis and his band simply went with it, locking into the other band's groove and creating something new and unexpected. To me, this is the essence of the easy grace and style of this city. Every time I go there, the people of New Orleans never fail to impress me as being among the most warm and gracious folks on earth.