2007 was finally the year to assuage my long-standing desire to go to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, even though I couldn't wangle any friends from here or Texas to take the chance with me. After a scenic start to my flights, including a stunning view of former volcanic crater Mono Lake (above) just east of the Sierra Nevada near Yosemite, I flew into Houston en route through some thunderheads, with a great low-altitude view of a burst of sun on the Rice campus as we maneuvered around the storm. When I got to the Lafayette Hotel in downtown New Orleans later that afternoon there was a free concert going on in Lafayette Square in front featuring some JazzFest performers like Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias - what a welcome! I ate just across the street at Herbsaint, which is also the name of a famous new Orleans aperitif used to make Sazerac cocktails (cocktails, I learned a few days later, were also named in the French Quarter after "coqueteils," a shell they used to shake drinks before pouring at local bars). I had wonderful crabcakes and roasted gnocchi and shrimp on corn cakes, but then discovered on my room TV that New Orleans had  tornado warnings until 4 AM followed by flood warnings until noon! Those thunderstorms were catching up with me, and they looked angry! We had intense lightening at around 2 AM, but things looked disarmingly clear the following morning (Friday). I sunscreened and packed a tarp to sit on and maps and guide book and singles and quarters for the $1.25 exact-change streetcars and busses I expected to take, then stood out on St Charles Ave. in front of the hotel for about half an hour waiting for the streetcar before realizing with a few other patient jazzfesters that there WERE no streetcars (or busses, for that matter). It seems the drivers decided to do a sudden walkout during the high-demand JazzFest, but there were enough of us to share a taxi we scrounged up after only a four-block walk. We were still relatively early, arriving about 11:30, just after the gates opened (it's only 3 miles from the French Quarter, but through some heavily flood-damaged neighborhoods where walking, especially at night, is still not recommended. There were crafts vendors and chair-sellers and dollar bottles of water ($3 inside) and guys handing out schedules and Offbeat magazine across from the entrance, where something called MikeFest was being held at a local store.

Once in the fairgfounds, a cornucopia of local foods and crafts opened up before us (Rick and Shelley, two new friends from the streetcar/taxi encounter, stayed with me to explore); everything was either crawfish this or etoufee thatl. Sweet potato pies and beignets and bread puddings and jambalayas; there wasn’t a pizza or burger in the whole place! Gospel groups resounded from one direction, cajun zydeco from another, and blacksmiths and artists in the middle. It was pleasantly cool and cloudy; flood warnings, my eye! Natural consequence to hubris, a few minutes later at around 1 the skies began to just pour swimming pools full of water on us, forcing everyone at the fair to seek cover in the few tents and stands that offered some protection. The music shut down and everyone ran for cover, and the lightening strikes nearby quickly convinced the skeptics to flee. Two hours later it began to abate, but not before many had given up and tried to leave  for the day, only to discover much of the way back downtown was flooded and impassible. When I got the Times-Picayune the following morning, it reported 5.5” of rain, and a total failure of a massive pumping station that had just been proudly reopened.

We didn’t need snorkels, but that much rain so quickly reverted the fairgrounds back to the status of a swamp! An 83 year old woman was rescued by firemen from her car when it went all the way underwater by Canal St., near our location! The dedicated survivors slowly ventured back out, only to discover most of the audience areas and the racetrack itself had turned to swampy goop,requiring wading through 2 feet of water at numerous places with no circumventing path to get from place to place. The stages were getting squeegeed over and over, and rain was still blowing onto the stage areas. Some people improvised, and the inflatable furniture (SoCo sofas) they brought turned into impromptu nautical vessels!

Others started turning the deep riverine trenches into slippery watersides, and even in some of the sheltered tent stages the only place to stand was in a foot of water. I'm glad I was wearing my beach sandals instead of my sneakers. I had my packable raincoat and an umbrella, many folks got by with trash bags with holes punched in them, but I'm not sure where they found even those. As Wavy Gravy said at Woodstock in '69, "there's always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area." People gladly helped each other get through the flood and shared supplies. 2 points for humanity and southern gentility!

I ended up standing in the same swampy stage area for almost 5 hours and got toknow a lot of the people; Sarah and Brett, and Dustin and Tim Swanson from Minneapolis, all of whom were supposed to be studying for college finals. The payoff for the soggy suffering was being at

the edge of the stage for a short but soggy set by Ivan Neville and his group Dumpstaphunk followed by Better the Ezra and then the day's headliners, Counting Crows (Adam Duritz watches Ezra from backstage at left). I got some great close-up photos after the camera survived the drenching, thanks to being in it's own little camera case that was watertight enough to help inside the beach bag. We "floated out" after the final set!

I watched a streetcorner band near the festival grounds before waiting in a playground full of fire ants (in my wet and muddy sandals) for a taxi back downtown. When I returned to the Lafayette I got in a long conversation with some fest fans who had just arrived and were looking for reports of how things went and it turned out to be Scott Ross, president of ILM, and his wife Wendy (they had flown in through the afternoon's thunderstorms). Make no mistake, even with my umbrella and coat I ended up drenched to the bone, clothes and wallet and guide book and my 20 page printout of festival info and backpack - I ended up peeling all the pages and papers apart and spreading them around the hotel room to dry, and used a hair dryer on the guide book and wallet!

I ate dinner at the bar counter of the Red Fish Cafe in the French Quarter (crab cakes and Arbita Lager), got chatting with a guy, Dominic, a consultant at Stanford, whose friends hadn't shown up as scheduled because of the weather, and we ended up going to a midnight show at Preservation Hall starring the Charlie Hunter Trio. Charlie's a great guitarist whom I'd seen at 19 Broadway in Fairfax when he lived nearby; he plays both bass and lead on one specially built guitar (right)! I got to talk to him afterwards, he was genuinely excited to hear that I remembered his early days playing in Fairfax and came to see him all these years later. You might notice on the wall behind him that the Preservation Hall Jazz Band requests a $2 donation for traditional songs, but $10 for "When the Saints Go Marching In!" They may be sick of it, but I heard that one night a guy threw down a hundred and made them play it ten times in a row!

This was also, coincidentally, about a block away from where I saw my dad first propositioned by a hooker on Bourbon St. when we traveled to Houston to see Rice and stayed in New Orleans on the way back at the Hotel Monteleone.

I got to bed by a little after 3 AM. This is starting to sound like my son Ethan's schedule at Brown! But that's actually only 1 AM CA time so I slept reasonably well.

Here's a FEMA trailer by the fairgrounds waiting for major repairs to the house. Below is Nicholas Payton, who followed WoodShed in the Jazz tent on Steamy Saturday (the mud really was starting to smell like Katrina II). There was a painter right by me doing an oil impression of Payton as the set went on. Pretty good (compare for yourself side by side)!

The Saturday fest fans came out in force as the weather cleared, but it was up to 94 degrees , and there's no shade to speak of at the big concert stages.

I got to see great  jazz vocals from a woman named Leah Chase, who owns Dookey Chase's restaurant. She was featured in Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke", but I had no idea what a good singer she was!

All during the festival, bands paraded around the fairgrounds, including a jazz funeral for Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes, who had died recently and had been a long-time supporter of jazz and New Orleans music. DURING the Festival one scheduled artist, Alvin Batiste, famous clarinetist and music teacher, died in his sleep hours before his scheduled appearance, and his tribute suddenly became a memorial played by his many students including Branford Marsalis.

Mardi Gras "Indians" paraded their vividly beaded and feathered costumes throughout the festival, including the Wild Tchoupitoulis and the Wild Magnolias and their Spy Boys and Flag Boys. While not Native American, they honor the role of the Native Americans in the local history and are one of the most colorful parts of Mardi Gras, as you can see!

Next was Galactic, jamming with all comers from the other stages, and finally with John Mayer guesting for Led Zeppelin's "Dyermaker" before his own set at the same stage. I was pinned against the front stage barrier by thousands of teenage girls convinced they were in love with him (and of course, he with them), something akin to Beatlemania, if the screaming was any indication. In all fairness, his recent Trio record and Continuum show that he's actually a first-tier guitarist as well as a "sensitive" singer/ songwriter. So anyway, Saturday was trial by fire instead of the previous trial by flood and swamp on Friday. It was 107 on my camera strap REI thermometer in the crowd! Maybe only 90-something outside of the teen-heat BTUs, but still....A girl next to me fainted from the heat and had to be removed by medics, at least they were alert and speedy, though I'm sure she hated missing the performance; I know how she was feeling, I was pouring sweat and couldn't get shade or water or a breeze without leaving my prime spot by the stage (there were 75,000 people behind me anxious to be where I was) but soaked my bandana and used my tiny visor fan to get by. I took more pix until my camera batteries gave out just before the Allman Brothers set, but at least that was the last show of the day, and I got the live CD set the next day to have a memorable audio record if not a visual one. P.S. many JazzFest performance CDs are at www.jazzfestlive.com for some of each day's sets...and the Allman Brothers set was great! Guest spots by Susan Tedeschi and hubby Derek Trucks and Chuck Leavell...

Whew! It took 2 hours to get back to the hotel, most of which was waiting in line in a playground with fire ants crawling on our feet, but lots of which was in snarled traffic.The music was all worthwhile but I hated the heat and the endless taxi/bus line. Good weekend to be a taxi driver!  After waiting through the taxi line I ended up on the first city bus I'd seen all weekend going down Canal St. (freshly returned to service from the walkout that took us all by surprise) but the driver was bound and determined to drop us all at Harrah's Casino a mile past our hotels near the French Quarter until the riders mutinied en masse and started banging on the doors and yelling at the driver. He finally let us all out, and I'm sure was glad to be rid of us!

 I ate at the Palace Cafe tonight (Jan was reminding me of when we ate here 15 or so years back) after trying for a place called Lemongrass which turned out not to be there anymore despite the 2007 guide book's recommendation (freshly dried out) . The Palace was still good enough to be booked solid (especially on JazzFest Saturday night), so I ended up eating at the bar, crawfish pain perdu and turtle soup with sherry and crabmeat cheesecake (not a dessert, by the way). Then I came back, dried my wallet and guide book some more from yesterday and soaked my aching feet. I've probably walked 7 or 8 miles each day out of necessity, and sandals are not the best for that. I'm looking forward to Steely Dan tomorrow but dread a repeat of the heat; they don't allow you to save spots in the standing areas and there's no shade by the stages, and you can only use lawn chairs a few hundred yards back and even then no umbrellas for shade allowed even there and with all those thousands of people standing in front of the chairs you couldn't see (or hear well) anyway unless you stood up for the whole show too. So you might as well stand one way or the other! At least this way you get close in a way you'd never manage with these bands on tour, and are with the "true fans" for those musicians, so you can both learn a lot and pass on what you know about the music. And I haven't met an unfriendly person here yet; maybe it's the music?

So, Sunday arrives. More zydeco/ cajun/ blues wanderings, some arts and blacksmitihing, a lovely Cochon du Lait poboy and some strawberry lemonade later and I end up at Alan Toussaint's stage as he honors Alvin Batiste and plays his own catalogue of 50 years of hits. Last I saw of him was on tour with Elvis Costello for their "River in Reverse" New Orleans tribute; little did I know I'd see him again in the French Quarter at Brennan's the next day!

Steely Dan was next, one of the reasons I went; these guys don't tour much and when they do the tickets disappear like beignets at Cafe du Monde! Bassisit/songwriter Walter Becker is becoming a wonderful lead guitarist as well, but it's tough to compete with Jon Herrington as their long time touring partner/guitarslinger; the latest in a long line from Denny Diaz to Jeff "skunk" Baxter. Starting off with "Two Against Nature," a recent favorite of mine, they performed tasty versions of Boddhisatva, Green Earrings, Peg, Kid Charlemagne, Janie Runaway, and much more from their 35 years of music!

Harry Connick Jr. was the big festival closer (though Taj Mahal and an all-star jazz jam were going on at other tents and stages. His recent work has been in tribute to New Orleans music, and his song choices followed suit. The big band of local talent could probably never tour with him because of financial and logistical constraints, so this was a special performance!

This was the putative end of the festival, though the 50 or so live music venues still partying down til all hours of the night lessened the blow for many. I slipped out before the encores and scored a taxi in record time, allowing me to also score a coveted spot for dinner at Cuvee, Susan Spicer's new French cuisine addition to her famous Bayona Cafe. Here's a shot of the "Spaghetti and Meatball," which is actually a giant sea scallop surrounded by Boursin cheese and a crunchy crust sitting on a bed of "spaghetti" squash in a tomato confit accompanied by a Gruner Vetliner wine.

Monday things quited down as the crowds headed for flights and jobs. My pickup wasn't due until 3 so I took a French Quarter walking tour (which I had planned to be a cemetery tour, but the French Quarter guy is the one who showed up). While waiting for the guide at the Musical Legends Park on Bourbon St I met Irma Thomas, who had just performed a set as tribute to Mahalia Jackson at the fest and had a string of her own hits from the past half-century. She was there to film a standup segment for a visitor's bureau summer promotional video, and I got a great quick shot of her laughing. The statuary honors Fats Domino, Al Hirt and Pete Fountain (and there's a statue of a local burlesque queen named Chris Owens off to the side, sort of a New Orleans Cher). We had barely started the tour when we also ran into Alan Toussaint coming out of a brunch at Brennan's. He was with friends, so I didn't bother him. He was just this week in SF doing a solo version of his Fest set as part of the SF Spring Jazz Festival. And THEN we spotted an original oil of the aforementioned Mahalia Jackson, gospel great, with the infamous Blue Dog!

Above is one of the elevated fireplugs, more likely to be useful during a flood. We learned about wrought-iron balconies (hand-made, some beautifully ornate) versus cast-iron galleries (molded iron from giant casts, with columns holding them up, used later for mass-produced buildings). The prickly looking one at right on the column is colloquially called a "Romeo Repeller" to discourage unwanted suitors!  Below left is Antoine's restaurant (since 1840) and, at right, William Faulkner's residence on Pirate Alley. Below that is Tennessee Williams' apartment where he wrote Streetcar (2nd floor, arched windows) and a great music shop called Good Rockin', owned by Tom Skaggs from Manchester, who went to school with Charlie Watts and knows almost everything about pop and rock and jazz (if he can only remember it...)

And no visit to the French Quarter is complete without a view of a riverboat paddling its way on the Mississippi, Jackson Square when you turn around, the Cafe du Monde at the bottom of the stairs serving their 3 billionth beignet (I have secret photos from the little-known window where they roll them out and fry them below) and, of course, Aunt Sally's Famous Pralines (they really are good) being handmade all day just across from the Central Grocery, known as the home and still best supplier of the famous Muffuletta sandwich. I even met the Pie Man selling his home made pies on the streets around the Quarter; sweet potato or pecan, you can't go wrong! I didn't fly home hungry (or without some memorable moments of serendipity)!

Doug Currens (douglasec@aol.com), May 2007