I am back from the first day of JazzFest. The real news is that the festival happened this year at all.  Keith Spera wrote a great article about how, post-Katrina, everything came together for this year's festival:

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1146206829171040.xml

While in previous years there were conflicted feelings about taking on marque event sponsors (commercializes the event too much, takes away from home-grown feel of the fest) the devastation wrought by Katrina forced everyone involved with JazzFest to rethink how this festival would be supported.  For 2006, Shell is the major underwriter and other corporations have come on board to make JazzFest more than a truncated attempt at what once was. 

Based on my first day at the fairgrounds, I must say that everyone involved has done an absolutely amazing job. While the festival as a whole has lost one day, two stages and about 100 performances it feels almost whole.

Some of my favorite performances include Cowboy Mouth, J. Monque’D Blues Band, and in the Children’s Tent- Grey Hawk.

You can also listen to my interview with Brian Pulver, co-founder of FestAid, a volunteer organization working to get JazzFest goers to participate in post-Katrina reconstruction. Find it in the KadmusArts blog

For those of you who like to listen to podcasts on iTunes, you can subscribe to the KadmusArts podcasts by clicking on the link below:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=152019875&s=143441

Or, if you'd like to subscribe to the podcast RSS feed directly, you can find it at:

http://kadmusarts.com/blog/?cat=5&feed=rss2

If neither of these options means anything to you, don't worry - as Ana Maria said, you can listen to the podcast directly on the blog:

http://kadmusarts.com/blog/

However you choose to do it, I strongly recommend listening to the interview - the intersection of festival culture with the rebuilding of New Orleans is truly inspiring.

I’m sitting on the balcony of my hotel room in New Orleans-  utterly spent after three days at Jazz Fest.  For a festival of this magnitude (even though the number of performances is reduced) you need a strategy or at least some kind of approach.  There are ten stages, and each stage hosts between four and five acts each day. 

You can stake your land claim at a stage and commit to that roster of artists for the day. You can take the all-you-can-eat buffet approach and wander around the different stages, or you can try a hybrid which involves finding a location and leaving some stuff there in the hopes that nobody will move it or take it while you wander around.

I took the buffet approach and was happy to graze the different musical offerings. The soundtrack to my life for today started with Papa Grows Funk http://papagrowsfunk.com/, followed by a cajun storyteller- Rose Anne St. Romain. I then turned to Don Vappie and the Creole Jazz Serenaders http://www.vappielle.com/CreoleJazzSerenaders.html who had the most wonderful second-lining I’ve seen in a while.I was able to see one of my favorite accordion players - Rosie Ledet http://rosieledet.com/ and the Zydeco Playboys.The day ended with an itty bitty view from far away of Bruce Springsteen with the Seeger Sessions Band. 

I think the whole experience is summed up best by Tom Piazza, author of Why New Orleans Matters, in an interview in the latest edition of OffBeat Magazine: http://offbeat.com/artman/publish/article_1472.shtml

“It is a kind of distillation of the mythology of the city. .. The important thing about Jazz Fest and the secret of its alchemy, is that the music doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it is carefully set into its cultural context at the fairgrounds and, by extension in the city�