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http://city-made.com/?p=392 From Arcadian Books I headed for Jazzfest, well-armed with sunblock and big cowboy hat. Jazzfest is the last of the great New Orleans festivals, and it ushers in the hot weather. I’ve never been in New Orleans in the summer, but a friend from the city, who is not given to exaggeration, said simply of it, “Oh John, it’s horrible. It’s really horrible.” Jazzfest is a kind of prophecy of it: the festival is held at a wide-open racetrack, where there is no shade, and sometimes you just marvel at the heat: a forerunner of the breathless, windless, swampy inferno New Orleans becomes as the temperature slowly climbs. Everyone feels it: the crowd labors with a kind of reptile slowness, and the performers, who are rather obliged by their work to expend energy, just sweat and sweat. Of course it is sensual in its own way, though it is amazing, for us New Yorkers, to see all one’s motivation gone, and so quickly.  Even in the earliest morning, by late April in New Orleans you wake up sweating in the soft air, and you find yourself unwilling to do anything at all: you just hope that if you lay in bed long enough it will get cooler somehow. If the sun comes in your bedroom window you fry in its hot light. The city’s activity starts to move to the shade, or wait for night. Jazzfest offers neither, and the only viable alternative is airy clothing (my oh my the ladies do not wear very much), very large hats, and a great deal to drink.

where is the best place to buy isotretinoin online You can spend a great deal of time wandering from place to place at Jazzfest, but I was something of a New Orleans veteran and knew to hit a few things and make sure they were good ones. I stopped in the Gospel tent – but only briefly, you can get Gospel music that good in most of the black churches of the South, and there you get it in its proper context; I passed by the Blues tent, which has gotten too popular – can’t ever see anything in there; and headed to see Kermit Ruffins. Ruffins is a New Orleans standard: not a genius, but journeyman performer who represents true New Orleans brass, which is a popular music and does not need to take itself too seriously. My own conceptions of “Jazz” had, before New Orleans, been corrupted a bit by its more dour and artful and New Yorky practitioners like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, who are about as fun as Tolstoy at a Superbowl party. In New Orleans five tuba players can get up and dance around with umbrellas on their heads and feather boas on and call it “Jazz.” Kermit Ruffins was a bit more artful than that, but definitely in that school. You knew that if his band showed up to your party it’d be to make sure everyone had a good time. For years Ruffins has done regular weekly shows at chosen venues in the city, while also doing irregular shows that involve him cooking barbecue while performing onstage.

And he was great at Jazzfest as usual, alive and vibrant and funny, and lighthearted in the true New Orleans tradition (Ruffins is a native). When I see this New Orleans culture, I think of the words of Anthony Wells, a New Orleanian interviewed by Daniel Baum after Hurricane Katrina. Wells’s father was from New Orleans, and they moved back from the West when Wells was a child:

Then one day I woke up from a nap in the backseat and everything was green. I mean like green. Water everywhere. It looked like we were driving over water that had this thin skin of grass on top, like if you scraped up a spoonful of grass you’d find water underneath. And that spooky Spanish moss shit hanging from the trees – you ever see that? Like you’re in a horror movie. Green. And my dad’s music came on the radio. You should have seen my parents, man. Like they got their groove back. ‘Here we are. We’re in New Orleans,’ my dad says, and I’m seeing it, this place I been dreaming about. It’s all jam-packety, pretty old houses lined up one beside the other, each one a different color, with curlicues and flowers, and man, streets just full of people. White people, black people, mixed-race people, all jumbled up together and walking. Music right on the sidewalk and everything, and I don’t mean like one nigger with a guitar, but a whole band and drum set and everything, like the whole city is a big party. I’m looking out the window, eyes big as saucers – eight years old – and I’m thinking, this is a whole different way to be a Negro; I’m thinking, this is where Daddy gets his groove.

We pull up to a light, and a cop car pulls right next to us. The cops are white, of course, but not like the storm troopers they got out in California; they’re kind of fat and rumpled up, like a couple of plumbers or something, you know what I’m saying? They kind of nod and smile, and Daddy smiles back. Smiling at a couple of white cops!

Ruffins’ music has that native vibe; and it was nicely brought into relief by a performer he brought up with him, Nayo Jones, from a Chicago family that had grown up in Phoenix: she had a tough, aggressive stage persona, and sang the Etta James standard “At Last,” and sang it beautifully: soulfully, physically, and powerfully. Even a song about fulfillment became, in her rendition, about longing, about something that is awaited forever and never really comes – all you can do is make art about its coming. Needless to say – I knew the feeling. (I’m posting here a video of Ruffins’ music with some footage from Treme, though the footage actually kind of Coltrane-izes and New Yorkifies the Second Line tradition: it shows how neat it is, but it’s treated as an aesthetic object rather than a living ritual; but it gets better as it goes on.)

From Ruffins’ performance I headed for the Gentilly stage to put myself in good positon to see Robert Plant as the final act of the evening. As a warmup I was treated to a show by the Mavericks. The Mavericks were a kind of hybrid zydeco-country-Tex-Mex band with Roy Orbison flavor, also good-timing by nature, led by a big fat blackbeard in a cowboy hat and black shirt printed with blazing red roses. I particularly liked a dance-hall tune they did which I thought promised to stay in the relationship “as long as there’s love and delight,” which I thought was a pretty good definition of light-hearted love, though a later check on the lyrics told me it was “as long as there’s lovin’ tonight.” A bit crasser but I suppose that’s all right too. But of course I really was waiting for the big show, the legend that is Robert Plant. I thought it would be an interesting context for him – the festival celebrated all the American source-springs that had flown into British Rock and Roll, and it would be a great opportunity for the old rocker to explore those roots a bit. I was curious. And I would be real close too. The main stage was taken up by the band Phish, who had drawn most of the young folk, and I had been there for the warm-up act too, and by now was right by the stage.