Doing My Fest: Part One
Resuscitating a tradition with the next generation
May 2025 — Looking Back
Until this spring, 19 years had passed since the last time I entered the Fair Grounds gates to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, commonly called JazzFest. The last time was in 2006. It was improbable that JazzFest even took place that year, but the organizers managed to make the show go on.
By that time, a group that included me, my husband, high school friends of mine and their friends from work, had been going to JazzFest together for years. Every year it took place over long weekends at the end of April and the beginning of May, a ritual of spring that helped mark time. March was a month of anticipation, April grew louder with our communication chains and buzzing excitement with just a few weeks to go, then JazzFest — yay! We kept celebrating as the beginning of May meant one more weekend of JazzFest, followed by the rest of May, June… then we’d start talking about plans for JazzFest the following year.
The festival worked a special alchemy that strengthened the connections between us. It mixed our respective personalities with music, beer and booze, great food, sunshine if we were lucky, and the silly things that happen when people overindulge. Memories layered on memories. I found out I was pregnant with my daughter at one of our early JazzFest outings. Every year our crew marveled at the kindness in the people we encountered, how concertgoers representing such a spread of generations turned out to enjoy the different genres of music, art, cultural demonstrations and more that make the event the marvel it is. The bargain of abundant, quality live music, literally dozens and dozens of performers, with many legendary names among them, at $40 a day, less than the price of a single headliner’s concert ticket at most big venues (not to mention other festivals), always dumbfounded us.
We developed traditions and preferences around the delicious food offerings, everyone plotting which favorites to eat when. One friend always insisted upon crawfish bread, a slightly spicy, saucy, cheesy stuffed bread for breakfast on Day One, followed by Crawfish Monica, a bowl of spiral pasta covered with creamy, garlicky, luxurious Creole seafood sauce for lunch. Forget Starbucks — the giant refreshing frozen café au laits always make me say, “What dairy allergy?” and iced herbal teas, available either sweetened or unsweetened, in flavors like Mandarin Honey and Rosemint were must-haves when the heat came bearing down and we had to slow down our alcohol intake.
JazzFest in 2006 happened eight months after Hurricane Katrina. Our innocent joyfulness as festival goers shifted as we became witness to a tragedy. That tragedy is why we insisted upon going, so that we could support the people of New Orleans who had generated so many positive experiences for us. We imagined some people would stay away in the wake of devastation. If there was ever a time to support the city’s economy, this felt like the least we could do. It was a time for people to come together, to acknowledge and work through the pain.
A feeling that defied words hung in the atmosphere: bitterness and fear, uncertainty, the deep cut of betrayal and loss. It wore a heavy veil of thousands of souls. Security guards walked around hotel lobbies with firearms bared at their hips ostensibly for safety, but they flashed like badges of fear and warning and doing whatever was necessary to hang on to what little there was left to lose. Washed out vehicles piled up beneath underpasses throughout the city. Houses sat abandoned, boarded up, emblazoned with coded messages marked by rescue workers with spray paint. This many people lived here, this many people rescued, this number dead. This number of pets found, this number of pets still on site, left behind.
Even at JazzFest, immersed in a dancing crowd surrounded with happy beats of music, you couldn’t escape it. Impatience rustled through the crowds. People stepping on each other, in each others’ space, pushing through, forcing past, rather than walking respectfully around the places people set up where they could sit, stand, nap, chill, dance and simply listen as mood, melodies, or spirits moved them to. The easy-breezy laissez les bon temps rouler mood we knew of New Orleans was faded, wrung out. Katrina changed everything. The implicit sense of trust the city had shown us in the past had been breached when the water broke through the levees in the storm.
That last time in New Orleans I had a preschooler who spent a good part of JazzFest dancing on her father’s shoulders, and another child in my belly. That second child sparked the impetus to revive our JazzFest tradition this year. In the last year and a half he has leaned into music in a determined way, practicing piano and teaching himself guitar and bass guitar and working on his vocals to gain control of a voice he previously didn’t know he had. Nightly, he hones his skills in our basement and the sound travels upwards where we can hear it in our bedroom, two floors above. He is always excited to connect his phone to the car radio to share tracks he’s been listening to. He took a friend to see Santana play last summer and came home dazzled by the guitarist’s show and amused by being one of the youngest people in the audience.
That child is leaving home soon. The clock is ticking and if there was a moment to be seized to squeeze in a formative memory before he goes away, thousands of miles to school, this was it. When I asked him if he’d like to go to JazzFest, he didn’t hesitate. Nor did my husband. Even though he mostly finds rock concerts disconcertingly loud, my youngest son said he’d go too. I promised to bring earplugs for him, just in case.
Stay tuned for Part Two, coming soon!
You can purchase the “Fest Day Ever” shirt pictured above and other items celebrating Jazz Fest (and Mardi Gras and other New Orleans favorites) by visiting local biz Fleurtygirl.com. I do not earn commissions for the referral, just paying it forward for the good times we’ve had.