So I went to the Jazz Fest of 1996. I traveled with my wife and stayed in the city for 10 nights, and night after night, day after day, we went from one concert to another, and oh what a stay it was! We should have been very exhausted, but our craving for more music and shows got the better of us and we were very fine and active during the stay. For our strength, we ate a lot of delicious local food. The raw oysters, po-boy sandwiches, gumbos and jambalayas, damn these N'awlins food taste good! We ended up putting on some pounds by the time we returned back to Japan. Sigh...
Needless to say, Jazz Fest is an enormous event. Each person at the Fest should have his or her own way of enjoying it. I see lots of people who weren't after any specific artists at all, but just coming to the Fairgrounds (racetrack where the Fest is being held) to enjoy the atmosphere. But there were 10 stages at the Fest where they had great music playing all through the day. We couldn't possibly stay calm under these circumstances. So there we were, with a copy of the Jazz Fest schedule paper ripped from the OffBeat Magazine in our hands, going from stages to stages every day.
Regardless of our efforts like this, we missed a lot of artists we wanted to see as more than one of those artists were playing at the same time. Even if we were lucky to see some of them, many of them were only brief peeks. This Fest is too gorgeous that it puts us in this kind of trouble situation! We saw neither Dr. John nor Allen Toussaint though we traveled all the way to the Crescent City, but that wasn't because we didn't want to, but we had no other choices. For example, artists who played at the same time as Dr. John did (who appeared on May 3), were BeauSoleil, Joe Louis Walker, and Cassandra Wilson, just to name a few. So our choices were Cassandra and BeauSoleil. We ahd seen Dr. John in Japan many times, and also saw Joe Louis a few months back in Japan, so we skipped them. Sorry! No offence, really.
The panicking situations like that remained the same at night as well. Many of the local clubs feature some great live performances during the Jazz Fest season. After returning from the daytime event, we were alway looking for what to see at night. So many things to see, so hard to choose! So we saw something every night, and our bedtime was usually around three or four in the morning. That was quite natural because those shows usually don't start before 10, and often go on till around three in the morning. This city at this season just won't let us sleep.
The day that we arrived was the same situation. We got to the hotel around seven in the evening, and we went to dine right after we dropped our suitcases. And ignoring the jetlag that we had, we called a cab to go to the U.N.O. Lakefront Arena. We went there to see the joint concert of John Mooney, Fabulous Thunderbirds, and The Allman Brothers Band. Though we were a little too late to catch John Mooney, (but we saw him at the Fairgrounds) the Allmans did a full powerful set which started after midnight. Their performance was over 2.5 hours long and it ended around three. That was our first day. Oh my...
So it is hard just to name all the artists and bands that we saw, if we are to name everything including the brief peeks at the Fest. So what I am going to do here will be to concentrate on the highlights for the each day in New Orleans. So now, here we go!
Note: This report is my translation of my report originally written in Japanese. Sorry if you feel that my translation is poor. I've done my best anyway. I haven't done all the translation yet. I'll upload the translated materials as soon as they're finished. Thanks you for your patience. Oh, we will be at the Jazz Fest this year as well. See you there!
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