If you’re intrigued to see a European electronic art-pop band in the Jazz Fest lineup, so is the band itself. “People are really surprised when I tell them we’re playing there,” says Thomas Mars, frontman of the French group Phoenix. “We asked to play the festival, I heard about it from my father-in-law. When I saw the lineup I thought, ‘Well, this is massive’. It just seems you have to embrace the festival, it seems like something really giant.”

[caption i...