It’s Friday morning, and for the first time this fest, there are closers I want to see. With Stevie Wonder, Terence Blanchard with the LPO, the tribute to Clifton Chenier and Ann Savoy’s Sleepless Knights, I expect I’ll keep moving for most of the last hour.

As for Thursday, my food luck changed. The shrimp macque choux with sausage could only have been better with slightly firmer shrimp, but the spice of the sausage and the pepper was beautifully balanced by the sweetness of the corn. Then I hit the fried chicken, and though I prefer a crispier skin, the meat was moist and virtually greaseless.

At John Mooney’s interview in the Music Heritage/Lagniappe Stage, he said he wasn’t playing summer festivals in Europe because American musicians caused their insurance costs to go up. Does anyone out there know if that’s true?

I tried local hip-hop artists Codac and Dizzy. Conceptually, I liked the way Codac worked the photo/image theme into his flow, but kids weren’t very interested in them and after 10 minutes, neither was I.

Kerry Grombacher looks more like the guy you’d trust your taxes or insurance to than a guy who makes western music, but with just a fiddle, an acoustic guitar and an upright bass, he sang beautiful songs that evoke a land defined by big skies and miles between people.

Folk-blues artists the Carolina Chocolate Drops reminded me of one thing Jazz Fest usually misses – sexiness. The trio was young, beautiful and stylish in their rural work clothes, and their passion for their performance was adorable. After a jug band track from the soundtrack for the Great Debaters, they finished with a song by Blu Cantrell sung by vocalist Rhiannon Giddens while Justin Robinson played human beatbox to give the piece a subtle hip-hop counterpoint to Dom Flemmons’ banjo. When the set was over, Giddens pulled out a camera and took pictures of their standing ovation.

On The Scene of the Crime, Bettye LaVette recorded “Before the Money Came (The Ballad of Bettye LaVette).” [Whoops. That’s “Battle,” but since it’s a ‘story of her life’ song, the rest of this note doesn’t change. AR 5/5/08] Having a song about your life doesn’t mean you need to perform music from throughout your career, particularly when most of that career was spent in obscurity. The show’s most powerful moments came from the two albums that introduced her to the world – I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise and Scene, but the majority of the set was a slow slog through a life as a journeyperson. Her voice and stage manner made every thought and emotion feel like a matter of life and death, but I wish she’d have employed that passion in service of stronger songs.