It’s been raining for a week. Take a deep breath. Hold. Release slowly.

Just over a week left for Jazz Fest. It’s imminent…

The Jazz Fest staff just moved out to the Fairgrounds. Hopefully, the weather gods will cooperate. The poor French Quarter Fest suffered through a weekend of rain, and although it was a great French Quarter Festival, attendance was way down. That’s the problem with outdoor festivals: you’re at the mercy of the elements. It’s rained every day since last week, and as I write this, I hear thunder heralding another very wet afternoon and evening. In fact, we have wet warm weather all the way through this weekend. Blah!

According to weather.com, this weekend is a washout, and the first weekend of Jazz Fest has a 40 to 60 percent chance of rain every day. Guess we’d better be getting those shrimp boots and ponchos ready.

The Jazz Fest Bible of OffBeat will hit the street early next week, in time to be distributed at all the hotels and free locations, as usual. Our usual OffBeat staff will be HQ’ed at the Seahorse Saloon on Gentilly and Fortin Boulevards, handing out the new issue, which this year focuses exclusively on the Jazz Fest; our regular May issue comes out on May 6, in time for Bayou Boogaloo.

OffBeat has been in existence since summer of 1988, and we have years and years of the rich history of New Orleans music that we would love to share with our readers, some of which has still not been digitized and so is only available in our print archives.  If anyone in our reading audience has suggestions or can help us put our archives in digital format, please let me know. It’s a project that’s been in our minds for many years, and we haven’t had the resources to digitize everything.

With our new website, it would be a great accessible resource for anyone who’s interested in the local music scene. We’ve come up with a few ideas on how we can make content accessible—and yet still be able to stay in business. Take our survey and let us know what yu, the music-consuming public thinks about the value of our online content.