Quint Davis

Before the festival, producer Quint Davis said Jazz Fest “should be safe, clean, well-behaved and run on time…. It should be good music, the best food on earth, and it should be an environment where you can bring your children and your parents.” Evidently, no one showed the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood that story; he walked onstage and the first words out of his mouth were, “Look at all you good-lookin’ motherfuckers!” Wynton Marsalis and Erykah Badu missed it as well. He was 20 minutes late for his interview and she was tardy for her gig as well.

—Alex Ralws

 

Quintessential Fest Experience

I sadly found myself merely able to fly in, run through the building site which was once our house, barking orders and inhaling dry wall, stopping only to rehearse, perform and immediately leave for the airport and the next gig! I was frazzled, but at the Lagniappe Stage my humanity returned. Everything that makes this town so kind, so cozy—it was all there. And then there was the performance—the warmth, the wind, the joy at looking out and seeing the shiny faces of friends and smiling strangers, including those Jazz Fest staples (you know the ones), the white folks with the clothes sense of Stevie Nicks meets Chief Sitting Buffett doing interpretive dances (sans rhythm). Watching a couple engage in a senseless act of lewd gyrations to one of my “deeper” ballads made me realize that I was indeed having the quintessential Fest experience!

—Judith Owen

 

Tony Bennett

Tony Bennett looked and sounded great. His band was the definition of swinging, and we liked his insertion of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” into the set. That said, he looked almost as bewildered at being in this setting as the audience was seeing him in it.

—David Kunian

 

Sharon Jones

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings demonstrated that classic soul is alive and well. Miss Jones not only had fun onstage, but she was spotted more than once at other stages and in line at Lil’ Dizzy’s Soul Food enjoying herself.

—Jeff Hannusch

 

Tab Benoit

“We’re losing an acre of wetlands every hour, which is why there’s nothing left to prevent the Gulf of Mexico from rolling right over us,” said Tab Benoit during the Voice of the Wetlands Allstars set. “This could be the last Jazz Fest if we don’t start doing something about it today!”

—John Swenson

 

Singing Along

For me, the most moving experience of this year’s festival was seeing thousands of people in front of the Acura Stage mesmerized and galvanized by the seemingly simple act of singing along with Pete Seeger’s completely acoustic, homemade songs. Playing his old five-string banjo and 12-string guitar and radiating integrity, Pete gently demonstrated the timeless, quiet power of the traditional music that set me on my personal musical path some 45 years ago, and he moved me to tears.

—Spencer Bohren

 

 

 

Day Tripper

Most ingenious cover: Twangorama’s “Pop Goes the 40” was, yes, 40 very recognizable bits and pieces—from “Day Tripper” to the “Looney Tunes” theme—threaded together over four minutes. Joked guitarist Cranston Clements, “We would’ve put that on our CD but it would’ve cost us a hundred thousand bucks.”

—Brett Milano

 

Short Set?

Bon Jovi blew it, alas, by saying “good night” at 6:25 (!), then leaving the stage for real after a fake-encore “Dead or Alive” and a real-encore “Twist and Shout” with a full 15 minutes left on the clock. Talk about anticlimactic. You had me at “hello,” boys, but you lost me at “goodbye.”

—Cree McCree

 

Neil Young

Though he wasn’t backed by Crazy Horse and the setlist leaned heavily on the hits, Neil Young’s Sunday set was by no means a lazy trawl through dewy-eyed baby-boomer nostalgia. With no introduction or fanfare, Young hit hard right out the gate with “Love and Only Love” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” conjuring luminous feedback and yanking strangled notes out of his beloved Old Black (as iconic a guitar as B.B. King’s Lucille at this point) like his life depended on it. His white shirt was emblazoned with an abstract paint pattern, but I overheard audience chatter mistaking it for blood splatter, which it might as well have been given the full-steam intensity of Young’s performance. An epic reading of “Down by the River” featured extended Young solos worthy of the great long-form jazz explorers and consumed nearly a quarter of the set. At 63 with a voice that breaks hearts, a guitar that boils the blood, and an enviable back catalog of classic songs, Neil still sounds vital, and most rockers half his age still can’t touch him.

—Rob Cambre 

 

Toussaint Songs

Allen Toussaint can thank the English for the two highlights of his Sunday set. Both were buried treasures from his catalogue: The funny, funky “Here Come the Girls” was lost on a long-deleted Ernie K-Doe album before someone in the UK made it a TV commercial. And he revived the tough, streetwise “Hercules” (first recorded in the ’70s by Aaron Neville), possibly because Paul Weller recently did it.

—Brett Milano

 

John Scofield

John Scofield is justly admired as one of the best jazz guitarists of his generation. But when he played the Blues Tent, he was playing a set of vintage gospel hymns rearranged as New Orleans funk workouts. With keyboardist Jon Cleary and bassist George Porter, Jr. providing the second-line push-and-pull, numbers such as “Ninety Nine and a Half” and “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” sounded little different, really, from what you one heard at the Fair Grounds from the Meter Men, Galactic or Dumpstaphunk. So what gave this set the edge over the myriad of other funk sets over the two weekends? The secret was Scofield’s jazz background, which allowed him to be simultaneously more adventurous in harmony and more restrained in phrasing. More chances and fewer notes made all the difference.

—Geoffrey Himes 

 

Solomon Burke

If not for Solomon Burke’s astounding version of “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” his show would have been riveting simply for freak appeal. His size in a shiny purple suit. His pimped wheelchair. His glowering paternal authority (“No rap,” he said sternly and repeated a number of times on and off mic before his youngest daughter sang “I Will Survive”). His lack of boundaries (playing with former Blind Boy Clarence Fountain’s ponytail while Fountain sang). And his shaky grasp of history (dedicating a soul medley to the greats that had passed on including Percy Sledge, who hasn’t).

—Alex Rawls