For 50 years, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has celebrated the music and culture of one of the great American melting pots.
Cultural movers and shakers in New Orleans received one of the most fortuitous rejections ever when they floated a business proposal half a century ago to the man behind the celebrated Newport jazz and folk music festivals, George Wein.
“We had no jazz festival,” recalled Quint Davis, producer of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival since it began in 1970, “and so people asked George to come down and do a festival just like Newport.
“He refused,” Davis said. Wein also offered up a warning to those cultural mavens: “He said, ‘If you get somebody else to do that, you’ll have a festival that’s just like Newport. But New Orleans has something that no one else in the world can ever claim and that’s the birthright of jazz.’ So he had this idea for the Jazz & Heritage Festival.”
With that, Wein asked Davis and Allison Miner, another passionate young music fan, to help get the project off the ground. The goal: a gathering that would celebrate the music, as well as the food and cultural traditions, of the region widely considered to be the fertile crescent of several strains of American music. Jazz was at the top but was by no means the only element on that list, which included Cajun and zydeco, folk, blues, country, rock and gospel music.
At the inaugural edition of the festival, attendance was modest, to say the least: 350 people turned out, about half the number of musicians who performed. “Our first year, there was no stage,” said Davis. “There was no PA system. We had an upright piano in the grass.”
Fifty years later, the event locals refer to simply as “Jazz Fest” is revered by the community at large and among music aficionados of various stripe. It’s the granddaddy of destination music festivals, and nearly unique in being inextricably linked to the culture and community in which it takes place. The 50th anniversary edition will get underway Thursday, expanded this year from the usual seven days over two weekends to eight days.
Whereas Southern California’s taste-making Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival hosted 165 acts across eight stages this year, Jazz Fest has lined up a staggering 688 acts that will populate a dozen performance spaces. Fully 600 of those, Davis said, are “local” acts from Louisiana, even though many are known around the world. The massive task of booking and organizing those acts is handled by Davis and his staff of about half a dozen.
At the time Wein drafted him, Davis was a college student with an abiding passion for music and many friends in the New Orleans music community. But neither he nor Miner, who died in 1995 at age 46, had much business expertise or experience organizing a festival.
“My career is a testament to what you can do if you don’t know any better,” Davis, 71, said over breakfast earlier this year during his annual visit to Los Angeles to attend the Grammy Awards.
