Jazz Festival Celebrates 50 Years with 50 Tracks

courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

Three weeks ago, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings celebrated the 50th anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival by releasing a five-CD box set entitled Jazz Fest: The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The album consists of 50 tracks of live performances. These do not constitute a year-by-year account of Festival offerings. Instead, the intention seems to have been to provide a fair account of the wide diversity of genres presented over the course of those fifty years; and the earliest recordings date back only as far as 1974.

Going for such breadth was an ambitious undertaking. I suppose I should begin by confessing that my appreciation of it came relatively late in my life, when my wife and I religiously watched the episodes of David Simon’s Treme series on HBO. Needless to say, given that the focus was on narrative, the episodes that presented the different aspects of music-making in New Orleans were far from comprehensive. However, it got me thinking more about many performers whose names I recognized but whose music had not drawn much, if any, of my attention.

Indeed, in at least one case, my initial knowledge of one of the performing groups had nothing to do with New Orleans. I first encountered the Dirty Dozen Brass Band because they performed the music that David Byrne composed for the “Knee Plays” that Robert Wilson had created for his epic production the CIVIL warS. Fortunately, once I was aware of the group, I was able to attend a concert they gave in Royce Hall at the University of California at Los Angeles; and that gave me a better take on their contribution to the musical traditions of New Orleans.

This all amounts to my polite way of saying that, taken in its five-CD entirety, the whole of this collection served up a journey of discovery that, for me at least, was as adventurous as it was diverse. Where there were familiar compositions, such as the “Royal Garden Blues,” they involved performers I not previously associated with the music (the Kermit Ruffins Big Band). Indeed, I think that the only track that involved a combination of music and performer that I had previously encountered was Terence Blanchard’s take on “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Normally, I prefer “going deep” to the breadth of a larger “sampler” collection. However, this Jazz Fest album reminded me that I have a lot to learn. As I used to do with music dating back to the origins of notation, I can use this release to establish my initial “map of the territory.” I can then use that map to plan my visits to other more focused releases.