New Orleans Jazz Fest: Fifty Fests and Countin'

Inside the lasting success of New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

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The first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival drew only a few hundred people. Tickets for the event, staged in 1970 in Beauregard Square, were $3 at the gate, $2.50 in advance.  

An Associated Press story described the original Jazz Fest attendees as “a colorful mixture of hippie types and tourists with loud shirts.” United Press International led its festival story with New Orleans musician Snooks Eaglin. “We’re gonna get deep down in the blues,” the blind singer and virtuoso guitarist told an audience gathered under oak trees in the square. “Deep down. We want you to feel it. We want you to dig it.”  

Forty-eight years later, the 2018 Jazz Fest drew an audience of 450,000 to the Fair Grounds Race Course, the festival’s site since 1972. In the years since Jazz Fest began, it’s become New Orleans’ most signature event after Mardi Gras.  

The 50th annual Jazz Fest, presented by Shell on April 25–28 and May 2–5, expands the sprawling springtime celebration from seven to eight days. The Rolling Stones will perform a special sold-out, separate-ticket concert. [Editor's note: This is no longer true. The Stones canceled their Jazz Fest appearance due to a medical emergency.] This year’s other stars include Katy Perry, the Dave Matthews Band, Pitbull, John Prine, classic rock acts John Fogerty and Santana, and classic soul singers Diana Ross, Al Green, and Gladys Knight. As always, hundreds of Louisiana musicians will perform the state’s indigenous jazz, blues, rhythm-and-blues, gospel, funk, Cajun, and zydeco music.  

The inaugural Jazz Fest lost nearly $40,000. The event lost less money in 1971. In 1972, Jazz Fest moved from Beauregard Square (now Congo Square) to the Fair Grounds Race Course. Attendance zoomed to 50,000. By the late 1980s, 300,000 patrons were attending the seven-day, two-weekend festival. In 2001, Jazz Fest drew a record-breaking 650,000, still its highest attendance.  

Jazz Fest founder George Wein, the now 93-year-old impresario and jazz pianist from Boston, set the festival’s template. He’d previously created the Newport Jazz Festival and Newport Folk Festival. “I wanted to use New Orleans and Louisiana artists exclusively, to showcase this wealth of local culture,” Wein wrote in his 2003 autobiography. “And tickets had to be inexpensive, so people from every economic level of New Orleans life could attend.”  

Wein’s original Jazz Fest board of advisors included Preservation Hall founder and musician Allan Jaffe and Richard Allen, curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. Wein hired two young music fans who worked at the jazz archive, Quint Davis and Allison Miner, to scout local talent.   

“Quint and I went to clubs, bars and churches, meeting people and telling them about the festival,” the late Miner told writer Ben Sandmel in 1991. “Neither of us had a car or a phone. We did it all by riding buses and using the pay phones at Allgood’s Restaurant.” 

Wein predicted success. “New Orleans, in the long run, should become bigger than Newport in jazz festivals,” he announced. “Newport was manufactured, but New Orleans is the real thing.” 

“New Orleans, in the long run, should become bigger than Newport in jazz festivals,” he announced. “Newport was manufactured, but New Orleans is the real thing.” 

The ambitious first festival featured gospel star and New Orleans native Mahalia Jackson, jazz great Duke Ellington, New Orleans’ best-selling recording artist Fats Domino, nationally-recognized local jazz stars Pete Fountain and Al Hirt, zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier, and funk band and future Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient The Meters. Louisiana artists appeared on four outdoor stages in Beauregard Square; national stars performed in the adjacent Municipal Auditorium; brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians paraded through the square.  

Country-blues singer-guitarist Little Freddie King, 78, played the first Jazz Fest and all but one of the festivals since. The 1970 Jazz Fest, King recalled, “was small, but plenty of fun. They had a whole bunch of—I call them umbrella tents—little small tents, gazebos. The money wasn’t too good, but I was happy to be there.” 

Meters bassist George Porter Jr. also saw the festival as a great opportunity for local musicians and local audiences. “It was what the local players needed,” he said. “And the Downtown citizens, who didn’t normally get to see Uptown bands, could see the Uptown bands, and the Uptown citizens could see Downtown bands.”  

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During the 1970 festival, Quint Davis, the fledgling talent scout who became Jazz Fest’s decades-long producer-director, witnessed a historic impromptu performance. Before Mahalia Jackson’s Friday night concert at the Municipal Auditorium, she strolled through Beauregard Square and, coming upon the Eureka Brass Band, spontaneously sang “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” with the parading musicians. “A New Orleans gospel singer making a bridge between gospel music and traditional New Orleans jazz,” noted Davis. “To me, that was the eternal spark of what the whole festival was forever going to be about.” 

Although there was room for inspired spontaneity at the early Jazz Fests, Wein’s scheduling discipline was a culture shock for many musicians, said Ellis Marsalis, another first festival performer. Wein’s assistant, Bob Jones, “introduced us to ‘New York’ time,” said the pianist. “That reality was the beginning of a professional experience for many local musicians.”  

Wein invited Tommy Sancton, a young traditional jazz clarinetist he’d befriended in New Orleans, to perform at the 1971 Jazz Fest. At the Jung Hotel, following his performance with the Black Eagle Jazz Band, Sancton recalled, “this very distinguished, tall, elderly Creole gentlemen introduced himself to us and complimented our band. It was Kid Ory. We were completely in awe.” The persuasive Wein had coaxed Ory, the 84-year-old jazz pioneer who’d worked with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, out of retirement to play the festival’s salute to Armstrong.   

[Read more: John McCusker's New Orleans jazz tour led him to write a biography on music pioneer Kid Ory.]

Jazz Fest in 1971 “was the kind of thing that could only happen in New Orleans,” said Sancton. “That mix of musicians and people, the different kinds of music, it really was a joyous event.”  

The festival didn’t stay small long. “Of course,” said Sancton, “it really took off when it moved to the Fair Grounds.”  

Tague Richardson, the festival’s longtime site director, first worked there as a carpenter in 1974. The Fair Grounds’ site budget then was $900. “It was bare bones in a field,” remembered Richardson. “The pieces and parts then were not even a teaspoon of what we have there now.”  

Over the years, Richardson’s responsibilities grew to include the installation of tents, trailers, art, electrical and plumbing hookups, groundskeeping, and construction of stages and food booths. His biggest challenges include rain and wind, both of which can shut the outdoor event down. Remarkably, the festival has rarely closed due to inclement weather.    

Richardson never anticipated Jazz Fest would become the massive event it is. “We started off with two boxes of stuff that we used at the festival,” he said. “Now we’ve got 150 boxes of stuff. We have forty-five or fifty tractor-trailer loads of inventory for our installation at the Fair Grounds and a 30,000-square-foot warehouse that we keep in.”  

The festival’s explosive growth and inclusion of mainstream stars drew criticism from many musicians and culture guardians, including Allison Miner. “What was most fun was when the performers stayed at our houses, before we had a budget for hotels,” she told Sandmel. “I remember Robert Pete Williams, the great Louisiana blues guitarist, sitting in my living room regaling us for hours with fabulous ghost stories. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.” 

Following Miner’s death in 1995, the festival renamed its interview-focused Music Heritage Stage, which she founded, the Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage in her honor.  

Wein expressed mixed feelings about the festival’s mainstream acts, too, but ultimately endorsed them. “Remember, I have to draw crowds,” he told journalist Ashley Kahn. “So, I try to find a certain sense of quality in the people that I use. More than that, I try to find artists who have respect for what we do.” Davis also believes the festival can have it both ways. “I definitely feel that we still make the artistic point that we set out to make,” he said.  

Local musician James Rivers, an eclectic singer and multi-instrumentalist who’s played every Jazz Fest, never complains about stars at Jazz Fest. “The festival is already big, but they make it even bigger,” he said.   

Survive and thrive though it has, Jazz Fest has confronted challenges, none more intimidating than the city-wide destruction inflicted in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina and the accompanying flood that covered 80 percent of New Orleans. By April 2006, much of the city was still in ruins. There might well have been no Jazz Fest that year. And once the festival was belatedly booked, Davis wondered if even 10,000 to 15,000 people would attend. Despite the uncertainty, Davis, Richardson and the rest of the Jazz Fest team built the festival. On opening day, the people came, streaming through the racetrack gates from all directions. During an on-site press conference the following day, Davis called the turnout a miracle. “Our city is pretty much whole here, even though the city outside of here is not really there,” he said.  

That first post-Katrina Jazz Fest featured Bruce Springsteen’s festival debut. Specifically for the occasion, Springsteen and his Seeger Sessions Band transformed “When the Saints Go Marching In” into a hymn for New Orleans. “It was our thanks and our prayer for the city that birthed blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and so much of American culture,” he wrote in his 2016 autobiography.  

With its 50th anniversary to be held in 2019, Jazz Fest’s place in the city’s cultural life seems assured for decades to come. As Davis said during that 2006 press conference: “It’s a connection to the spirit and soul of New Orleans.”  

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