By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
NEW ORLEANS � One of the happiest music fans at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this weekend was first-timer Blake Woods, 28, a Floridian who stumbled across young Cajun band Pine Leaf Boys on his way to hear soul/folkie Amos Lee and then couldn't pull himself away.
By Gerald Herbert, AP
Rocker Jon Bon Jovi performs at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on Saturday.
By Gerald Herbert, AP
Rocker Jon Bon Jovi performs at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on Saturday.
"It's like being in a musical washing machine," he says. "You're hit by this colorful powerful jazz shirt and then, pow, here comes this weirdly patterned zydeco sock."
Day two of the Jazz Fest, again blessed by bearable temperatures and a merciful breeze, found tens of thousands of euphoric patrons caught in the spin cycle of 12 stages simultaneously pumping a wild array of roots music across the Fair Grounds. (Opening weekend figures won't be announced until midweek; the fest continues Sunday and Thursday through May 8).
At one point, tenor saxists Christian Winther and Charlie Gabriel were blowing the roof off their woodshed set in the jazz tent as Hot 8 Brass Band was cranking up its horn-powered hip-hop on the Congo Square stage while elsewhere Wayne Toups rocked a Cajun party groove, the Midnite Disturbers kicked out a funky brass jam and Rhode Island's The Low Anthem soothed the masses with its melancholic folk.
Musicians seemed as gleeful as their audiences. Recounting a dressing-room conversation with Friday headliners Jeff Beck and Robert Plant, festival producer/director Quint Davis said they concurred that audience reaction is the vital ingredient in the festival's vibrant makeup.
"Music here is not entertainment," Davis says. "It's like food. People feel it renews them, refreshes them," he says. "The musicians can sense that. Once you feel the vibe of all this indigenous music, you're hooked."
He pauses.
"Or maybe people come for the food!"
Among Saturday's highlights:
?Since last week's announcement that guitarist Richie Sambora was headed to rehab, fans worried that Bon Jovi wouldn't keep its headline slot Saturday. But the touring giant, last on the bill in 2009 and this time handed the festival's longest set time (nearly two hours), kept its commitment, turning in a polished, high-energy show packed with hits and front man Jon Bon Jovi's showmanship and gracious banter.
Sambora's substitute was session guitarist and former Triumph member Phil "Phil X" Xenidis. Most eyes were trained on Bon Jovi, in mirrored shades, snug jeans and a black vest.
Bon Jovi devotee Shelly Walker, 35, arrived at the field unaware that Sambora would be absent.
"I don't care," she said. "The band is called Bon Jovi, not Richie and The Other Guys."
The enormous crowd sang along with You Give Love a Bad Name and loudly cheered favorites, including Wanted Dead or Alive, Bad Medicine, It's My Life and Livin' on a Prayer, which Bon Jovi dedicated to "our brother Richie," the only reference to Sambora.
?The J. Monque D Blues Band summoned Mardi Gras Indians to the stage for a crowd-pleasing Iko Iko and drew roars with a closing rendition of Muddy Waters' Got My Mojo Working. But the singer made an even bigger splash joking about the weekend's other prominent social event, the royal wedding. Joking about performing at Buckingham Palace as the royal family's official blues band, Monque D said, "It was a sight to behold. ... Right in front of God and everyone, Queen Elizabeth could not keep her hands off my drummer."
Monque D has missed playing at only two Jazz Fests in 42 years, once while touring in Europe and again while being treated for cancer.
?After performing rousing signature Iko Iko and a Mardi Gras medley, the Dixie Cups provided one of the day's most touching moments. The R&B trio sang God Bless America in honor of one member's daughter, who serves in the Navy. The audience stood, hats off, and sang along, not the kind of scene typical at, say, Lollapalooza. Joining the group on stage was New Orleans council woman Jackie Clarkson, dubbed the "fourth Dixie Cup." She represents the French Quarter and is the mother of actress Patricia Clarkson.
?Dapper in a panama hat and guayabera shirt, John Boutt� held a packed jazz tent spellbound with his angelic voice, an instrument of stunning purity. The singer, whose Down in the Trem�is the theme for HBO series Trem�, paid tribute to the city with Arlo Guthrie's City of New Orleans and Basin Street Blues. He created a communal warmth with the frisky Good Neighbor and silenced the hall with a slow, deliberate take on Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.
Ken Ehrlich, producer of the Grammy Awards, was dancing at the side of the stage with his daughter as Boutt� performed. Though steeped in music year-round in Los Angeles, he attends Jazz Fest every spring.
"It's the best music anywhere," Ehrlich says. "Every year, I see things I've never seen anywhere else. And I love piano players. If I can hear Dr. John, Allen Toussaint and Jon Cleary in one place, it's incredible.
And by the way, the soft-shell crab po-boy ain't bad."
?With Allen Toussaint watching from the wings, trumpeter Jeremy Davenport delivered a diverse set that included Baby Won't You Please Come Home and Bourbon Street Parade. The St. Louis native studied under Wynton Marsalis and his father, Ellis Marsalis. On Saturday, he turned the spotlight on his own prot�g�, an eighth-grader who sang and played trumpet on When You're Smiling.
?Talk about a mash-up. Bruce "Sunpie" Barnes and the Louisiana Sunspots, already an enticing hybrid of Afro-beat, blues and French New Orleans rhythms, invited Haiti's Ti-Coca and his Afro-Euro "Compas" troubadour band Wanga Neges to join them onstage in the blues tent for some multi-ethnic interplay of dueling accordions, sax, drums, banjo, guitar and washboard.
Sunpie, making his 20th consecutive Jazz Fest appearance, satisfied his longtime fans with spirited versions of Loup Garou, Bunny Bread and Boogerbear.
?Festival founder George Wein, who also established the Newport Folk Festival, visited stages during the weekend and beamed at the size of the turnout. He's thrilled by the festival's growth since Katrina. Staging the 2006 Jazz Fest was a big gamble, he says, but its success fueled a climate of optimism and determination.
"That was the first sign that New Orleans could draw people back," Wein, 85, says.
He wasn't discouraged by the fest's 1970 debut, with an attendance of 300, and he didn't let a category 5 hurricane rattle him.
"The decision to come back after Katrina was made by two people, Quint and myself," Wein says. "We made that decision because festivals are our life."
Natasha Bedingfield Jessica Paré Janet Jackson Lorri Bagley Katharine Towne
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