Walking to Jazz Fest is a kindred, yet
divergent sensory experience than walking to the Edymion parade in Mid City New
Orleans during Mardi Gras. Jazz Fest is
more of a pilgrimage of inter-faiths.
The foot-travelers who park far in the distance pace for the eleven a.m.
sets are prepared for the end of the day.
These folk are not startled by the men adorned in feather head-dresses
of vibrant red and cerulean bliss dancing on the horse-track infield under a
blazing sun four hours later.
The trumpet flower shirts dazzle with
squished pinking shrimp. The walk to
Jazz Fest erupts in a check for a tow-away parking sign. Ration is stamped to the skin as sunscreen
crawls like an ooze monster. Sun
glasses, hat, stage cube of artist times, check.
People form a line before the line. No asking.
No cops, just volition to be happy.
All the straw hats are in a story
speaking to each other all day aloft with a nation of brims having the best
seats in the house. Ladies wear blue
sundresses with lazily wrapped matching-hue bandannas above the ridge for
mobile shade. The glisten of lotion
screens is in its infancy, but will cry love by noon.
The pace of the walk to Jazz Fest breaks
away from noting where one parked in the event inebriation racks one’s
compass. “Good morning” wishes to
strangers of other days are traded for “Who Dat’s,” but today nobody is a
stranger. Footmen line City Park Avenue
to pass the Museum of Art washing across Bayou St. John. The language is a wave.
The less-goers pay $25 to park at the
Shell station on the corner to a man with no I.D. The next hand $30 to pull in at Cabrini
Catholic high school for saintly girls.
If only they knew what exiting felt like later.
We are walking shed of our rolling
metal. The sidewalk has a crack. Water is lodged. Mud is unavoidable. Free bypass depends on one’s velocity. Headphones are sounding out Ben Harper and
Charlie Musselwhite to listen to the blues later today on the Gentilly Stage.
The kids of NOLA poverty and neighborly
entrepreneurs yell, “Wata, one dolla!
Wata, one dolla!” as the footsteps approach the ice chests set outposts
as the walkers are informed, “Four dolla at the gate, you can bring two
in.” The logical economics spurs more
pilgrims to pause. A garden of white
rocks shaped in a fleur de leis watches them question what country are we in.
The over-ticketers hold their surplus
allotment out as their sunk cost dissipates upon entry. I have an extra in my backpack. Maybe I will come again alone next
weekend. Water everywhere, this is New
Orleans.
If it were Mardi Gras, the routine would
be more enormous. That party is closer
to free. The dirty on sale is chucked down
from floats in February. This is spring
time. Grass is growing again in late
April. Clouds to Congo Square sing a
second line.
Through the gates, the pace spreads to
grazing herds at crawfish beignets, soft-shell crab po-boys, couchon de leit,
oyster everything, strawberry lemonade and beer drafted cold out fountains
sprung from the horse-track itself.
People at Jazz Fest are sort of like
chess pieces. The squatters carry
foldout chairs in mini armies. The
chair-goers are the rooks, veterans stationed with planned anchor points. Drinking, eating, keeping off the legs,
avoiding the sun with placed umbrellas is warfare. The conversations are sermons in themselves
as the world convenes.
The older-hippies with tattoos streaming
tanned arm lines service as the bishops.
Dancing like Springsteen or the ghost of Jerry Garcia, the religion of
the happy, let be happy is observant. I
am dancing, spotting the diagonally moving people grinning sideways to a
tie-die or 401k account depending on which slant the 1980’s took.
The NOLA couples are the knights
directing traffic, holding hands, bringing a vibrant veteran love. They are old enough to know, young enough to
still do something about it. Sneakers,
shorts, sunglasses, T-shirt, ball cap for the male. Sandals, beacon-colored sundress, fedora with
a stick me out ribbon with coordinated loose cloth bag-purse and Ray Bans for
the female. Some bring their children,
which means blankets, sunscreen in a spray wafting into other people’s red beans
and a hint of affluence given the price of modern tickets. That or somebody who knows somebody, which is
a currency in itself in New Orleans.
The pawns are the tourists. Some wear beads, dance a bit tight, but most
all one can see is the marvel glaze gleaming in some of their eyes. That this much is possible in such a city, at
such a pace is mind boggling to the rookies.
Others come once and return every year.
They know. The aged-pawns walk
with their chin up, peering out as if at an amusement park on where to head
next. Glancing down to pause at stage
guides, they march with spouse.
Others clasp cameras, scoping the
distance in lenses unaware of what Rebirth on the Congo Square stage at three
forty means. Some are fraternity
brothers, louder, scamming, flexing, posing, pointing in the air in braggadocio
about what happened in the Quarter last night.
Others, “Is that Aaron Neville on the poster?”
The Queen is the city itself, flowing
peace between all these Republicans and Democrats on different days. The turtle non-profit pace keeps the river
moving. The bombs in trash cans may
be. They may come down from Boston, but
today will shine, because she has to.
The city will protect her people, not from death, but from the virus of
fear that pens people in their homes afraid of the small faiths between faces
to faces.
That kind of fear pushed away drifts a
man to pay a pilot to drag, “Heather, will you marry me?” across the Jazz Fest
sky. This kind of love prompts a man to
comment on a band to people aside in a crowd one may never see again or before,
but in this gyration of sound there is you and me, and we are brothers and
sisters in this sea of bodies. Yeah, you
right.
We are dancing, nameless,
limitless. Where you end and I begin is
contextually altered here. For outside
this city, the lack of humid-humanity keeps us at a frozen distance.
We are left within the musicians as the
kings holding court on stage-thrones to thousands by guitar, drum, Fai Do Do
accordion, fiddle, bass guitar, rattling tambourine, piano, belting into a
microphone. Brass metal is shaped into
bellowing maw-fanfares with trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and tubas. A pigeon-stepper is an instrument in himself. This all is said for a kingdom, you, me and
peace, love, and we are all interconnected.
Storytellers have a place. The teepee-lady in authentic dress, tattooed
lawyers, real-estate agent mothers, secretary harlots, find kindred love with the
black church lady with gray hair for Jesus in a sundress chugging a Miller Lite
to soak in Creole skin. Ladies ogle
frat-boy’s muscular exposed shoulders in a juxtaposition of gender sexual
peaks. The staff t-shirt trash pickup
paid-to-be-here walk-around-crew smoke cigarettes on their breathers.
Every cloth is an advertisement for an
idea for the plain tribes of black and gold Who Dat’s, bed-sheet gut
gator-trumpets, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Pelicans with red and green wings,
crawfish claws playing piano keys, the ignominious plaid, the NRA can lick my
sweaty Jazz Fest Balls T, irises and trombones, tie-die, Foster family reunion,
and Let it Be with a bearded John Lennon.
The haze of Jazz Fest is speaking to me
over a bamboula rhythm. The pace of the
board is of amazing hour upon hour contemplated for you by the collective, if
one is willing to let go.
I wander to the days end writing in my
shaded sequestration realizing today is like my version of a retreat, to myself
in my version of church. I remember
going to the swamps to Manressa Catholic silent retreat weekend with my dad
back in 2003. I think I have finally
found a way to have that feeling again on my terms: an iPod, a kindle, a composition
notebook, a pen, and the defiant majesty of Jazz Fest with the time to observe.
This gerrymandered silence talks in my
head while the world’s decibels ring. I
end the day in the sunlight time by the Gentilly stage where I once say Mumford
and Sons followed by the Avett Brothers call out to me, that things were going
to be around. Today will be Ben Harper
and Charlie Musselwhite to play the Blues.
The angst and raw love does not disappoint. Accolades for excellence of years to be here
peeks with a blues-cover of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” I knew what song it was going to be by the
first drumbeat, everybody in this city does.
Before the show a drunk-stoned early-forties
woman stumbles into my body. She is announcing,
“Happy Jazz Fest, when is Billie Joel playing?
Where you from?” I inform her he
is on the other football field size stage and here, New Orleans, not always,
but just moved back a few weeks ago.”
She says, “I was on the coast.
Katrina is a big black bitch and I’m a big white bitch and we are still
duking it out. She broke up my marriage.”
I say a few things as to the joy of the
day and the magnetism of the piano man.
Eventually I pull out my kindle and start reading some book about
Einstein’s theory of relativity for a few minutes. Her friend corrals her and mentions her Defcon
level of diminished sobriety.
I look up at the people around me and
say, “Only at Jazz Fest could we have all shared that moment.” In front of me is a graduate student from
NYU, with some Vitilgo depigmentation on her over left rear scapula, hair
natural and shaved short with two hanging earrings in the shape of the
continent of Africa and glitter over her eyelids. To her left is a brazen Charles Bukowski
blues grinder with a Cannon digital camera on a tall pole to get shots of the
man he came to see play harmonica. He
tells me about what the levees did to his house down in Gentilly.
Behind me is a family crew of two
mothers and fathers and a little girl of eight who spilled her snowball on my
shoe later in the show. She was
embarrassed and forlorn for the drizzled-sugar ice. She jumped into her mother’s arms. At the prompt of their apologies, I turned
and said I have a little girl her name is ****, she’s eight. “How old are you? What is your name?” She says, “Bethany, eight.” I said, “It’s ok,” Then to her parents, “I
just don’t want her to feel bad.”
To my right I stood next to a man in a
wheelchair named Aurio from Barcelona.
He has come every year for the last five. He says the wheelchair watchers no longer get
to go to the front. The corporate
sponsors complain, but there he was inches away behind the first barricade for
the general public cheering on Ben Harper playing the hell out of a steel lap
guitar as Charlie brought it home on the harmonica.
Beautiful day, my it was such a
beautiful day.
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