Lost Bayou Ramblers - Friday, May 2

Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue - Sunday, May 4

Royal Southern Brotherhood - Saturday, April 26

Edith Grove wrote on Mar 12^th, 2014 at 11:11am:



can you send this po yankee a care package?

Oyster Rockefeller Bisque,
Cajun Chicken & Tasso w/ Creole Rice


Fried Soft-Shell Crab Po-Boy,
Fried Catfish Filet Po-Boy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpDKp2DUJCs

Walter "Wolfman" Washington & the Roadmasters - Friday, May 2

Ellis Marsalis - Saturday, May 3

This will be quite an extravaganza!

Bonerama - Sunday, April 27

Pete Fountain has retired from performing, will miss the 2014 New Orleans Jazz Fest



Pete Fountain, who said on Thursday, April 17, 2014, that he is retiring from live performing, made his last appearance at the New Orleans Jazz Fest in 2013. He performed, along with his granddaughter, before a packed house in the in the People Health Economy Hall on Sunday, May 5, 2013. (Photo by David Grunfeld, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune)


By Keith Spera, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
April 17, 2014


The Pete Fountain fans who filled the Economy Hall Tent at the 2013 New Orleans Jazz Fest unknowingly bore witness to bittersweet history: The farewell performance by one of the greats of New Orleans music in general, and traditional jazz clarinet specifically.

"Last year was his last public performance," Benny Harrell, Fountain's son-in-law and longtime manager, said Thursday (April 17). "He's fully retired now."

In interviews over the years, Fountain maintained that he would keep "tootin'" as long as he and his audience were satisfied with the sound that resulted. His clarinet tone, simultaneously sweet and swinging, illuminated such signature songs as "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "Basin Street Blues."

But after last year's Jazz Fest, he concluded that the time had come to hang up his horn. His playing was no longer "to the level of his expectations," Harrell said. "It was the right time" to retire.

Still, declining an invitation to the upcoming, 2014 Jazz Fest was emotional, Harrell said, for many reasons.

Fountain appeared at the 1969 event that was a precursor to the first, official New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1970. At that first Jazz Fest, he was featured for a nighttime concert aboard a riverboat.

He's been a staple of most of the 44 Jazz Fests that followed, and hasn't missed one in more than two decades. For fans of traditional New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, checking in with Fountain at the People's Health Economy Hall Tent was akin to a pilgrimage.

The festival "has been a big enjoyment for him," Harrell said. "He loved the crowds. They really expressed their feelings for him.

"And it's not only his fans, but the people that work at the festival. The warmth that they showed him every year... they treated him like family."

He'll be missed at Jazz Fest this year. But at 83, Fountain has more than earned his retirement.

He turned pro at 15, working multiple nights on Bourbon Street. He became one of the most famous jazz musicians in the country during a two-year stint in the late 1950s on "The Lawrence Welk Show." Three gold-selling albums followed. He returned to New Orleans in 1959; a year later, he opened the first of two nightclubs that would bear his name on Bourbon Street. In 1977, he moved his club to the Hilton Riverside.

Along the way he squeezed in 59 appearances on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." He entertained four presidents and one pope, hung with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Dolly Parton. In general, he lived life large as Mr. New Orleans, the most prominent ambassador of good-time New Orleans jazz.

After closing his Hilton club in 2003, he still performed regularly at a casino near his waterfront estate in Bay St. Louis, Miss.

Various medical issues have slowed him down in recent years, especially after Hurricane Katrina destroyed his Bay St. Louis, Miss., house and heavily damaged his home near the New Orleans lakefront. Emergency bypass surgery in 2006 caused him to miss his Half-Fast Walking Club's annual Mardi Gras morning ramble for the first time in 45 years, much to his dismay. He rallied to perform at the 2006 Jazz Fest, the first one after Katrina, with his cardiologist in attendance -- just in case.

Months later, two strokes, one minor, one more serious, made speaking difficult for him. But he could still make his clarinet sing: He was the featured attraction at the 2008 French Quarter Festival.

He was hospitalized with pneumonia in early 2013. He did not feel well enough to sit in with cornetist Connie Jones at that spring's French Quarter Festival.

His health of late has been good, Harrell said. "He's doing well. He hasn't had any (health) issues lately."




Mardi Gras is still a happy place to be for Jazz musician, Pete Fountain.
Clarinet player and jazz musician Pete Fountain, 83, is a popular guy among parade goers on Mardi Gras morning. This year, marked the 64th year that Fountain and his band joined the Half-Fast Walking Club to Fat Tuesday festivities in New Orleans.
Fountain often goes out for breakfast, and attends meetings of the Half-Fast Walking Club. He rode aboard the Half-Fast Club's traveling bandstand on Mardi Gras this year, but did not play with the band.
VIDEO: http://video-embed.nola.com/services/player/bcpid1949030309001?bctid=32919107080...


In September 2013, he was the honored guest at a fundraising concert at his alma mater, Warren Easton High School. He, his wife, Beverly, and other family members watched fellow Easton alums Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews and Nicholas Payton perform.

Fountain didn't join the youngsters onstage that night at Warren Easton. He'd already delivered his swan song four months earlier, on May 5, 2013 at the Fair Grounds.

'The love that the crowd showed him was awesome.' -- Benny Harrell, Fountain's son-in-law.


Seated on a red walker at Jazz Fest's People's Health Economy Hall Tent, he fronted a band that featured fellow clarinetist and lifelong Fountain disciple Tim Laughlin. With trombonist Mark Mullins, cornetist Connie Jones, trumpeter Jimmy Weber, saxophonist Otis Bazoon, pianist David Boeddinghaus and drummer Bryan Barberot, they ran through songs that are, to Fountain's fans, more like old friends: "Just a Closer Walk With Thee." "Struttin' With Some Barbecue." "Basin Street Blues." "Tin Roof Blues."

As in previous years, members of Fountain's family joined him onstage. His adult granddaughter Danielle Scheib worked a washboard on several songs. A 7-year-old great-granddaughter, Isabella "Izzy" Harrell, sang "You Are My Sunshine." Afterward, a photographer caught Fountain wiping a tear from his eye.

Throughout the show, the overflow crowd broke out in spontaneous second-lines and showered him with adoration. Each time he raised the clarinet to his mouth, scores of cellphones snapped photographs.

"The love that the crowd showed him was awesome," Harrell said. "From when they announced his name to the standing ovation, it was amazing.

"It was a great show to end up on."

Music writer Keith Spera can be reached at [email protected] or 504.826.3470. Follow him on Twitter @KeithSpera.


http://www.nola.com/jazzfest/index.ssf/2014/04/pete_fountain_has_retired_from.ht...

A TRIBUTE TO BUDDY BOLDEN AT JAZZ FEST 2014
01 May 2014 — by David Kunian







Charles “Buddy” Bolden. For those in the know, the cornetist’s name conjures up an entire world of turn-of-the-19th century New Orleans and the jazz music of which he was probably the first major innovator. And with that come the myth and the mystery of his life, music and demise, which has influenced everyone up to the coming Tribute to Buddy Bolden at the Economy Hall stage.Buddy Bolden, photo, OffBeat Magazine, May 2014

According to Donald Marquis’ canonical study In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, Bolden grew up in the musically rich neighborhood of Central City. As an adult, he lived at 2309 First St., and formed his first bands in 1895. He played dances, some parades, and gigs that focused both in the Black Storyville neighborhood centered around South Rampart and Perdido streets and at Lincoln and Johnson Park. By 1900, Bolden had acquired a reputation as a loud player whose ways of combining and embellishing the rags, blues, waltzes, and mazurkas that made up the repertoire in that time was unparalleled. He also was known to keep the company of many women and he was never far from a drink.

People called him “King” Bolden. However, by 1906, his life started to unravel. His behavior became erratic and his playing worsened. Over the last century, there has been much thought as to the causes of this and whether it was due to alcoholism, insanity, inability to reconcile the different roles of his life—or, as writer and musician Ned Sublette recently speculated, acute cocaine psychosis. By 1907, he was committed to the State Mental Hospital in Jackson, Louisiana. He stayed there until his death in 1931 and was buried in the Holt Cemetery. Although there were no recordings of him (some of his fellow musicians state that he and the band did a wax cylinder recording, but none have been found), his music and life was a great influence on everyone who came after including Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton (who wrote the song, “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say.”), Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, and many more.

Bolden’s influence continues to touch people to this day. Dr. Michael White is one. White, one of the great clarinetists and composers of the traditional New Orleans music that Bolden started, is a man who thinks about Bolden a lot. He is the perfect person to organize the Tribute set for Bolden at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this year. As White says, “I’ve done a lot of specialized concerts for Jazz Fest before. There’s never been a Buddy Bolden tribute. It might be a good thing, because he’s one of the first jazz musicians. Of course, there are no recordings of him but we know enough of his songs or songs that were played in that era.”

On a personal level, White feels a great connection to Bolden. “When I started playing in brass bands in social club and church parades, I played a lot in that neighborhood,” he says, “and we used to pass his home on First and South Liberty streets. The barbershop on the corner where he used hang out was owned by my relatives. He played some of the same functions in the neighborhood that I did—some of the same songs, probably.

I think that Buddy Bolden was one of the most important figures in American music and culture because he was among the first to really kind of figure out and put into action jazz and all its cultural and social and musical implications. That’s one of the reasons to do the tribute. In many ways, he remains a mythical figure. It’s kind of rare in this country and New Orleans that he is really given any serious consideration beyond the couple of lines here and there. His music is very important and, personally, I feel a personal, musical, and spiritual connection—not only did my relatives interact with him but I went to elementary school in that neighborhood. I still drive around the neighborhood and sit outside the house and think about him.”

In some ways, the myth of Bolden makes him the archetypal jazz musician. According to the myth, he was a black, innovative musician who played loud, womanized, drank too much, and then went crazy and died broke and alone. That archetype, either in part or in full, can be applied to countless musicians who came after him, from Freddie Keppard to Bix Beiderbecke to Charlie Parker and Bud Powell to Lester Young to Woody Shaw and, as White points out, several musicians who currently live in New Orleans today. But there is much, much more to him.

As a musician, White points out, “In Bolden’s time, one of the concepts was to incorporate the music of different genres. Of course, they used rags and marches and blues and popular songs and quadrilles and mazurkas and others, and they converted it and turned it into a language that became traditional New Orleans jazz. He started a revolution. And the thing was, the beauty of it was in order to play that style, you didn’t have to copy Bolden as such, but you had to find your own creative sound and improvisation in the style to sound like that style.

And I think that most of the musicians in that era had to do that because it became so popular in the community at dances and functions. They had to learn how to improvise and one of Bolden’s great developments was learning to improvise off of popular tunes, learning to develop it and to personalize the sound that included many of the characteristics of the black blues and church singing. He used vibrato and vocal expression on the instrument that people hadn’t heard before. I think everybody started to use those expressions that Bolden popularized. Everybody was influenced by that, all the young trumpeters and it got passed into King Oliver and Louis Armstrong and quite a few others.”

Even though there are no recordings of Bolden, White has done research into what Bolden played. And he has assembled a top-notch band including Greg Stafford and Leon Brown on horn, Lucien Barbarin on trombone, Tyler Thompson on bass, Herman LeBeaux on drums, Anthony Brown on banjo, and David Boddinghaus on piano. White explains: “Even though they are mostly instrumental, we’re going to do some vocals, too. And I’m going to try to do as much as possible to use the musical concepts and try to keep it as I would imagine as Bolden-esque as possible. I think that Buddy Bolden’s music swung in a certain way. It was dance music, and one of the things about the Economy Hall tent that I look forward to is seeing people dance. The beauty of the music was that it encouraged people to be more creative and free, and that’s what we are looking for.”

Beyond Bolden’s music, White sees a much deeper significance to Buddy Bolden, what he did, and when he did it. “I think that Bolden means more to New Orleans and music than most people realize,” he explains. “He helped to make NOLA special. The most famous thing to come out of New Orleans was jazz. And if you really think about it in the big sense, that’s what put New Orleans on the map. It’s immeasurable in terms of the city’s reputation and the tourism industry. It’s ironic that Buddy Bolden never appeared in the newspapers for music—not once. He appeared for being arrested for hitting his mother-in-law in the head with a water pitcher. Ironically, he’s subsequently responsible for untold billions of dollars in the tourist industry. He’s why people come here. He started the whole thing. The importance of that is immeasurable.”

Most probably, Bolden never thought about such a legacy when he was onstage at the Funky Butt Hall or Lincoln Park playing and being heard all over the city. The legend is that he could play at Carrollton and Claiborne and be heard in the French Quarter. People scoff at that, but given the lack of industrialization and noise in the first decade of the 20th century, and the fact that due to the topography and humidity and other reasons, sound carries in unconventional ways in New Orleans. In some ways, that sound and the implications of it touched many people then and carries on to this day. White is passionate in connecting Bolden to his time and ours.

He states: “The social meaning of the music is a lot more, in a lot of ways, more significant. In any sense of the word, he launched this idea of greater freedom and individuality in American society. The music is about putting democratic ideals in action. And it was extremely important in the African-American community. It gave a voice and visibility to a people who were essentially declared invisible. It came along at a time when all of the things that people were fighting for in American society, this is the perfect model. It shows how you can maintain rules and order but you can ultimately incorporate individuality and individual ideas and concept and ethnic diversity. We’re talking about the same time as Plessy versus Ferguson—well that was a little earlier, but the reaction of that was there, and the results of that were going forth. And you had the Robert Charles riot in 1900. That whole incident happened within walking distance of Buddy Bolden. That had a big impact on musicians in a lot of ways. That was such an important thing.”

White continues: “I just like to think about and imagine what it must have been like the very first time he started playing what was the earliest jazz. I wonder what it was like for the musicians and the community. I mean, did he take a theme like ‘Careless Love’ and he started improvising the theme, and the dancers started hearing something that was the song and wasn’t the song and was very different from what they were used to hearing from the Robicheaux band [one of the Bolden Band’s contemporaries and rivals]. What was the first reaction to that? Were they aware? Did they stop in amazement? Did people even know? Did they accept it? Did they all of a sudden realize that it was a moment of musical and social liberation? I think that was the magic moment that changed the world. I think about that quite a lot. And I wonder if he knew and how much and if he felt a burden or responsibility? Did he want to develop it more? Did he realize what the hell he was doing in a sense—not musically—and I wonder if he knew what he was on the verge of. I think of what I call that magic moment with Bolden and it’s such an exciting thing. It’s like an explosion that didn’t explode.”

White’s voice quickens as he follows this train of thought like Bolden might have added ornaments to finish out a melody. “Did he consciously do it or did it just happen?” he asks. “Did he work on those ideas or did he talk about it? Or was he reacting to what was going on around him and in society? He found a way to show democracy. Did he know that at the time? He actually showed the rules that incorporate freedom of expression and diversity of ideas. It’s also a philosophy of life and existence and how you could incorporate the idea of endless possibility. That’s a lot of heavy stuff.”

White finishes with a laugh: “All that in one man’s music and innovation.”


http://www.offbeat.com/2014/05/01/a-tribute-buddy-bolden-jazz-fest-2014/