John Sinclair

JazzFest in New Orleans is America's ultimate musical event. From the last Friday in April through the first Sunday of May, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival takes over the Crescent City each year and fills it up to the brim with an amazing array of great roots music.

Centered on the racetrack and grandstand at the old New Orleans Fairgrounds, JazzFest presents all kinds of music on 10 stages from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm for seven thrill-packed days and stages a major nighttime concert series at venues around town. The 10 stages at the Fairgrounds are interspersed with several sets of food booths serving mouth-watering Louisiana culinary specialties beyond simple description and a collection of arts & crafts areas demonstrating and offering for sale a mind-boggling selection of goods produced by Louisiana artisans.

That's just the official Jazz & Heritage Festival, now in its 35th year, and beyond that the entire city pulsates around the clock with live music presented in every conceivable setting, from established nightclubs and bars to record shops, dancehalls, concert houses, public parks and private parties. Just about every musician in town can be heard somewhere during JazzFest, along with a panoply of imported talent to boot.

This is my first Fest as a visitor since 1991, when my wife Penny and I moved to New Orleans just two months following JazzFest. We left the Crescent City just after JazzFest last year to begin what's become a prolonged transition to establishing residency in the Netherlands, and she's staying with her aged mother in Detroit while I spend most of my time on the road trying to scratch up enough cash to make the move come true. I went back to New Orleans for White Buffalo Day last August; returned in October to perform marriage ceremonies for my friends Wallace Lester and Shannon McNally and, the next day, Tom Morgan and Hild Creed; and spent ten days in town for Mardi Gras in February.

But JazzFest in New Orleans is something else, as we used to say, filled with opportunities to see scores of old friends from all over the place, hear your favorite musicians and feast your senses on the sights and sounds of the Crescent City in full swing. I was fortunate to secure some of my old and much treasured jobs while I was there-serving as master of ceremonies for Piano Night at Generations Hall, conducting on-stage artist interviews at the Allison Minor Music Heritage Stage at the Fairgrounds, and MCing five glorious days of in-store free concerts at the Louisiana Music Factory-and I got to see and hear just about everybody and everything I wanted to.

There were several chances to perform with a variety of musical ensembles, and I snapped up every one of them: Opening the show at Rosey's Music Hall for old friends Big Brother & The Holding Company, whom I'd first met when the MC-5 opened for them two nights in March 1968 at Detroit's Grande Ballroom; playing with guitarist Marc Stone and flutist Eluard Burt (New Orleans' founding father of the jazz & poetry movement back in the 1950s and '60s) at poet/propagandist Dave Brinks' Gold Mine Saloon in the French Quarters; sitting in with harmonica man Rockin' Jake and his band at 308 Decatur ("Home of the Bloody Mary") and a cram-packed Apple Barrel on Frenchmen Street; and joining my Oxford cohorts Eric Deaton and Guelel Kuumba for a set of Afrissippi music at the International House hotel in the CBD.

Then there was the invitation from Rene Broussard to answer questions from the audience after the screening of the film MC5-A True Testimonial at the Zeitgeist Theatre, and the unexpected blessing of getting to fill in for Michael Domenici on his Wednesday night radio show on WWOZ and spin two hours worth of discs of my personal selection. I was a volunteer programmer at WWOZ from 1992 2003, hosting the Blues & Roots Show every Saturday night from 2:00 5:00 a.m. and the very popular New Orleans Music Show on Wednesdays from 11:00 a.m. 2:00 p.m., for which I was rewarded by being voted the city's Favorite Radio Personality five years running.

At the Fairgrounds I got to meet, talk with and listen to the powerful voice and guitar of Alvin "Youngblood" Hart, and later to interview the legendary Louisiana guitarist Paul "Li'l Buck" Sinegal, who brought Henry Gray's bassist, Andy Cornett, and drummer Nat Jollivet with him to demonstrate a few of the many roots music idioms Buck has mastered. Both sessions took place at the Music Heritage Stage named for my dear departed friend Allison Miner, co-founder of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, manager of Professor Longhair, the Wild Magnolias and the ReBirth Brass Band, and a champion of the New Orleans music community until her death from bone marrow cancer in 1995.

Another benefit of spending almost two weeks in the Crescent City was the chance to catch up on my health-care issues with Carol Schwaner, my primary care-giver and Director of the New Orleans Musicians Clinic at LSU Medical Center. NOMC was founded by doctors and community volunteers to provide for the needs of the city's musicians irrespective of their access to medical insurance or level of income. The Musicians Clinic is partially funded by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, by benefit concerts, private donors, and income from sales of a great CD called Get You a Healin' featuring performances donated by Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Coco Robicheaux, the Radiators and other New Orleans artists.

My personal high point this JazzFest had to be the fantastic Piano Night show staged at capacious Generations Hall by pianists Eddie Bo, Marcia Ball, Dr. John, Davell Crawford, Jon Cleary, Joe Krown, John Gros and a host of the city's finest contemporary keyboard professors at the gigantic annual benefit concert for WWOZ Radio. Created in the late 1980s by the Professor Longhair Foundation as a living tribute to Fess and the Crescent City piano tradition, Piano Night at Tipitina's was also the Foundation's principal fund-raiser, with the proceeds dedicated to commissioning and installing a permanent memorial to Professor Longhair on the Napoleon Avenue neutral ground adjacent to the nightclub named after Fess' song.

By 1997 the Professor Longhair Foundation had achieved its goal, the memorial was in place, and the group decided to dissolve itself, willing its well-established Piano Night fund-raiser to WWOZ Radio. Soon the benefit show outgrew its original home at Tipitina's and moved downtown to Generations Hall, where the audiences have continued to increase each year. Three years ago WWOZ dedicated Piano Night to the Godfather of Funk, Mr. Eddie Bo, and last year Mac Rebennack (Dr. John) was similarly honored.

This year Piano Night celebrated the city's adopted daughter of the keyboard, Ms. Marcia Ball, in a ceremony conducted with love and gentle care by Eddie Bo himself. Following a smashing set by Davell Crawford and his ensemble, Bo romped through a set of his own classics-"I'm Wise," "Check Mr. Popeye," "Every Dog Has His Day," "Hook and Sling," "Check Your Bucket" - and brought on Dr. John to play organ behind him. The Doctor took over the feature spot and did a cooking piano set with Herman Ernest on drums, Billy Gregory on guitar, Brent Rose and the legendary Herb Hardesty on tenor saxophones, finally summoning Ms. Ball to join him and the rest of the band for their ending number.

The long, tall Ms. Marcia Ball called out her own rhythm section and tore into an inspired set of boogie, blues and New Orleans R&B, rocking the crowd mercilessly and bringing down the house. Eddie Bo reentered center stage like a benevolent potentate to direct the closing proceedings, calling out the pianists who'd played earlier to join Marcia and him for an incredible grand finale that grew to include Davell Crawford, Jon Cleary, Joshua Paxton, John Gros, Joe Krown on organ and Dr. John on guitar. What a blowout, and the perfect way to end an exciting evening of piano music from New Orleans.

As always, the sweetest treat for me in New Orleans is the time I get to spend with my daughter Celia, and we were able to make the most of the opportunity to get together once again. When Celia finally put me on the Amtrak train to Chicago, I was headed for Detroit to celebrate her sister Sunny's 37th birthday, hang out with my little granddaughter Beyonce, and spend some much-needed quality time with my wife Penny. My pal Fritz met me at Union Station and took care of the four-hour layover before my train left for Detroit, whisking me off in a taxi to lunch and then to his studio for some mental refreshment followed by a mad dash back to the station.

After three swift days in the Motor City, I caught the Greyhound bus to the west coast of Michigan and played dates in Saugatuck, Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo with my band of Saugatuck Blues Scholars led by guitarist (and Creem magazine editor) Brian Bowe. Then two more buses got me to rural Big Rapids, Michigan, where I spent several days visiting with my old friend Michael Erlewine and his family and playing two nights of blues at their Two Sisters Café. I'd first met Erlewine when his pioneering Ann Arbor blues band, the Prime Movers, had shared a bill with the MC-5 at the Grande Ballroom in the Fall of 1966, sporting a lineup with a young Jim Osterburg on drums, Robert Scheff (now better known as "Blue" Gene Tyranny) on keys, Michael on harmonica and vocals, and his brother Danny (now a world-renowned luthier) on guitar.

The Prime Movers were contemporaries of the Blues Project and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, passionately dedicated to exploring the Chicago Blues canon created by Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Junior Wells and their colleagues. When the band broke up around 1970, Michael turned his focus from music to astrology and then to computer technology, logging on to early e-mail services in the late 1970s and eventually creating an on-line data bank called the AllMusic Guide-a site where one could find information about every sort of recorded music.

AllMusic Guide grew and grew, and Erlewine's fiendish interest in movies and games led him to develop the AllMovie Guide and AllGames Guide with equal success. The chance to cash out his ownership interest in the late 1990s while remaining active in the operation of the business he created was transmogrified into an elongated nightmare of preposterous proportions too painful and complicated to describe, and Erlewine has retreated to his family compound in Big Rapids to heal his wounds and gird up for an uncertain future.

Michael's next venture, on the launching pad as we speak, is a massive website called ClassicPosters.com that will provide access to digital images of thousands of posters, flyers and other artwork from concerts, festivals, psychedelic ballrooms and cultural events of every sort-including complete runs of the historic posters from the Avalon, Fillmore, and Grande Ballrooms created by artists like Stanley "Mouse" Miller, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Gary Grimshaw and a galaxy of others. This venture is an outgrowth of Erlewine's lifelong love of poster art and promises to become a valuable resource for art and music lovers everywhere.

But Erlewine hadn't played any blues harmonica for about 34 years until he decided that I was going to need him to back up my verses when I came to play at his little restaurant and cafΘ in Big Rapids this month. So I had the extreme honor of reintroducing Michael Erlewine to the blues harp and the delightful pleasure of hearing him rise to the occasion and turn in a stellar set of intelligent, emotive playing on my behalf for two nights at Two Sisters. We had the musical benefit of Seth Bernard and Luke Winslow-Smith on guitars and Brian Samuels and Brian Galloup alternating on bass, and the Big Rapids Blues Scholars came full-blown into being.

After three short days with my loved ones in Detroit, I hopped on the train again and headed over to Chicazgo, then back down south to Memphis, Oxford, Jackson, and Hattiesburg MS, and Willie King's Freedom Creek Festival in Aliceville, Alabama on June 5th. I'll take up the story of my bardic travels from there in my next column, but that's all for now - I gotta get moving. &