Too Much Love... Too Much Fun

This is a picture taken of Ivan Neville from the back of the Gentilly Stage at JazzFest this Sunday while a new bunch of old New Orleans musicians played together as the New Orleans Social Club. The little yellow arrow is pointing at me (or at least a reasonably good guess at me) in the crowd. These guys (a loosely bound together group featuring, Ivan, Henry Butler, and Leo Necontelli, and including Irma Thomas and John Boute, and really just about anyone they can gather together to play together at any given time) have been a traveling band of rockin' NOLA reminders as they have worked their way across the country over the last year and a half. But on Sunday they simply tore up the stage and proved, again, one of the reasons New Orleans matters. It was a great show, and for me the highlight of the first weekend (though Sonny Landreth's smokin' version of Congo Square to close out his set in the Blues Tent on Saturday would have to be a close second).

There was also a makeshift jazz funeral/second line at the heart of the fairgrounds for a great friend of New Orleans and an exemplary party person in his own right, Ed Bradley (Times-Picayune coloumnist Dave Walker has a great piece on Ed and what he means to New Orleans that's definitely worth a read). There was a jazz mass for Ed at St. Augustine's Church on Sunday morning where Dr. John, Irma Thomas, and the Treme Brass Band played him home. I missed that one unfortunately, but that's the nature of Jazz Fest.... just too many opportunities.

And that's the difficuulty that I face in attempting to communicate what's been going on over the last week since I got on a plane in San Jose and landed in The Crescent City. I have begun about a dozen different pieces of writing and reflection, some of them entertainment based, others featuring food and drink, and of course a certain level of the on-going personal and political reality that settles on everything like the humid air.

But frankly... all of that is going to have to wait until I have some more time... this afternoon I've got a Marcia Ball concert to get to and two parties to catch!