Music: Scars Amid The Party In New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — Like the city it celebrates, the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is steeped in local memory.

The funk bandleader Ivan Neville during a Jazzfest set.

Jon Pareles and Nate Chinen report on the festival from New Orleans.

Stevie Wonder at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Jazzfest, which took place this year on seven days from April 25 through Sunday, revolves around familiar songs, distinctive rituals and the time-tested recipes of its justly celebrated food vendors. After 38 years there are also memories of Jazzfest itself. And no one onstage or elsewhere at the Fair Grounds, where Jazzfest took place, had forgotten about Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At this year’s Jazzfest it was clear that New Orleans performances have added a new and possibly permanent custom: an acknowledgment of the scars left by the storm.

When Stevie Wonder headlined Friday’s lineup, he brought onstage the New Orleans R&B stalwart Irma Thomas to sing his song “Shelter in the Rain,” which she recorded after losing her home and club to the flood. The New Orleans trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, leading the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra on Saturday, ended his set with a hymnlike elegy to his father, who drowned in the flooding after the storm. As Randy Newman performed his song about an earlier flood, “Louisiana 1927,” he drew a heartfelt sing-along on the chorus: “Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away.” Another New Orleans trumpeter, Kermit Ruffins, doing his version of the optimistic “O-o-h Child,” rapped about growing up in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, and urged, “Clean up this mess,” while the Dirty Dozen Brass Band added a few words about Katrina to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”

But musicians at Jazzfest didn’t linger over grief. They created a New Orleans party, the kind that simultaneously defies sorrow, affirms continuity, heartens the locals and draws eager tourists. The festival, which scrambled to reassemble itself for 2006 and expanded last year, has now returned to its full pre-Katrina length: seven days over two extended weekends. (Last year the festival’s second Saturday had Jazzfest’s largest one-day attendance since 9/11, about 90,000.) The lineup this year included visitors like Widespread Panic, Santana, the Roots, Elvis Costello and Jimmy Buffett.

Yet the most heralded event was the homecoming of the band that provided Jazzfest’s finale from 1990 to 2005: the Neville Brothers, whose members have been at the center of New Orleans music since the 1950s. Displaced by Katrina, the Neville Brothers had not performed together in New Orleans since the storm. Returning to their regular slot at the festival was a symbol of restoration for a city that remains depopulated, particularly in the poor African-American neighborhoods that nurtured vital musical traditions.

Individually the brothers were all over the festival. The keyboardist Art Neville, leading his own band, jovially revisited songs he had recorded half a century ago; Aaron Neville joined him onstage for a few, making his return to New Orleans a casual family affair. The percussionist Cyril Neville sat in with the Dixie Cups, whose hit “Iko Iko” is based on a Mardi Gras Indian song. Aaron Neville performed his own full set at the gospel tent, putting a second-line parade beat behind songs like “I Saw the Light” and singing comforting ballads in his gentle, aching voice. “I’m home,” he said. “Feels good.”

The festival’s aesthetics reflect ingrained New Orleans habits and tastes: for horn sections, for two-fisted piano, for wry voices, for dancing, for permeable boundaries between sacred and secular. Ms. Thomas, who reappeared Sunday afternoon in a tribute to the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, said, “Yes I sing my rhythm and blues, but it was God that gave me my voice.”

The city’s music, from jazz to R&B to funk, has transformed American culture but never conformed to it. It has always been a culture apart, sometimes intersecting the mainstream — the hometown rapper Lil Wayne, who did not perform here, is a major hip-hop star — but never defining it.

New Orleans songs, old and new, draw on rhythms that reach back at least a century, with even older African, European and American Indian roots. Parades representing the city’s traditions of brass bands, Mardi Gras Indians and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs wound through the festival, sometimes ending up at the Heritage Stage, where brass bands and Indians performed full-length sets.

On another stage the Cajun and zydeco music of nearby bayou country tootled and ratcheted through the day, with accordions and washboards. Performers at the blues tent spanned styles from the old rural blues of the Carolina Chocolate Drops to the roadhouse blues-rock guitar of Kenny Wayne Shepherd to the clear-voiced affirmations of Ruthie Foster to the deep soul of Bettye LaVette.

In New Orleans music, traditions mingle and can turn up anywhere. At the gospel tent songs of praise sometimes rode funk grooves. The saxophonist Donald Harrison started his set playing complex jazz tunes and ended it with the band playing fierce funk behind Mardi Gras Indian chants. By then Mr. Harrison was in full feathered regalia. He is the chief of the Congo Nation tribe.

At Jazzfest, New Orleans doesn’t go mainstream; it helps visitors find Louisiana connections. Smart ones, like Mr. Wonder, draw on the sensational local talent. Widespread Panic brought the feathered pandemonium of the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians onstage. Mr. Buffett looked toward Cajun country, latching on to the world-class slide guitarist Sonny Landreth and performing “U.S.S. Zydecoldsmobile.”

The Roots, the hip-hop group from Philadelphia, were ready for Jazzfest style on their own. They were backed not by a disc jockey but by a funky live band that — like a New Orleans brass band — gets its bass lines from a sousaphone. The Bad Plus, a jazz piano trio that can grow abstruse, met its audience with compositions full of earthy vamps.

Yet the heart of Jazzfest is its local musicians: the startling solo voices that leap out of groups like John Lee and the Heralds of Christ, rambunctious brass bands like Rebirth, thoughtful jazz composers like Terence Blanchard, the two-fisted piano phenomenon Henry Butler, the socially minded funk bandleader Ivan Neville, the backbeat-loving bluesman Snooks Eaglin and the many Mardi Gras Indians who hand-sew their costumes and take to the streets out of pure devotion to tradition.

From the stages at Jazzfest performers called out, “Only in New Orleans!” After Katrina that could be changing; some displaced residents have started to transplant their cultural memories to the places where they’ve resettled. But at Jazzfest, and in New Orleans, all those memories and traditions are still dancing on home ground.

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