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    Tristram Lozaw

    Tristram Lozaw

  • Jazz Fest Weekend 2 Highlights: Shorty, Stevie, and Snoop

    Picking which of Jazz Fest‘s 12 stages to try next presents countless dilemmas. It was no different deciding where to close out the festival’s second weekend, as two generations of New Orleans rhythm kings held court for tens of thousands of fans at opposite ends of the Fair Grounds. Here were the highlights of weekend two. (For weekend one highlights, click here.)

  • Jazz Fest Weekend 1 Highlights: Petty, Usher, Nas & Brass

    Over the seven days of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, nearly a half million people descend on the city’s Fair Grounds to take in more than 450 performances on 12 stages. Something of a misnomer, Jazz Fest has never been about just jazz, but more loosely includes everything that the freedom of jazz represents: The dozen stages offer everything from touring headliners, jazz legends, and Cajun/zydeco to rap, funk, Americana, and brass bands. No one can be in 12 places at once, so there are many choices to be made, and everyone’s Jazz Fest is different.

  • Bang On a Can Plays Art, Radiohead, and Wilco

    In a season overflowing with music festivals that seem to merely trade headliners, Bang On a Can's annual Summer Festival offers a "utopian residency" of uncommon contemporary music, with top new players from multiple continents. Best of all, Banglewood (as it sometimes called) makes all this future music not only supremely enlightening but also a ton of fun.

  • New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival: Party Keeps Going For Weekend 2

    Officially, we’re into the second weekend of the 45th New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Presented by Shell. That’s a stodgy moniker for such a free-spirited event, so it’s usually shortened to Jazz Fest. But that, too, is unrepresentative.

  • Between-Weekend Festing In New Orleans

    Trombone Shorty will be closing out this year’s New Orleans Jazz Fest in front of thousands of fest-goers this coming Sunday evening. But right now he and his stellar krewe are rocking the record bins for a couple hundred people who have squeezed into Louisiana Music Factory’s new store in Fauburg-Marigny, a funky area east of the French Quarter that is a hub of home New Orleans live music club scene.

  • Jazz Fest: An ADHD Trip for Music Lovers

    The way to taste the most that the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival has to offer is to flit between the 11 stages, landing just long enough to draw nectar. Jazz Fest is a trip of sensory overload even before you add in the 500-plus acts performing over seven days divided between two weekends.

  • 12th Annual Bang on a Can Summer Festival Marathon

    Aphex Twin Gets the big Bang, August 3, 2013 at MASS MoCA, North Adams MA

  • 2013 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival – Weekend 2

    THURSDAY MAY 2: A series of heavy rains have only served to multiply the mud fields generated at the 44th Annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival’s first weekend at the Fair Grounds Race Course. On my way in for the first day of weekend #2, with threatening clouds overhead (again), I pass by some [...]

  • Music Series at Louisiana Music Factory: Jazz Fest 2013

    If coming to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Jazz Fest is like going to school and majoring in New Orleans music, hanging out at the week of all-day in-store performance at the Louisiana Music Factory record store in the French Quarter is the Advanced Placement class. The CD & vinyl mecca – with [...]

  • Celebrating New Orleans’ Native Tongues: New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival – Weekend 1

    FRIDAY APRIL 26: Henry Gray’s keyboards are first thing I hear upon arriving at my 27th (or is it 28th?) straight Jazz Fest. It reminds me of a time a few years back, at an early Ponderosa Stomp, when I leaned on Gray’s piano while listening to him reunite with other blues legends from Muddy [...]

  • Reich & Roll: The 11th Annual Bang on a Can Summer Festival Marathon

    People sometimes ask why I drive all the way to the back roads of the Berkshires for the finale of Banglewood, the pet name for Bang on a Can's Summer Festival and Institute. Surely that's not the only place one can hear adventurous contemporary music. Well, maybe not, though most of us would likely have [...]

  • Jazz Fest Weekend Two: How I Almost Lost My Jazz Fest Mojo

    43nd Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell Weekend II, May 3-7, 2012 Fair Grounds Race Course, New Orleans I'm not even half way through Jazz Fest 2012 -- seven days of the sensory overload of music simultaneously pouring from 11 stages for eight hours a day, along with the food, art, [...]

  • Jazz Fest Continued: The Best Little “Restival” in New Orleans

    Popular in-store appearances at the Louisiana Music Factory fill the gap between Jazz Fest weekends April 26 - May 7 Barry Smith is fairly calm for a man nailing down the last-minute details for a special DVD-release event with the members of the HBO hit series "Treme," organizing a still-shifting line-up of presentations and appearances, [...]

  • Jazz Fest Weekend One: Startin’ Some Big “Mess” Here Today

    43nd Annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell April 27-29, 2012 Fair Grounds Race Course, New Orleans There are lots of worthwhile music festivals out there these days. Coachella, Bumbershoot, Bonnaroo, Rhythm and Roots, and Lollapalooza are annual destinations for many, just to name a few. They all have one thing in [...]