![\"Parade](\"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/20260415-parade.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
When I wrote about New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival a couple weeks ago, Bill posed a question the the comments: “I have a question about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival \u2013 I know there are some jazz and New Orleans \u2013 based acts (and maybe more this year than in recent years?), but it always seems to be much more of an \u201cacts you hear on the radio\u201d modern music fest. Were things different back in the 1990s?<\/p>\n
My quick answer is about 80 percent of the 5,000 musicians and performers (on 14 stages) will be from Louisiana. That’s a lot more that “some,” and I’m pretty sure more Louisiana musicians than appeared in 1990.<\/p>\n
We went for the first time twenty years after the festival began. People we met who had been going for years, told us about how much better it was in years before, smaller, easier to get around, truer to its roots, whatever. We’ve tried our best not to become those people.<\/p>\n
Yes, it is different. In 1991 you could camp out maybe five-feet in front of the Ray Ban stage (the largest venue, now called the Festival Stage, but also know as the Fess stage, a nod to Professor Longhair). Now there is very expansive fenced off VIP area in front of it. There are signs of corporate creep to bitch about everywhere. In 1993 I laid on my stomach right in front of the Lagniappe stage (really just a wooden floor laid on top of grass) to shoot a picture of Chris Smither’s feet. They were pounding out acoustic backup as he sang. Something you wouldn’t be able to do today.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"Members](\"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/20260415-loslobos.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Louis Perez, Conrad Lozano and David Hidalgo of the band Los Lobos waiting in line for food (1991).<\/em><\/p>\n Last year there was a thread in Jazz Fest Forums<\/a> that started with complaints about the festival going cashless, including that it meant taxes were no added on top of food prices instead of built in. There was this:<\/p>\n “In 1977, festival co-founder Alison Miner was quoted in the local press as saying that that after attending the 1977 festival (when she was no longer involved) ‘It was as if your only daughter had turned out to be a whore.’<\/p>\n “Why would she say such a thing? Probably the goddam out of town BNAs — acts with no connection to New Orleans like Odetta, Lightnin Hopkins, Ruben Gonzalez, Bobby Blue Bland, Bill Malone, and god forbid, Bonnie Raitt. And while he was local, they pulled out the ultimate BNA in Fats Domino.”<\/p>\n The words that follow are worth your time, and not just if you think craft beer was much better [fill in the blank] years ago. As is the reply<\/a>: “I’m pretty sure Allison Miner’s objections centered around the growing corporate orientation and with commodification of a culture she saw as pure and good as it was. Both of these trends were merely at the beginning of their journey and far less pronounced than they are today, but she was a sensitive, perceptive, and passionate person who could see the direction things were headed. Maybe she felt betrayed to some degree or that she had been naive (after all she was very young and idealistic when she began) to believe it was ever not the point all along.”<\/p>\n Plus this: “I could see someone in 30 years saying ‘let me get this straight — fest booked the Stones, Crazy Horse, Foo Fighters Jon Batiste and Widespread Panic, plus there were locals like Galactic, Dumpstaphunk, Cleary, Irma, Shorty, George, Zig, the Rads, and you were pissed because … you had to use a credit card????'”<\/p>\n No doubt, the corporate orientation becomes a little more apparent every year. But commodification of the culture? Not when we’ll be standing in line next Thursday, not particularly happy that it always takes longer to get in the first day, because Sally Baby’s Silver Dollars (definitely a product of New Orleans) is first up on a stage about as far from where we enter as possible and Mason Trail (grandson of zydeco great Boozoo Chavis) is on one nearby.<\/p>\n Not when you can still join a parade (such as at the top) weaving around the fairgrounds. Not when you choose from scores of food vendors offering Boudin, Cochon de Lait Po-Boy, Crawfish Monica, Fried Oyster Po-Boy, Muffuletta, Fried Alligator with homemade pepper jelly, sweet potato pie (which we bought from Mr. Williams in 1991 and now buy from his grandchildren), pork debris and grits, white chocolate bread pudding . . . and so on. All true to the roots. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I wrote about New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival a couple weeks ago, Bill posed a question the the comments: “I have a question about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival \u2013 I know there are some jazz and New Orleans \u2013 based acts (and maybe more this year than in recent years?), … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-54a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19478"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19491,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19478\/revisions\/19491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"View](\"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/20260415-fessstage.jpg\")
<\/p>\n