One of the highlights of our stay in New Orleans was going to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival aka JazzFest the last weekend we were there. After being canceled for two years, there was much excitement for this year’s festival. Interesting side note – of the hundreds of high-flying flags people flew to help mark their seat locations at the main stages, there wasn’t a single political flag being flown.
Headline acts on the weekend we attended included The Who, Lionel Richie, Death Cab For Cutie, CeeLo Green, and George Porter, along with other great jazz, zydeco, blues, and gospel acts on the many stages throughout the Fairgrounds. We had been looking forward to seeing the Foo Fighters but the death of drummer Taylor Hawkins one month earlier caused them to cancel.
Although we didn’t share it with each other until afterwards, both our expectations for The Who were really low (especially if Roger Daltrey was going to wear his trademark fringe vest over a now 78 year old naked chest). We were pleasantly surprised that Roger and Pete are still delivering rock anthems like “their generation” wasn’t more than 50 years ago (and also relieved that Roger wore an age appropriate white shirt). At one point Roger did have an issue with gravity, however that appeared to be more alcohol related than age induced.
Another headliner who left us shocked was Lionel Richie. My goth 16 year old self would have been horrified to know that someday in the far off future I would be happily dancing with tens of thousands of others to his bouncy pop tunes from the 80s and the funk sounds of the Commodores. Richie wasn’t just still pitch perfect though, he was actually funny as hell.
Of course, it wouldn’t have been New Orleans without great food. The awesome thing about JazzFest is the food is intended to be a showcase for the best of Louisiana Creole and Cajun cooking. There wasn’t a corn dog or funnel cake in sight. Instead, we snacked on crawfish bread, crawfish Monica, crawfish étouffée (I’m starting to feel like Bubba explaining to Forest Gump all the ways to make shrimp so let’s just say that options to eat mud bugs were plentiful). Other food highlights included an amazing Cochon De Lait Po Boy and a praline stuffed beignet. And it’s not like we didn’t burn off the calories grooving to Lionel singing Brick House.