NEW ORLEANS -- Less than two blocks from the Gentilly Boulevard entrance to the 37th annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival at the city's Fair Grounds -- and the first since Hurricane Katrina -- there are the merest of hints of the devastation wrought last August. The side of a nearby home remains blown away; all that remains of a bathroom is a toilet exposed to the elements.
Inside New Orleans' Fair Grounds over the past weekend, however, the spiritual rebuilding was proceeding at a pace far faster than FEMA has been repairing the miles upon heartbreaking miles of ruined homes and infrastructure. Perhaps unique amongAmerican cities, the people of New Orleans truly believe, per both a local radio station and a French Quarter nightclub's slogans, can be rebuilt “one song/note at a time."
It's hard to imagine such a raucous party amid such sorrowful circumstances, but that's exactly what transpired. It was quintessential New Orleans, home of Dixieland funeral parades, a few of which curled through the jammed Jazz Fest pathways over the weekend. Sundry stages and performance tents were routinely packed as more than 150,000 attended the first three days of the Festival. In fact, though only somewhere between a third and a half of the city's population has returned to the Big Easy -- now better described as the Big Difficult -- one festival-goer swore that the crowds this year surpassed those of 2005.
A-list performers lined up to support the effort, and undoubtedly the first weekend's highlight was Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band's first live show, hot on the heels of the release of Springsteen's latest CD of Pete Seeger covers, “We Shall Overcome."
Springsteen's two-hour set offered an uncanny blend of sage empathy for residents' suffering and infectious exuberance -- once he turned from the crowd to fix yet another pop-world wardrobe malfunction ("It's not just a new band," he explained, “but a new belt").
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Inside New Orleans' Fair Grounds over the past weekend, however, the spiritual rebuilding was proceeding at a pace far faster than FEMA has been repairing the miles upon heartbreaking miles of ruined homes and infrastructure. Perhaps unique amongAmerican cities, the people of New Orleans truly believe, per both a local radio station and a French Quarter nightclub's slogans, can be rebuilt “one song/note at a time."
It's hard to imagine such a raucous party amid such sorrowful circumstances, but that's exactly what transpired. It was quintessential New Orleans, home of Dixieland funeral parades, a few of which curled through the jammed Jazz Fest pathways over the weekend. Sundry stages and performance tents were routinely packed as more than 150,000 attended the first three days of the Festival. In fact, though only somewhere between a third and a half of the city's population has returned to the Big Easy -- now better described as the Big Difficult -- one festival-goer swore that the crowds this year surpassed those of 2005.
A-list performers lined up to support the effort, and undoubtedly the first weekend's highlight was Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band's first live show, hot on the heels of the release of Springsteen's latest CD of Pete Seeger covers, “We Shall Overcome."
Springsteen's two-hour set offered an uncanny blend of sage empathy for residents' suffering and infectious exuberance -- once he turned from the crowd to fix yet another pop-world wardrobe malfunction ("It's not just a new band," he explained, “but a new belt").
Continue...
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