If I was in my adopted hometown, right about now I'd be making my way to the Cafe Du Monde booth for my iced Cafe Au Lait (with coffee made with chicory)and my first Beignets of the weekend. The liklihood is that I would have already begun my morning with a mind-blowing Bloody Mary at Liuzza's before even entering the gates of the New Orleans Fairgrounds and Racetrack... because this morning starts the Holy Grail of music and culture for anyone with a penchant for jazz, blues, roots, or other "American" music... It's JazzFest Time in New Orleans!
For the next 10 days music and food will reign even more supremely than usual in The Crescent City. People will wander around in dust and/or mud, they'll gorge themselves on foodstuffs both wonderful and peculiar (or wonderfully peculiar). People at the fairgrounds, in their homes, and on the street will eat more crawfish than people elsewhere can even imagine exists. All of this will go on accompanied by the incessant drumbeat and lilting melody of music wafting out of every nook and cranny. New Orleans exists both for and because of this incredibly rich mixture of food and culture (not to mention food culture) and despite all of the strange, horrible, and frustrating realities that accompany The Big Easy (both now and from long ago), this is the reason people will ALWAYS return!
You can read some of my previous posts on JazzFest here and here at SpeakLo, and you can catch the fever for yourself by tuning into the Best Radio Station In The World and at the Jazz Fest site itself. Of course the best thing to do is GO! There really is no other way to truly capture the amazing mixture of people, food, and culture - the incredibly rich tapestry that is New Orleans - than to spend the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May festing with the best of em.
See ya'll next year! Have some mudbugs 4 me!
