racial amelioration permeating the memories of Jazz Fest principals was the foundation's commitment (Miner is especially praised in this regard) to assisting local and “traditional” (and especially black local and black traditional) musicians, both financially and in terms of generating attention and respect for their work. Many claim that Jazz Fest has been critical to raising national and, indeed, global awareness of New Orleans music and culture. Some emphasize that Jazz Fest, which has featured brass bands and Mardi Gras Indian groups since the very beginning, has played a particularly important role in promoting these community-based cultural expressions, in effect rescuing them from obscurity. And while such claims by Jazz Fest insiders may be to a degree self-serving, prominent figures from the second line and Indian communities have made similar comments over the years.18
Of course the scale of these projects has changed over the decades of Jazz Fest's extraordinary growth, which has expanded the national and global market for New Orleans music and contributed significantly to the “branding” of New Orleans as a musical city. This growth has been accompanied by increasing and often controversial corporate sponsorship—though a certain level of that sponsorship was there from the beginning—that positions Jazz Fest firmly within a larger story of the expanding culture industry across the globe over the past several decades.19 In-the-know music fans, the wealthier of whom have an increasing disposable income, consume a growing array of multicultural forms made available and knowable (even when deemed “traditional") by the speed of global markets and emergent communication technologies. Such experiences are made possible not only by the corporations that profit dramatically from the production of these cultural forms but also by increasingly powerful private businesses and foundations that sponsor culture to facilitate tax relief and name recognition.20
In addition to its growth in scale, Jazz Fest's imbrication in the global culture industry is symbolized by the increasing international flavor of the event, a trend that took off in the early 1990s with the introduction of the International Pavilion, designed to highlight each year the cultural expressions of a particular nation. Some have pointed to this internationalization not only as a reflection of an emergent global consciousness and a local cultural terrain that is increasingly cosmopolitan, but also as a marker of an increasingly sophisticated and well-traveled (read wealthy) festival audience.21
As it has grown over the decades, Jazz Fest has established itself as a powerful financial engine for the local economy. It has become integral to the local tourism industry, which has been a critical financial sector in the postindustrial period, by bringing large number of music fans to the city over two spring weekends and by helping to define New Orleans more generally as a musical city, which encourages tourism at other times of the year. But with Jazz Fest's growth have come questions about and, at times, conflicts over who should and who has actually benefited from the festival's commitment to enhancing New Orleans's cultural life and giving back to the community.
During Jazz Fest's early years, a growing chorus of African American voices raised such questions. At a presentation on the roots of soul music at the first Jazz Fest, Reverend Fred Kirkpatrick shouted out “Where are the black people?"—probably referring to the relatively small percentage of African Americans in the audience at this event in what would become a black-majority city during the 1970s. But Kirkpatrick's comment would also have been accurate if he was referring to the relatively small percentage of black people among Jazz Fest's staff and producers, despite the presence of pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis as adviser.22 In 1978 a group of black activists calling itself the Afrikan American Jazz Festival Coalition showed up at a foundation board meeting and called for a boycott and disruption of Jazz Fest if more was not done to give back to and include members of the African American community. Although the now profitable festival had recently developed a small grant program for community projects, with some money put aside for African American–initiated projects in particular, members of the coalition, whose prominent voices included Kalamu ya Salaam, Sekou Fela, Michael Williams, and Mohammad Yungai, argued that there was inadequate black representation on the board and Jazz Fest staff and among arts and crafts vendors. The activists also charged that the economic benefits from the festival were primarily flowing to white society.23
This activism caused no small amount of friction among Jazz Fest staff and board members, and some white members resigned. Wein and other principals responded quickly, even if some of their recollections of the conflict are a little defensive and self–serving—especially their claims that protesters could not quite grasp the organizers’ commitment to the New Orleans black community.24 Jazz Fest subsequently underwent significant changes in response to the activists’ demands. Among the first was the creation in 1979 of the Koindu stage and crafts area for black artists, which, in Salaam's view, represented an emergent ethos of creating a stake in Jazz Fest for the black community and giving back to it financially. In 1988 Koindu was reinvented as “Congo Square” in an attempt to reflect some of cultural and spiritual “reality” created at that New Orleans site so many years ago.25 The year 1979 also witnessed the naming of the first African American as foundation board president and invitations to other blacks to join the board. Eventually, the board became majority African American, with some presidents and executive directors also of African descent. Black representation on the Jazz Fest staff also grew.26
Many of these black members of Jazz Fest's board and staff expressed a commitment, as former president Dan Williams put it, to ensure “that the wishes and desires of the community are taken into consideration” and to make Jazz Fest a “365-day organization.” Jazz Fest subsequently established a number of programs to increase African American involvement and “give back” to the community. A “community grants” program for artists and cultural workers was initiated in 1979. Other community-focused programs instituted over the next few decades include the distribution of low-cost Jazz Fest tickets to nonprofit and community groups, the creation of the Heritage School of Jazz Education, a community lecture series, off-festival music programming and neighborhood festivals, a newsletter, microlending programs for local small businesses, support for a local Musicians’ Clinic that provides health care for low-income musicians, a home ownership program for musicians called “Raisin’ the Roof,” the purchase of the license and subsequent administration of radio station WWOZ, and various attempts via Jazz Fest programming to highlight African American contributions to New Orleans culture.27
Despite such efforts, however, the questions of whether Jazz Fest serves New Orleans's black community in a significant way and whether it might even help to reproduce racial inequality in the city have remained. Looking back on his tenure as executive director of the foundation from 1983 to 1987, Kalamu ya Salaam invokes the image of a slave who, after gaining access to the plantation house, “tries to slip as much food as he can back to the people in the field.” Eventually he became frustrated in this position “because ultimately, the better I did my job, the more I built up the status quo.”28
With this history in mind, the representations of democracy in action and African American distinction we witnessed at the 2006 Jazz Fest indeed present competing narratives, especially if one also considers the widely held perception that this particular iteration of the festival was a critical juncture in determining whether the future New Orleans cultural scene would be adequately responsible to local communities. One journalist said the 2006 festival “represent[ed] the two most crucial weekends in New Orleans’ cultural history.” Not only was there the question of whether the city's music scene would come back; also critical was the issue of whether it would be adequately rebuilt on the foundation of the “sounds of the streets.”29
At the African American–oriented Congo Square we saw a shrine where one could honor both “the Ancestors of the Diaspora” and “those affected by our recent national tragedies.”30 And one could certainly read the brass bands and Mardi Gras Indian performances on the Jazz Heritage Stage, the second line processions winding their way through the fairgrounds, and the educational exhibits under the race course grandstand on Mardi Gras Indians and second lining as an explicit validation of unique, local musical cultures and also of the black working-class communities that have sustained them.
Second lining is a tradition that goes back to the nineteenth century. It involves public processions