Ladies First at Jazz Fest on Friday Starting with Lainey Wilson

Lainey Wilson

Our highlights of Friday at Jazz Fest include women from Jamaica and New Orleans.

On Thursday, Jazz Fest was shortened to get artists, fans and crew off the grounds before predicted storms blew in. We’ll know in the morning if enough rain fell fast enough to muddy up the Fair Grounds.

Friday looks like the softest lineup at Jazz Fest this year. Country singer Lainey Wilson’s star power can almost counteract a day that feels very familiar. It’s certainly not bad, but it’s not very motivating either.

Lainey Wilson and Raye in the first weekend were the two artists that caught my eye when the talent list dropped because people are talking about them now. Both have done the work to become credible and are making the move to a higher echelon. Appearances at Jazz Fest are part of the stories of their growth, not footnotes from a decade in.

In Wilson’s case, last year she hosted country music’s CMA Awards and won for Entertainer of the Year, Female Vocalist of the Year, and Album of the Year for Whirlwind. She also has a new documentary on Netflix, Lainey Wilson: Keeping’ Country Cool and one that started streaming on Hulu in 2024, Lainey Wilson: Bell Bottom Country.

She’s mainstream Nashville with credentials like that, and her songs are made to reach to broadest possible audience. But, they’re also grounded in who she is as a person and a woman.

Friday’s a good day for the Jamaican acts, all of which have a lot to recommend them. Ziggy Marley and The Skatalites are well-established acts and I mentioned The Rising Suns yesterday. On Friday, I’m particularly interested in Runkus & Royal Blu with the Dub Squad (Sandals Resorts Jamaica Cultural Exchange Pavilion, 2:10 p.m.; Jazz & Heritage Stage, 4:25 p.m.), which feels like the contemporary reggae equivalent of hip-hop-driven R&B.

I also really like what I’ve heard from Original Koffee (Congo Square Stage, 3:55 p.m.), who got attention as a teenager when she recorded a tribute Jamaican track star Usain Bolt that made her youth and sincerity work for her. Koffee has an ease in her delivery that makes everything sound personal, and her ability to pull together Afrobeats, dancehall and pop make her someone that draws such stars as Rihanna, Harry Styles, and Jay-Z to want to be part of her story.

For more on the Jamaican acts playing this weekend, check the guide by Ethan Ellestad of MACCNO.

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Rickie Lee Jones (Festival Stage, 12:45 p.m.) is at a point in her career where she does what she wants. She writes songs when she feels like it and interprets songs written by others when the mood strikes. Her sensibility merges jazz, R&B and the singer/songwriter tradition so that everything she touches sounds distinctly her, whether it’s a jazz standard, Bad Company’s “Bad Company,” or a song she wrote.

I interviewed Jones in 2015 about her move to New Orleans.

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Sarah Quintana (Lagniappe Stage, 11:30 a.m.) similarly unifies a wide variety of musical sounds with a clear musical personality developed by logging the hours on stages in the Bywater. Last year’s Baby Don’t was made for a Jazz Fest stage, complete with a Cajun French cover of Shirley & Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll.”

I interviewed Quintana about the juggling act required to make the album, and it’s a good look into the realities of being an independent New Orleans musician.