The Choices Posed by Jazz Fest 2024

The Rolling Stones, by Mark Seliger

The release of the schedule means Jazz Fest is less than 30 days away, and fans are starting to think about the choices they face.

This is the point when Jazz Fest’s lineup gets real.

When the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell first drops the talent lineup, the cluster of star attractions at the top of the poster is intoxicating with so many possibilities seemingly coming at you at once. When the day-by-day announcement comes out, that talent is distributed over eight days and the excitement takes on more normal dimensions. Now we can see it scheduled in cube form and the challenges and choices become concrete.

The easiest choice comes on Thursday, May 2 when The Rolling Stones will finally play Jazz Fest (knock wood!). The plan from the start has been that nobody would play opposite the Stones, so there’s no competition, but but when Dumpstaphunk opens for them on the Festival Stage, they too will play most of their set unopposed. Presumably, shutting down other stages in the 3 o’clock hour is a recognition that Stones fans who aren’t camped out for the day will start working their way to the stage in that window anyway, but it also creates time for people to get there and settled before the Stones start.

The day has a couple of other interesting features. There is no Kids’ Tent on that Thursday, I’m sure in large part because there wouldn’t be many kids at the festival, and there’s no Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage that day either. The day also looks like it has been carefully curated in a number of ways. Aside from the Columbian acts performing as part of this year’s “Celebrate Columbia” lineup on the Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion Stage, everybody playing on May 2 is more or less local from Louisiana or Mississippi. There’s a lot to like on the day including the Festival Stage lineup, which also features the New Breed Brass Band with Trombone Shorty and Samantha Fish, but anyone paying to attend Jazz Fest that day is doing so to see The Rolling Stones. Full stop. Because of that, the day looks good, but Stones aside, it also looks understandably budget-conscious.

After May 2, maybe the coolest piece of news on this years schedule is that Juvenile and Mannie Fresh will headline the Congo Square Stage on Sunday, April 28. Jazz Fest has had a complicated relationship with hip-hop over the years, but putting Juvie in a closing spot is a recognition of the undeniable place he has come to occupy in New Orleans culture. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rap was outlaw music, but Juvenile and his peers became the soundtrack for a generation of New Orleanians’ parties, and they still are. That and time have made Juvenile respectable, so much so that when he called out Essence Festival for leaving him out last year when it celebrated the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, Essence added him. It makes sense that Jazz Fest booked him as a headliner because he and Mannie Fresh are too important to the last 20 years of music in New Orleans to continue to leave him on the bench.

In general, hip-hop gets a better showcase this year than in many past years with at least four rap sets including Juvie, Queen Latifah, Ha-Sizzle, and Hotboy Ronald with Alfred Banks. There will likely be other acts incorporating rap including Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr., whose set at 2:45 pm on Friday, April 26 is billed to include Choppa and producer BlaqNmilD.

To my eye, there aren’t a lot of hard choices at the end of days at the festival, but individual mileage may vary. A friend is worrying about what to do on Sunday, May 5 with Trombone Shorty, Earth Wind & Fire, George Thorogood, Kermit Ruffins and The Wallflowers all on at the same time. I get that anxiety with Vampire Weekend, Nicholas Payton and Flagboy Giz all opposite each other on Saturday, April 27.

Those are taste-based issues, though. There aren’t many days where two shows share similar audiences, and April 28 is one of them when Juvenile and Anderson .Paak and the Free Nationals will force many fans to decide where to go or how to split their time. On Saturday, May 4, loud guitars will take center stage with Neil Young and Crazy Horse at one end of the Fair Grounds and Greta Van Fleet at the other. Still, those are very different acts, really only united by their love of heavy guitars. Other days present headliners on the big three stages that appeal to different audiences:

• Thursday, April 25: Widespread Panic, The Beach Boys, Stephen Marley

• Friday, April 26: The Killers, Jon Batiste, Kem

• Saturday, April 27: Chris Stapleton, Vampire Weekend, Fantasia

• Sunday, April 28: Anderson .Paak, Heart, Juvenile and Mannie Fresh

• Thursday, May 2: The Rolling Stones

• Friday, May 3: Foo Fighters, Hozier, Steel Pulse

• Saturday, May 4: Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Greta Van Fleet, Queen Latifah

• Sunday, May 5: Trombone Shorty and Orleans Ave., Bonnie Raitt, Earth, Wind & Fire

While the choices don’t look as hard as they have in some past years, they’re more inviting simply because they look fresher. Across the board, this year’s festival appears to have more new or less familiar names at the Fair Grounds, including local bands and Jazz Tent acts. In some cases, familiar artists will play on new stages, like Mardi Gras Indians band 79ers Gang, who’ll move from the Jazz and Heritage Stage to the larger Congo Square, where they’ll play Friday, May 3 at 12:30pm.

This year’s Jazz Fest certainly relies less on rock ’n’ roll’s greatest generation than it has in the past. The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, The Beach Boys and Bonnie Raitt still fly that flag, but the ‘90s are well represented this year and likely signify the direction for the future.

For years, Jazz Fest seemed to cater to baby boomers, but that may have been a misread. It may have been that the festival aimed at an age group, not a generation, people in their 40s, 50s and early 60s who still have the rock ’n’ roll heart to want to travel for the festival, the knees and backs to enjoy it, and the disposable income to make it happen. This year and last year, it looks like the festival is booking mission-appropriate bands that now appeal to Generation X, and while they don’t have the same cultural cachet as some of the stars from the early 1970s, neither did Raitt or Jimmy Buffett at the time.

The release of the schedule means Jazz Fest is less than a month away, and that single day tickets are on sale now. If you want tickets for under $100, get them in advance because they will be $105 at the gate. We all knew this day was coming, but it’s still a hard number to see.

We’ll be back in the upcoming weeks to go through this year’s international acts from Columbia and to rate the days. Personally, I think Saturday, April 27 looks particularly good because I will interview Boyfriend that day at 3:30 pm on the Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage. She has staged some of the biggest spectacles at Jazz Fest, a festival not known for spectacle, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that. I have interviewed her many times including once about her love of Amy Grant’s first Christmas album for my Twelve Songs of Christmas podcast. I look forward to the occasion to see where we’ll go this time.