The New Orleans Jazz and Blues Market Opens Wednesday with Bill Frisell Trio

Inside the renovated New Orleans Jazz and Blues Market

The New Orleans Jazz Market has a new name and a new focus, but it remains the home of the NOJO.

After a rocky start, the New Orleans Jazz & Blues Market will open this week with shows by Bill Frisell Trio and the Bob James Quartet.

The New Orleans Jazz Market at the corner of Oretha Castle Haley and Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards has been renovated and will open with an impressive series of shows with acclaimed and in many cases Grammy Award-winning jazz and blues artists. The renovations took longer than anticipated which meant some of the first shows had to be rescheduled, but venue will open on October 1.

The New Orleans Jazz & Blues Market was built to be the musical home for the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO), and the Market will continue put on NOJO shows, but it has been reconfigured to accommodate four-top tables and chairs in addition to theater and balcony seating. One focus of the renovations was to work with the European company RCF to improve the acoustics to establish the Market as an intimate listening room.

The Jazz & Blues Market opens on October 1 with two shows with the Bill Frisell Trio including Thomas Morgan and Rudy Royston with Gregory Tardy), and nights with Bob James, The Yellowjackets, Grace Kelly, Larry Carlton (playing greatest hits and Steely Dan), Stanley Jordan and Lisa Fisher. Tickets are on sale now.

The venue has been the source of confusion and concern over the last month since the plans including gigs felt more like rumors that scheduled dates. The long-time online home for The New Orleans Jazz Market—theNOJO.com—didn’t mention the shows or include links to a new site, and as of last week, the sign on the side of the building still identified it as the New Orleans Jazz Market. Music fans had to know to go to JazzandBluesMarket.com to discover a list of shows that looked too good to be true. Some who discovered the shows at Ticketmaster wondered if they were real because so many seats remained available for artists who seemed likely to sell out such an intimate room.

Once the venue opens tomorrow, some of those communications issues will sort themselves out as word of mouth and digital mouth take over.

The building was built in 2002 to create a permanent home for the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, and interim manager Suzanne Bresette says the Market’s relationship to the NOJO remains a priority. “We see the value NOJO provides to local musicians, and we will work our hardest to continue growing the Orchestra, providing increased performance opportunities and additional education programming for those willing to learn,” Bresette said in a statement.

Our 2018 story on the death and rebirth of the NOJO.