Intense but brief rainstorms put a damper on about half of New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival’s fourth day on Thursday (April 28), with performances from blues-rock guitarists Sonny Landreth and Gary Clark Jr., activist singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, soul band The Suffers, dynamic folk icon Buffy Sainte-Marie and headliners Elvis Costello and The Imposters and Flo Rida. Here are the highlights from day four (all times local).
1:30 p.m. Kam Franklin, the charismatic lead singer of The Suffers, sits down with Billboard in her backstage trailer off Congo Square Stage as the rain starts to come down. She’s texting with Jim James — lead singer of My Morning Jacket, playing Jazz Fest tomorrow — about where to eat breakfast in the band’s hometown of Houston, at a coffee shop where a friend works. “My friend just texted me saying, ‘I think Jim James is here’ and I told her, ‘No, that can’t be right he’s in New Orleans.’”
Franklin likes to joke around and mess with her friends, but when she mentioned that her birthday is the same as the late Prince, she became more thoughtful. “It doesn’t feel like he’s dead to me just yet,” she said. “It feels like a lot of Prince parties going on. But I know he’s not coming back and it’s really really rough. Also I never got to see him play, and, yeah, it took a little bit of a toll. But the show must go on.”
The Suffers have been on quite a ride in the last year, with an especially impressive rise in notoriety since the release of their self-titled debut full length in February, with appearances on The Daily Show and other late-night appearances. “A few years ago, we were all working our day jobs and I never thought we’d ever get to do… the Jazz Fests and the late-night shows,” Franklin said. “I never really thought I’d have access to those types of things. Once we started changing our brand and how we promote ourselves, it was a matter of ‘Oh, we can’t do that because we’re [based out of] Houston…’ it became, ‘because we’re in Houston, what can we do differently?’”
2:10 p.m. Sonny Landreth is finishing up his early-in-the-day set at Acura Stage with rain pouring so hard you can barely hear his band’s rollicking blues-rock guitar interplay. A distant clap of thunder, followed shortly by one much closer mid-song, gives Landreth and his band license to play a final one and they leave the stage a little earlier than scheduled. Within the hour, the rain has passed and the sun is out, shining bright.
2:40 p.m. Buffy Sainte-Marie is in the middle of “It’s My Way” at the Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage, an indoors interview stage where she’s drawn quite a crowd seeking refuge from the train. An Oscar winner for co-writing “Up Where We Belong” from the 1982 film An Officer And A Gentlemen, Sainte-Marie began her career as a ’60s Grenwich Village folkie (though she called herself “kind of an outsider” in that scene). She rose to fame in her native Canada amid contemporaries like Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
“People have looked at me as parts of the truths that I am: Native American, really strong sounds, I have a real connection to that pop ’50s sound, the Southern sound, that Italian New York kind of sound… I like all that sound,” Sainte-Marie said, also having released what is considered the first quadraphonic vocal album ever in 1969. “Coming up in the folk music era — I suppose coming up in any era — when a company is trying to market something and target something, there’s a lot that gets left out.”
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3:10 p.m. Gary Clark Jr. and his band are showing they’re lean and mean blues-rock machines on Acura Stage with “Next Door Neighbor Blues” and “Travis County”. “I hope you don’t mind if we go really wild for a second,” Clark muttered, one of the few quick moments he piped up between songs. His band locked into the killer groove of “When My Train Pulls In”, slowed it down for “Our Love” and segued silently into the super-funky “Cold Blooded”. Clark fit many an extended solo and long jam from his band into his 80-minute set for one of the biggest crowds of the day.
3:40 p.m. Brandi Carlile, like the thunderstorm that came before her, is playing like a force of nature at Gentilly Stage. Her ferocious set rocked the hardest and heaviest of the day, with “Raise Hell”, commenting after, “It might be a little bit messy but this is my first Jazz Fest!” Carlile and her band seemed genuinely stoked to be there, especially given it was a kickoff to their ongoing U.S. tour. Songs included “Wherever is Your Heart”, “Again Today” and “The Eye” featuring bandmembers and twin brothers Tim and Phil Hanseroth in tight three-part harmony.
Speaking with Billboard earlier, Carlile pointed out that while she said she has North Carolina dates scheduled this summer, she would not be cancelling her gigs in the state like Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Bryan Adams have in recent weeks. “I’m a gay artist,” she said. “I’m playing places in North Carolina like The Orange Peel [in Asheville] which holds 900 people. I can tell you unequivocally that 700-800 of those people will be gay. So for me to cancel my shows just disenfranchises gay people. It just further oppresses people that the bill [the quickly passed and signed HB 2] was designed to oppress.” Instead, she said, she wants to “act a congregant leader and get people together to organize musical protest.”
4:10 p.m. The Suffers are delayed by over 20 minutes at Congo Square Stage due to technical difficulties and have to play a shortened but skillful set, ending with their recent single “Peanuts” and hitting on jams like “Stay” and “Gwan”.
4:30 p.m. Buffy Saint-Marie makes her way through a set of varied sounds and sentiments at the Sheraton Fais Do-Do Stage, with “Blue Sunday” (a blues song about her childhood listening), “Generation” (an environmentalist message about the moon landing) and “No No Keshagesh,” which, in her native tribal tongue, means no “greedy guts,” a Beat-like poem protesting wealth inequality. Later, she switches gears to love songs with “Not the Lovin’ Kind” and “Darling Don’t Cry”.
5:30 p.m. Elvis Costello with his band The Impostors waste no time getting into his greatest hits at Gentilly Stage, starting straight away with “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” and “Watching the Detectives”, “Mystery Dance” and “Radio Radio”. It cleared the way for more recent material like “Flutter & Wow” (off 2008’s Momofuku) and his ’80s material (“Beyond Belief”, “Clubland”, “Everyday I Write the Book”).
The second half of his set was dedicated to his friend and New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint. The two collaborated on a seminal post-Katrina album, 2006’s The River in Reverse. Costello arranged Toussaint’s piano-driven “Ascension Day” into guitar for his tribute, following with the album’s title track, the Lee Dorsey-sung/Toussaint-penned classic “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” and other New Orleans R&B standards.
5:50 p.m. For such a day largely dreary and gray, human club-and-radio hit machine Flo Rida has really brightened up the Congo Square Stage proceedings with hooky hits like “Right Round”, with his touring singer Macy K providing the Ke$ha part of the chorus, while his dancers provided choreography. “Where Them Girls At”, “Wild One,” “Club Can’t Handle Me”, “I Don’t Like It, I Love It” and “Whistle” all followed. In the midst of it all, the Miami rapper popped a champagne bottle over the photo pit, in what’s sure to be a Jazz Fest first. Definitely not a Jazz Fest first, but still wonderful fun: Flo Rida bringing up a few dozen audience members on stage to dance and strut their stuff for “Low”.