First impressions favorable; Jazz Fest 2019

Notes on Jazz Fest 2019.

Clay Parker and Jodi James.

“This is an album that will need to be listened to and not just played in the background. It has to marinate in your musical soul--It is for select tastes and for discriminating ears. It will make an impression…it will.”  -John Apice, No Depression

For several hours in the days preceding Jazz Fest I do my research to plan each day.  The smaller, more intimate stages?  An interview an artist?  The cooking demonstrations, for crying out loud?  Or a plunge into the maelstrom of the mega-stages to hear Widespread Panic or Gary Clark, Jr.?  On our first day of festival this year, we started off at the small somewhat shade-blessed venue called the Lagniappe Stage** (lagniappe is, according to Mark Twain, a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get, see footnote).

My choice to start our first day at Jazz fest this year was the singer-songwriter duo Clay Parker and Jodie James.  Both play guitar, and the performance was a duet with vocal harmonies and shared leads.  I immediately was reminded of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.  The reviewer in the magazine Acoustic Guitar reports that their music “drifted in from another, much simpler time”, but their stories are not simple. 

I got the impression that these two are very serious artists with something to say, and they’re going to be bringing their music on the road for some time to come.  They’re both from Baton Rouge LA, and it sounds like Jodi was convinced first that musicianship could be a full time job.  Clay left his warehouse job to follow Jodi “following streams of Southern music sources, generating a lifestyle tinged with the mystery of traditional Americana”.  Although I did not hear this at the show I saw, apparently they can mix mellow psychedelia and “cosmic country” into their classical harmonies.  They met Ethan Hawke at a hootenanny in a small town north of Baton Rouge, and ended up being cast for a performance part in the movie “Blaze”, in 2018. 

Do you know the story of Stone Soup?  A traveler arrives with only stones in his pocket to offer the townfolk.  However, as a result of the generosity of the citizens with their added offerings of garden produce and other necessities, the pot which at first held only stones is soon filled with a wonderful soup.  The story is a metaphor for the creation of the duo’s new album. “The recording came together in an interesting way first and foremost because we’re poor,” jokes Clay. “There were people that simply heard us and believed in what we were doing and offered their services for next to nothing. That’s really how this record came about.” 

The record is called The Lonesomest Sound That Can Sound, referencing a Woody Guthrie lyric. Closer listening will most certainly be rewarded if you like great songs, and listening to the entire album on Spotify is on my to-do list.

  spotify:album:4Mt36LkeXrgaRTyyqM6TOq (I am not sure if this is helpful, but it’s the Spotify “URI”).

That’s how we started, auspicious indeed.  Tomorrow, the planned lineup is as follows:

-Jon Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen
-Little Feat
-The Radiators
-John Fogerty

There hangs a tale, and I plan to tell my version of it in this very blog.   

**“ We picked up one excellent word—a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word—"lagniappe." They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish—so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a "baker's dozen." It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop—or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know—he finishes the operation by saying—"Give me something for lagniappe."The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor — I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely. When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans—and you say, "What, again?—no, I've had enough;" the other party says, "But just this one time more—this is for lagniappe." When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his "I beg pardon—no harm intended," into the briefer form of "Oh, that's for lagniappe."  -Mark Twain, from Life on the Mississippi, 1883.