Music Doc combines Funky Delights with Lots of Heart

Anybody who’s been to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival could tell you that the hardest part of making a movie about the annual event, which takes up two weekends in late April and early May in the Crescent City, would have to be fitting it all in.

Jazz Fest showcases over 7,000 musicians on 14 stages in eight days in a town whose music is a gumbo of every style and sound that has passed through the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the delta, and the swamps to its west. The festival is gloriously overwhelming, an embarrassment of riches that forces you to pick and choose and be open to surprises any time the wind changes and you hear something special coming from a stage where you didn’t know you absolutely had to be.

Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern tried hard to combine all that into one movie. “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,”It is both impossible and irresistible. I have been to Jazz Fest numerous times and was frustrated. “Jazz Fest”It was thrilling, but also frustrating.

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The inspiring documentary was premiered at SXSW Film Fest on Wednesday. Sony Pictures Classics will release it on May 13th, five days after the conclusion to the first Jazz Fest for three years. (The 2021 and 2020 fests were cancelled due to COVID. The film is akin to the festival. You see a lot, but you also miss a lot. And you can enjoy the city’s aura, as Gregory Porter, a jazz singer, says. “The air is thick, not just with humidity. It’s thick with culture.”

“Jazz Fest” showcases New Orleans talent (the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Irma Thomas and Aaron Neville, among many others) and visiting stars (Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry and Earth, Wind and Fire … ); it has rock and gospel and blues and Cajun and zydeco and hip-hop and yes, even some jazz.

It’s got “When the Saints Go Marching In”Louis Armstrong at the beginning “When the Saints Go Marching In” by Trombone Shorty at the end, because it’s 93 minutes long and in New Orleans you can’t go that long without hearing “Saints”Minimum of twice

It’s a history lesson you can dance to, and at times it’s an unexpectedly mournful and moving portrait of a city that has an intimate relationship with death and damage.

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Marshall and Suffern examine the festival through a lens of the 50th Jazz Fest 2019. Although the majority are from this year, the film uses footage from other years. The festival began in 1971 with an event that featured Mahalia Jackson and Duke Ellington.

After an opening barrage of clips and quotes designed to give a sense of what it’s like between the stages, the tents and the food stands on the fairgrounds where the festival is held, the film starts out chronologically but quickly becomes more thematic. It includes brief sections on the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, on New Orleans’ jazz funerals, on Mardi Gras Indians, on Cajun and zydeco music and on the jazz side of Jazz Fest through a performance by Ellis Marsalis and his four sons (Wynton, Bradford, Delfeayo and Jason) in 2019.

Some segments of the program are too short. More Mardi Gras Indians please!However, Jazz Fest is a place where everyone has their priorities and their own interpretation of the festival. You might be in the crowd for Jimmy Buffett while I’m across the fairgrounds watching BeauSoleil, and nobody’s Jazz Fest is any better or more correct than anyone else’s. Boyfriend, a performer and singer, observes in one of her numerous insightful observations that the greatest joy in Jazz Fest is finding the unexpected. “Walking from one stage to another … whether you want to or not, you’re going to experience something that your computer wouldn’t have put in your feed.”

So this isn’t my Jazz Fest movie; it’s Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern’s Jazz Fest movie. Irma performing the Big Easy songs might be my favorite highlight. “Iko Iko”And “Hey Pocky Way,”Sonny Landreth plays a mean guitar. The Glen David Andrews Brass Band is romping through “I Can Do Bad Myself”Al Green is back to his secular material and he does so with a powerful “Let’s Stay Together.” For somebody else, it’ll be all about the scenes set in the Gospel Tent, or about Katy Perry or Pitbull or Samantha Fish or Herbie Hancock.

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However, the last half-hour will be decisive. “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” brings it home with a stunning section devoted to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Jazz Fest that followed eight months later and became a symbol of the city’s resilience. The film begins with footage of the devastation and ends with the sad sounds of Gary Clark Jr. “I Got My Eyes on You” (“I left home to never come back … ”), and then moves into a Bruce Springsteen performance of “My City of Ruin”Springsteen calls himself “one of the most beautiful concert experiences I’ve ever had.”(I was there that day, so I fully agree.

This is in many ways the core of the film. The sequence that emphasizes how “Jazz Fest,”Like “Summer of Soul”Like many fine music documentaries, it’s about more than just the songs. But you can’t end a movie about Jazz Fest with a guy from New Jersey, so Marshall and Suffern find just the right coda: the angelic voice of Aaron Neville, whose Neville Brothers used to close the festival every year, caressing “Amazing Grace,”Then, the final “When the Saints Go Marching In”Trombone Shorty.

Jimmy Buffett (an honorary New Orleanian, and an executive producer for the film) gets the final credits spot for a version “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – and strangely enough, maybe that song by a pair of Brits is an apt way to end: I could give you a long list of artists and songs and themes I wanted to see in “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,” but I can’t really argue with the necessary stuff that is here.

The end comes out as follows: “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” is a movie to approach the same way you approach the festival: Move quickly, don’t worry about what you miss and rejoice in the funky delights in front of you.

“Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story”Sony Pictures Classics will release it in theaters on May 13,

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