urban bicycle journeys

On a Friday morning I left our Lower Garden District New Orleans condo around 9:30 AM to bicycle my usual seventeen mile loop around City Park. Afterward at about 11:00 AM I cycled directly to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for which Tootie and I had multi-day tickets. The previous day we had experienced an exhilarating but tiring six hour mixture of loud music, friends, sun, walking, crowds, and heat. Going solo this next day I just wanted to see a few random performers up close on some of the festival’s fifteen stages.

Jazz Fest takes place at the Fair Grounds Race Course, a horse track in the Esplanade Ridge neighborhood about two miles from the French Quarter and five miles from our condo. The festival starts in late April and runs Thursday through Sunday of two consecutive weekends. It is easy to say the Jazz Fest that has become too huge, expensive and crowded. There are big headline acts like The Rolling Stones who we saw here last year. This year on the first Saturday and Sunday there would be Stevie Nicks, David Byrne, and Rod Stewart. Still, the Fest’s hippyish communal vibes remain from when the event began in 1970.

Near the festival gate on Fortin Street I locked my fat-tired Kona gravel bicycle to a telephone pole on North Lopez Street, a block from the the relatively famous bar-restaurant Liuzza’s On The Track.

On entering one passes the Gospel Tent and I listened briefly to the Edna Karr High School Gospel Choir, from across the river in the Algiers neighborhood of the city. Inside the nearby and half-full Blues Tent a band called Parlor Greens was just getting started. I took a seat on the third row.

Despite being just three guys who do not do vocals they put on a great show. Their sound was instantly fetching and explosive; instrumental grooves on unique musical hooks. If electric music can be old school, Parlor Greens is that.

Now that we all have handheld computers in our pockets I could guiltily look up more information. The musicians are from separate parts of the country but their home base is somewhere between Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio.

Adam Scone did not have a modernist stack of Keith Emerson-like keyboards, just a traditional looking electric organ feeding through a Leslie speaker whose revolving baffle produces that arresting shimmering sound. My late mother was an accomplished church organist who loved traditional pipe instruments and had a big aversion to electric organs. She would not have liked the earblasting funky setup of Adam Scone. I could not get enough of it; I just wanted to drink the sound in.

Guitarist Jimmy James cut an arresting and androgynous figure while brilliantly playing a 1960’s Silvertone guitar, a low end instrument built for the retailer Sears-Roebuck that he and a few others continue to play in 2026. Later in the show Jimmy switched to an ancient looking Fender Stratocaster to show off Hendrix-like squeals and rock-and-roll riffs plucked with his teeth but soon switched back to the Silvertone for catchy melodic blues chord runs.

Drummer Tim Carman looked and dressed like one of my thirty-something son’s golf buddies. Tim is very very good at his craft and his art. Whack!

I grooved to Parlor Greens for forty-five minutes in the Blues Tent but eventually moved on.

Huge crowds were already surrounding the big stages but I was able to stand right in front of the Jazz & Heritage Stage for Bamboula 2000. They are difficult to classify; New Orleanians playing gentle but rhythmic West African sounding music, singing sometimes in English, sometimes in a West African language, often showing Cuban and Haitian influences. There were two fascinating older women on vocals who in between songs talked solemnly about their heritage. There were multiple drummers plus colorful dancers spinning around. The show was not only fetching and danceable but somehow spiritually moving.

I moved on again. Where would be the next great sound and where could I eat lunch while watching that music? Jazz Fest is famous for its local food which comes from all sorts of cultures. I chose the Asianesque shrimp yakamein noodles.

Where to sit? I had not brought a folding chair so I carefully sat on the grassy lawn to watch the local brass and vocal band Free Agents. New Orleans has a long tradition of drums, horns and keyboards but it has not been as much a guitar city. Free Agents had no bass guitar but two tubas, three trumpets and three trombones, and the local setup of two drummers, one bass; one snare. Free Agents upped the game by soulful harmony part singing by the six or seven young men.

What else? Each year in Jazzfest they feature a different country to show the artistic links of that country with New Orleans; this year it was Jamaica. In the Cultural Exchange tent I found the deafeningly loud Silver Birds Steel Orchestra, of Kingston, Jamaica.

The photo above fails to capture the energy created by these young people, mostly women. Their act featured constant dance routines in matching outfits, with rapidly changing shifts in tempo. The crowd loved their take on the Bryan Adams song “I Do It for You.”

It had been almost two hours and I felt my mission, at least for today, was over. I walked out through the gate while others were still arriving. I had plans to come back the next day. I can already say that you should have been there for the David Byrne show.