New Orleans JazzFest

Allman rebirth arrives

On faith in better days ahead at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Tuesday, May 08, 2007

I wept with joy at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on Saturday, experiencing one of those transcendent moments in live performance when the currents of song, life and legacy run together into something achingly sublime.

The Allman Brothers Band supplied the songs, two hours of bluesy, guitar-driven bliss. And I was right there, standing in the muddy, beer-stained infield of the fairground racetrack. I came to JazzFest as a fan, not a newspaper man. Yet in the middle of all that, I felt connected with a larger story — about hope, about New Orleans, about faith in better days to come.

Here's my confession: Before Saturday, I hadn't been to the festival in at least 15 years. I certainly didn't consider going in 2006, the first JazzFest after Hurricane Katrina. How could I party and play with a clear conscience knowing the city lay in devastation all around me?

I didn't intend to take the trip this year, either, but the Allman Brothers lured me back.

I know, I know: The Allmans are not a New Orleans band, even though the spirit of jazz and improvisation is all over their playing. The real connection is in their story, which is all about rebirth. Certainly, the familiar lyrics Gregg Allman sang to New Orleans at the top of Saturday's show were not chosen by coincidence:

I have not come ... to testify ... about our bad, bad misfortune. I ain't here a-wonderin' why. But I'll live on. And I'll be strong. Because it just ain't my cross to bear.

The Allman Brothers have for decades been chased by the ghost of death. Their founder and leader, slide guitar maestro Duane Allman, died in 1971 just as the band was reaching its prime — setting off a chain of tragedies, and more death, that made it almost impossible for the band to survive.

Duane played with a jagged, emotional intensity that just couldn't be duplicated. I gave up on the Allmans a few years after his death. There were just too many holes, too much grief, too many silent spaces in the new music.But now the Allmans are hot again, so hot it might be argued that they're playing their best music, ever. Several years ago, they picked up young slide guitarist sensation Derek Trucks — a nephew of Allmans drummer Butch Trucks — and with the infusion of new passion, the spark has returned. Never before in Jazz Fest history, proclaimed the stage announcer at Saturday's show, had so many people gathered at the Gentilly Stage to watch a set.

The Allmans have not forgotten loss. But they've transcended it. Through their triumphant shows, they demonstrate that we can all know a place where it no longer hurts to remember — and even honor — a past that is lost to us, even as we create anew. Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes solo that way, pulling quotes from the old songs in tribute, then launching into new, beautiful atmospheres. It's clear everyone on stage is having fun again. The tears, I suppose, arise from that shared understanding of vulnerability and possibility, our shared griefs and joys, and the human capacity to grow beyond it.

I'll live on. And I'll be strong.

There's nothing you can do but try to hold fast to that idea in present-day New Orleans, even as you understand that the tragedy of Katrina can never be undone, never be made right. Just driving by the McDonogh high school made me shiver — knowing, what I know now, the stories of children and parents from that district who didn't make it out of Katrina alive.

"It haunts me still," a New Orleanian named Gary Migliori remarked to me Saturday afternoon as we shared a patch of shade next to a jambalaya booth on the festival grounds. He was just about my age, but what struck me was the palpable astonishment in his eyes as he shared his memory of seeing nothing but water on each side of the Independence Highway.

"It felt unreal," he said. "It was like I was in a movie, even though I saw it all with my own eyes."

New Orleans will never be the same. It can't be. We can only hope, in life as in music, thatwith the passage of time, infused by new energy and a respect for legacy, that we will come to know a brighter day. Different. But every bit as beautiful in its own, new time.

bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967