New Orleans Jazz Fest 2013: An Off-Year Marked by Virtual Milestones

Jazz Fest Now: A Cultural Extravaganza, Actually and Virtually

The evolution of corporate sponsorship aggressively seized new ground in 2000, when festival organizers, reluctant at that point to auction off naming rights to the event itself, instead made a deal with Acura that included a total redesign of Jazz Fest’s largest stage, which had formerly been dedicated to the roots-music, folk hero known as Professor Longhair, a keyboard innovator who mixed syncopated rhythms in a uniquely New Orleans style and whose rediscovery in the fest’s earliest years came to symbolize a much larger 20th-century New Orleans music and culture revival. And where local sponsors had once been the event’s underwriting foundation, national corporations now began showing up along the accoutrements of big-event production, including giant video screens beside each of the event’s three largest venues, well-hidden hospitality tents for corporate employees and guests only, and VIP ticket packages that included exclusive access to newly built viewing stands as well as now-roped-off stage front patches of real estate. Soon after, festival organizers questioned the ability of the event’s long-time, hometown producers to corral headliners big enough to dramatically inflate attendance numbers and offset potential rainouts and the potential of other year-to-year investment risks.

In 2004, a “plea-bargaining” agreement was announced: from now on, Festival Productions would partner with AEG (http://aegworldwide.com/), a multinational corporate monster that not only controls a majority share in the international business of booking of big music acts and other live-entertainment blockbusters (like circuses, stage shows, and a variety of popular exhibitions), but also owns entire chains of venues in which these cultural spectacles are staged. The ability to harvest a variety of entertainment segments helps explain, for instance, the context-jarring makeup of this year’s top-shelf headliners, which included Billy Joel, The Black Keys, John Mayer, Maroon 5, Fleetwood Mac, Jill Scott, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Cliff, Phoenix, Patti Smith, and Kem. It also helps explain why, despite the imposition of inclement conditions, organizers claimed only a slight drop in overall attendance numbers, from 450,000 last year to 425,000 this year.

So what makes Jazz Fest’s transition to digital accessibility such a significant cultural milestone? In simple terms, the ongoing construction of a media landscape enveloping all of American culture in which players have divided themselves into either channels of distribution or providers of the content that populates those channels, or platforms, to use the current terminology. In that world, AXS TV, promotes itself as “the premier source on television for 100% live music” and “the largest independently owned and operated network … [whose] partners include [Dallas Maverick’s owner] Mark Cuban, AEG Worldwide Productions, Ryan Seacrest Media, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), and CBS.” In this brave new world of corporate culturization, the coin of the realm is rapidly becoming the ability to simultaneously stage gigantic spectacles and ensure widespread digital access, creating in the process, to use the current jargon, content and distribution “synergies.” Jazz Fest audiences got a glimpse into the future, for example, when Bruce Springsteen essentially commandeered a closing set on the Acura Stage in 2006 to stage what basically amounted to a CD-release party for We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.

This year’s event unveiled more of what audiences can expect in the future with the January release of Aaron Neville’s Blue Note Label debut, My True Story, followed by the ruby-throated singer’s formal resignation from The Neville Brothers, a live Brooklyn concert with Paul Simon and Joan Osborne as guests filmed as a PBS special and then sold as a DVD just in time for Neville’s closing-act Jazz Fest appearance. But even while those kinds of carefully pre-arranged media synergies will more than likely shape the list of festival headliners to come, avid fans of live music and especially fans roots-based live music can rest assured that within the inflated confines of a grab-bag mainstream pop festival there will still remain performers and performances worth the challenge of a trip to New Orleans — they will exist at the peripheries and more-marginalized venues, but will remain sublime and unique experiences nonetheless, as the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival increasingly becomes a multi-platform, multi-audience-segment, music-and-culture extravaganza increasingly shaped by the digital age in which we now live.

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