Whatever your opinion is about Quint Davis, the Executive Producer of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, you gotta admit it: the man and his team run a really awesome festival.
Because the Jazz Fest has a major influence on the New Orleans economy, both in the mega sense and down to the micro economy of giving local musicians the ability to play for pay and get exposure to potential fans from all over the planet, Davis is arguably the most important person in the New Orleans music industry.
In fact, the Jazz Fest has put New Orleans’ and Louisiana’s music, food, heritage and culture into the international public’s consciousness in a way that nothing else ever has. In that respect, Davis is, arguably, the most important man to Louisiana’s culture in the last 30 years.
I visited Davis in the New Orleans Festival Productions office just a week after the 2003 Jazz Fest, after he and his staff had had a few days to catch up on their sleep after this year’s Fest.
The office is on the second floor of an older unassuming office building at 336 Camp Street in New Orleans Central Business District. The first thing I noticed in the office is the Louis Armstrong print hanging about the receptionist’s desk (the same one I have in my dining room at home), the really intimate photographs that any fan of New Orleans music would cut off his (or her!) right arm to have: photos by Michael P. Smith and Herman Leonard. Photos of New Orleans musical greats—both living and passed away.
Quint Davis is still tired from the 2003 Jazz Fest—it shows in his eyes. But he’s relaxed and content and shows me proudly around his office, telling me about the poster in Hebrew advertising a B.B. King concert, explaining the beaded Nigerian hangings that adorn several walls of his office.
This guy’s casual dress (he’s in turquoise shorts and a multi-colored short-sleeved shirt) belie the fact that he heads up Festival Productions in New Orleans and the huge budget he oversees to produce the Jazz Fest as well as the upcoming Essence Festival in July.
What is your typical Jazz Fest day like?
We basically have one crew of people that does the Fair Grounds and a different crew that does the night shows but I do both, so I’m going from 6:30, 7 in the morning, I go over to the Fair Grounds about 8 and then go straight from there to the night shows, so I might get home around 2. And then get up and go again. So that’s like three or four hours of sleep. But I think about the people out there in the audience.
When I look out at the audience, I think, ‘I’m working 20-something hours a day and I think I’m getting tired. But these people out here, they’re going out longer than I am.’ And they’re hearing more music—they’re going out all night. And they’re back here the next day. So Festival-goers really work hard at this.
It’s a little hard when you’re out at that field for 12 hours—8 ’til 8—and you’ve got 1,500 musicians and 70,000 people in that wide-open space, to then go into a room with one band and 300 people. My hat’s off to the Festival-goers! Golly!
I thought the City coming up with money for an extra day of Jazz Fest was a good thing to do.
The extra day is such a no-brainer. It came out of an economic development initiative, along with Mo’ Music and the City wanting to use the Festival to market and integrate with the music industry. The economic impact of a day at the festival is two nights at the clubs, taxes, limos. I went to a Saints game where I was doing the entertainment for the halftime and two bus drivers came running out and said, ‘Thank you for the new day! We drive the shuttle busses to the Festival and it gave us another day of work.’ Even I didn’t realize how far the ripples went—I would think music clubs, waiters, waitresses, restaurants, food suppliers. How many pounds of crawfish and shrimp and French bread and paper plates get serviced through the Jazz Fest, just in the food operation? It really ripples everywhere.
Essence and Jazz Fest are festivals but they’re more—they’re like the Funk Olympics or something. New Orleans, whether it’s the Superbowl or the Final Four or the Sugar Bowl or Mardi Gras, has the best infrastructure for mega-special events of any city, I think, in the world. Cultural tourism is really what we can do best.
Most of my life I spent on the road. I spent 20 years with more than six months not here. That was because with festivals, you’ve gotta go to them. They don’t come to you. When Essence came along, there’s now two events that are sorta world in nature, that are much bigger than just a New Orleans event would be. So now I get to be here—from September until the middle of July. Between the two events, they’re driving more than half-a-billion dollars for the city. I’d love to see another one in August. It would really be good for the city.
When we started to do Essence on the Fourth-of-July weekend, you could shoot a cannon down the sidewalk and the ball would end up rolling, not hitting anybody. That was back when the conventional wisdom was you can’t doing anything in New Orleans in the summertime ’cause it’s too hot, which it is. But we said, “You’ve got the two best indoor air conditioned facilities in the country—the Superdome and the Convention Center—with 25,000 air conditioned hotel rooms in between, number one. Number two, you mean to tell me that people in Houston and Dallas and Atlanta can’t come to New Orleans in the summertime ’cause it’s hot? You think the rest of the world’s cool? You ever been to Houston in the summertime?”
From the cultural standpoint, the reason that we can have the kind of festivals that we do, that are New Orleans in nature, is because of New Orleanians. You could book all these bands from Jazz Fest, and take them to Iowa or Boston or anywhere, and it wouldn’t be Jazz Fest. It wouldn’t be anything like it. Because the New Orleanians are what makes it go. Because they’re music people, they’re of the spirit of what it is. So when somebody from out-of-town comes, they’re not just coming to see New Orleans bands—they’re out there with, I think, the greatest people in the world: New Orleans people.
If you hadn’t met George Wein, what would you be doing now?
That’s a real good question that no one’s ever asked me. All of this has been a total surprise to me. It’s not luck, it’s some kind of unbelievable blessing. It’s beyond imagination.
Would you have been in the festival business?
I never had a business head, a business sense. I just fell into it, lifestyle-wise. I was half a dropout and I was taking ethnomusicology. I was going to every gospel concert in town.
My dad didn’t have a dad and he was a self-made man who put himself through Harvard. His first-born son tells him he’s dropping out of college to live in a station wagon with Professor Longhair. I was hanging out in Shrewsbury blues clubs, I was going to Gloria’s, I was just living a lifestyle. I wasn’t hanging out with Led Zeppelin or Janis Joplin. I was involved with jazz and gospel and blues in the early ’60s—those are really non-commercial forms of music, even to this day. And then along comes probably the only guy in history that’s made a real viable, major industry of these musics that I particularly, personally loved—George Wein. He’s the only person I’ve ever worked for. When I’m 75 years-old, George Wein will still be my boss.
How did George train you for what you do now?
The first thing I ever do for George Wein is fly to Copenhagen and meet Duke Ellington and his orchestra to go with them on their first tour behind the Iron Curtain. I was 20. I’d never done anything in music. We did 44 shows in 42 days with no days off. I didn’t know what a tour was.
I met George in 1969. I worked on the first [New Orleans] festival in 1970. George was always looking for kids who wanted to do something.
The first festival I ever worked was the riot at Newport when they burned the stage down under my feet, while I was on it. Then in 1971, I took both B.B. King and Muddy Waters to Africa for the first time in history. I was the road manager, tour manager, stage manager—just me. Now how bizarre is that?
A lot of my career is a testament to what you can do if you don’t know any better. You just go do it.
A lot of people think that my dad was involved [in my career], but actually my dad didn’t get involved until three or four years later. George didn’t know my dad. Then he met my dad and asked him to get involved in the festival and save the festival by going to the bank.
At that point, I wasn’t really hired per se. I did the Jazz Fest for a few months, I started doing tours every year from November ’til the summer. Or I’d go to Nice and stage-manage. I just started doing stuff. These tours were really sink-or-swim. One guy who had done a tour with Chuck Berry had a nervous breakdown. I did two of ’em.
I was really fortunate because at the time, during the ’60s when there was Woodstock and hippies and all that stuff, I had fallen in with some real professionals—George Wein, his partner Dino St. Angelo, Bob Jones. These are people who had been doing it for 20 years. I did everything. I tore tickets at the gate, I road-managed, I stage-managed. I was learning from George in ways that were almost subconscious. He would tell me things—simple little lessons that would take me years to understand them.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned, working for George Wein and Festival Productions?
George told me once, “What you have to learn, if you want do something important, importance only comes from longevity. What you have to learn is the economics of creativity. Otherwise, you’ll just do something once that’ll cost a lot, lose a lot of money and it’ll never happen again. You have to master the economics of creativity.”
It took me years to understand what the hell he was talking about. People think about art and music and “I don’t want to be bothered with business—business sucks.” But there’s an economics to creativity. George really understands the bottom line. You would be amazed how many people don’t—people in the rock business, people who handle millions of dollars don’t know where the bottom line is. They just have such a big cash flow they don’t have to know the bottom line. George knows what a bottom line is, how to construct it, where to find it, how to maintain it.
I had the opportunity to learn real old school ethics. George is a totally ethical person, but he’s a professional. He’s not a wild hairy-ass rock guy running around with a bunch of money. He taught me how to apply a financial architecture to an artistic structure. You have to do that to stay in business and keep something going. We’ve been doing this for three generations.
How do you feel about the evolution of the Jazz Fest to what it’s become today?
There’s a lot of things that some people don’t like [about the Jazz Festival] and sometimes, they’re more vocal than their percentage but as this festival has evolved, first of all, it’s gotten big. It used to be only 5,000 people, it used to be only in a tiny little part of the [Fair Grounds] infield. Now it’s got 12 stages and 1,500 musicians a day and 90,000 people a day. If you just don’t like the fact that it’s a big festival, there’s going to be a certain thing that you just don’t like. The reason it got big is because people liked it. The only way to keep that from happening would have been to put on a really bad festival and people would’ve stopped coming.
The festival, when you look at it, is still a funky, folky little thing. It’s not very flashy or dressed-up. Underneath this funky, folky surface is an enormously complex and sophisticated operation. But it’s really produced by a bunch of people that are not high-powered music executives from Clear Channel or something. It’s all us kids [!] that grew up doing it. Most people have been there for 15, 20 years, and kind of grew up with it.
How do you feel about the fall in the attendance this year and the financial ramifications?
As it gets bigger and more people like it, there’s a certain financial reality to maintain. The festival has so many different facets and so many little stages and stuff. Some people don’t like sponsorship at all. Some people would just like it to be a little festival like it was.
The budget was pretty much the same this year. We had some dire circumstances with the war coming and people not traveling, we didn’t know if there would be another 9-11 in the United States. We had some scenarios to cut the festival way down. We had some cancellations. The festival could’ve been canceled.
There were no more local groups than there ever were. What was going on in the society with 9-11, with the war, with SARS, with the economy, with tourism being off and our numbers being down…unless something happened that would directly—like 9-11, when no one would get on a plane—then we would have had to really downsize it, eliminate stages. We had options to have to do that. There are four different levels of threat status that trigger all kinds of stuff, but we—the Jazz Foundation that foots the bill—really held the budget firm but went ahead with a full-size festival. We really didn’t cut. We didn’t back off of booking anything.
I’ve heard nothing but raves about this year’s festival and much of it was about the Fair Grounds being less crowded.
After the Dave Matthews year, we really built a model of the festival that can comfortably hold about 130,000 people. So when we have 70,000…!
The music was fairly extraordinary this year at all levels. The openness [of the infield] made it breathe more to people. So the combination of the music we had, no rain, and this feeling of not having one day that’s like a Mardi Gras day on Canal Street. Even the second weekend, when the numbers were back up. We’ve had five years in a row without a drop of rain. We used to have big deluges every year. That’s been a big factor.
George has done 50 years of festivals, thousands of festivals. Whatever a festival is, this one—the 2003 Jazz Festival—was a truly great festival. It blew me away.
The sum is greater than the parts. When you get all the people out there and that feeling of interaction where the music is reaching their souls and they’re all happy about it, it’s a great festival. What’s not to like?
