Issue Articles — Features
Blue Sky: Allman-Betts Band messing with tradition
The very name of the Allman-Betts Band is steeped in music history. And so’s the band itself, led by Duane Betts and Devon Allman, the sons of Dickey Betts and Gregg Allman. If any band ever seemed cosmically destined to play hard-driving, Southern-styled blues-rock, it would be this one.
Another Heart and Another Ann Savoy
Ann Savoy doesn’t have an exact count of how many performances she’s done at Jazz Fest over the course of the 45 years since she first played there. But it’s a lot: 80? 90? Maybe as many as 100?
A Hell of a Ride: Mac McAnally of the Coral Reefer Band
Singer and guitarist Mac McAnally isn’t about to forget the last time he saw his longtime friend and musical partner Jimmy Buffett. “It was 24 hours before he passed, and I was there with [Coral Reefer Band] keyboardist Mike Utley. ‘Keep the party going’ was exactly what he said to us—and then he put his hand on his heart and said, ‘What a hell of a ride.’ Those were the last things we ever heard him say. And what I saw on his face was that big smile, the one you always saw from him, whether he was onstage or at the grocery store, or the smile that you could just feel when you were hearing him sing. And he took that smile with him to the next place.”
Finding Something Epic: Béla Fleck’s Bluegrass Heart
Trying something he’s never tried before is a passion for Béla Fleck. Trying something no one has tried before—on the banjo at least—is a calling. “Yeah, that’s my happy place,” he says, truly beaming on a video chat from his Nashville home. “To try to find something epic, or at least that I perceive as epic. Whether it’s epic or not, it’s enough to get me to feel like it’s worth going to work every day—if you call this work.”
Farewell Tour: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Jazz Fest debut
When you’ve been a band for 58 years and played a key role in country-rock history, you’re entitled to a long goodbye. So it is that the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is playing Jazz Fest toward the start of its farewell tour, but they don’t intend to wrap it up right away.
Bad-ass Babe: Ghalia Volt is a lot about feel
Ghalia Volt is one bad-ass babe. Though I came late to her raucous blues-rock party—she first hit town in 2014 and made New Orleans her homebase in 2017, when she Let the Demons Out on her Ruf Records debut with local bar-band faves Mama’s Boys—I became an instant convert when I blasted her latest release Shout Sister Shout! in my earbuds and kept it in heavy rotation.
From Visual Art to Musical Freedom: Indys Blu is a rising vocal star
During Indys Blu’s recent set at the Jazz & Heritage Foundation’s Chanteuse Series, she nonchalantly took hold of a full room mostly unfamiliar with her music and, step by step, made them feel her and wanting more. This is what can happen when songwriting shines, delivery glows, and energy reciprocates. The fact that she pulled it off with slower-tempo songs made her sheer talent and studied style even more striking.
A “Baron” of Philadelphia: Pianist Kenny Barron loves to play in New Orleans
Pianist and composer, the hugely talented Kenny Barron, 80, jumped into the jazz scene when he was still in high school and through circumstances met and performed with the legendary and progressive saxophonist Yusef Lateef. Lateef would become a major influence in his life.
The Songbird of Wassoulou: Oumou Sangaré is always moving
Quint Davis and his team basically built the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival from the ground up decades ago. But they didn’t build it from the ground up the way Malian singer and cultural activist Oumou Sangaré built the Festival International du Wassulu for its inaugural edition in 2017.
A Personal Essay: The Rolling Stones
Mick Jagger taught me how to dance, as anyone who saw me strut my stuff on the dance floor in my prime can attest. Like many other smalltown Yankees in the ’60s, I was first introduced to the blues by the Rolling Stones, who mined the motherlode of music by Black artists from the deep south and its northern outpost in Chicago by listening to “race records” far more available in England than in Jim Crow America.
