Producing Africa at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

The gangly teenager in the black frame glasses saunters up to the camera with a lively step. His image flashes across the screen then is gone (Fig. 1). But the laughter in the audience suggests something else. I thought I recognized the young man, but I wasn’t sure, so I asked the filmmaker later. In a broad, knowing smile, he confirmed my speculation. But did everyone in the room recognize him too? Or were they laughing because of the incongruity of his presence? What is this white young man doing here, among the deeply etched faces and dignified dance steps of the African American elders leading the procession? And why does his presence prompt laughter? Growing up in New Orleans in the early 1960s, Quint Davis was introduced to the working class African American performance traditions of second-line parades, jazz funerals, and Mardi Gras Indians by photographer Jules Cahn, who was a friend of the family. The films of Jules Cahn, now archived at the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC), contain several images of a young Quint, at perhaps fourteen years old, bespectacled, wearing long shorts and a plaid shirt, dancing at parades. At around the same time this footage was made by Cahn, Davis’s image was also captured by photographer Lee Friedlander, then in New Orleans working on a project on New Orleans jazz musicians. The music historian and archivist Dick Allen brought Friedlander to the parades, just as he had brought countless others before him (Friedlander 1992). Cahn brought the young Davis, initiating him into a world of black music, tradition, and dignity that most whites in New Orleans ignored or avoided. This footage appears in Royce Osborn’s film All on a Mardi Gras Day—a film that focuses squarely on the black performance traditions that developed in counterpoint to the dominant carnival traditions historically orchestrated by the city’s white elite (see also Smith, this issue). Davis is one of only two white men who appear in the Osborn film. His is thus a notable presence in a documentary whose major actors, cultural historians, carnival experts, and cultural workers are all African American. In documentary films about black culture, white faces are more likely to appear as the historians or other experts than as the research subjects. Osborn’s film cleverly reverses the gaze with this wink at documentary filmmaking tradition. Davis’s cameo as a wiry young second liner arouses knowing smiles among the viewers of the film who know this history. Decades later, Davis would become the producer of one of the most successful music festivals in the world, a major cultural institution in its own right, a landmark site for the display of Louisiana’s cultural heritage, and a powerful economic engine in the city with an economic impact greater than Mardi Gras. In the years since the founding of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1970, Mr. Davis has become not only its executive producer, but also the public face of the festival, often appearing on stage to introduce major acts or to close out a major stage and often giving interviews about the festival and heading up press conferences on its annual music lineup. Because of the festival’s scale, overwhelming success, and influence, it has become a touchstone for discussions around the cultural economy of the city and debates around the commodification of music, culture, and heritage (see Regis and Walton 2008). And while the festival is a complex organization with a broad diversity of participants and social actors, Mr. Davis has also become the focus of festival critics, who sometimes seem to blame him personally for any festival policy or decision with which they disagree. In fact, what surprised me when I first began researching the festival in the early 2000s was the frequency with which New Orleanians referred to Mr. Davis as “Quint” as if they knew him personally, when they had often never met him. The personalization of the festival in the figure of one person, of course, erases the complexity of a sevenday event involving hundreds (if not thousands) of workers and volunteers and running a production company that operates yeararound, presenting events as different as Superdome half-time shows, Essence Festival, and the Bayou Country Superfest. As an anthropologist who studies the festival and its relationship to the city, I am struck by this common confusion of the personal and the institutional. And yet, in some ways, because of the festival producer’s deep love for New Orleans music and culture, it is personal. In interviews with media (as well as this anthropologist) and on the production company’s web site, the work of creating the festival is clearly grounded in the producer’s personal life experiences and commitments (see, for example, www.fpino.com “who we are”). When I first interviewed Davis in 1999 and asked about the role of second-line parades at the festival, he said, “What you are talking about is central to my entire existence.” The way Davis and others talk about parades has to do with the way many New Orleanians understand power, knowledge, and how to get things done. Embodied knowledge, personal relationships, and patron-client ties remain central to day-to-day life in the city. It softens the hard edges of bureaucracy, and it is also a shorthand for representing social dynamics. This paper begins with the figure of Davis as a starting point for a consideration of the intertwined strands of personal and collective heritage that come together in the project of bringing African performers to Jazz Fest. The festival represents music, culture, and heritage. But in its forty-plus year history, it’s also become a site for the creation of heritage. As I shall show, the personal and the collective intertwine in the public dialogues about African and African American music and culture—framed in terms of Diaspora and African heritage at the Festival.1 Since its beginning, one of the central themes of festival was to reconnect roots and branches of American music, so that, for example, gospel, blues, and traditional jazz were shown to be related (and generative of) later popular music styles of rock, soul, and R&B. At some point, the roots of gospel, blues, and jazz were further extended across the Atlantic to Africa. While this reframing of roots and heritage in trans atlantic perspective no doubt reflected the personal interest of festival producers and the distinctive history of New Orleans, it is also a reflection of the festival’s long encounter with cultural 1 Quint Davis circa 1963, marching with the Eureka Brass Band.