Catering to the Crowd

Next to Mardi Gras, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Presented by Shell is New Orleans’ largest annual economic event. Figures are conflicting and imprecise and vary from year to year, but most ballpark estimates place the two-weekend festival’s economic impact on the city at over $300 million. Jazz Fest affects the entire city. Hotels, restaurants, music venues, bars, and just about anyone who is at all involved in the hospitality industry (which is most of New Orleans) gets extremely busy around the time of the festival.

Jazz Fest’s attendance has climbed steadily since a 2006 low of 350,000, reaching 475,000 in 2019. Many locals attend the festival, but it’s the huge number of tourists Jazz Fest brings to New Orleans each year that make it such a powerful economic engine. How does the Jazz and Heritage Foundation keep the operation afloat and the very specific and devoted Jazz Fest tourists coming back every year? Do the musicians, artists, and cooks on whose shoulders the entire experience rests get their due, or does the money all go to hoteliers, AirBnB owners, and big-name, out-of-town talent?

The Rain Before the Drought

The culture bearers who make Jazz Fest possible do get a piece of the pie, if only a sliver. As much as people like to gripe about out-of-town artists taking over the festival’s headlining spots, the lineup remains over 75 percent local every year. New Orleans musicians—at least those who play what is considered to be New Orleans roots music—make their best money of the year during the two Jazz Fest weekends and the three-day week between them.

The festival itself pays reasonably, though for many performers, its true benefit is not the actual dollar amount on their paycheck. CDs and merch sell at a higher ratewith the Jazz Fest crowd than any other that comes through New Orleans. There’s also the ever-lauded “exposure bump.” Many artists play Jazz Fest in the hopes that out-of-town bookers and talent buyers will catch their sets and contact them for future touring gigs. It works out for some, but many musicians have played Jazz Fest for decades and received little to no national attention.

“Generally, the money is pretty decent,” says trumpeter Aurélien Barnes, who has played Jazz Fest with Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots (his father’s band), the original lineup of the New Breed Brass Band, Trumpet Mafia, Kings of Brass, and Cha Wa, among others. “I don’t think exposure is that real unless there’s a number associated with it. But it depends how you look at it. It depends what stage you play on. It depends what kind of music you’re playing. There’s some guys that are legends in New Orleans, traditional jazz groups that play in the Economy Hall [Tent] and have been playing there since the ‘70s, and their exposure hasn’t gone up.”

It’s the nighttime gigs at venues throughout the city (but especially around Frenchmen St.) that are the real moneymakers. “A lot of the shows have covers, as opposed to normally, when it’s a lot of free shows,” Barnes says. “And a lot more people will be there, so regardless of if there’s a cover or not, you’ll be making more in tips. Those [shows] are better money than any other time of year.”

Even musicians who never play at the Fairgrounds can reap these rewards, as long as their acts cater to the Jazz Fest crowd. Violinist Adrian Jusdanis, who performs party music in the streets of the Quarter as New Thousand, fondly recalls many of his Jazz Fest shows. “If I were to rank the top ten street performances I’ve had in my life, maybe five of them would be from Jazz Fest weekends,” he says. Jusdanis doesn’t depend on the money he makes during the festival to survive, but it certainly helps. “I did maybe 40 percent better than I typically do on a weekend,” he says. “I’m sitting on a nice chunk of change.”

It’s important to note that many musicians in the city see little benefit from Jazz Fest if their art is incongruent with the festival’s zeitgeist. “I was talking to some friends of mine that are street performers that do more of a low-energy kind of thing, and Jazz Fest is like nothing to them,” Jusdanis says. “Their vibe doesn’t fit into the vibe of the city in that moment.”

Still, directly or not, Jazz Fest does pay dividends to a huge number of New Orleans musicians. For many of them, it’s their last chance to save up for the slow season, which hits hard almost immediately after the festival ends. “Everyone’s coming to spend money in town, and all the musicians are working,” Barnes says. “Everybody’s got gigs, so now’s the time to make your money before the slow summer comes and you’ve got to either be on the road or figure out something else. If you’re not on the road in the summer, it’s slow.”

“Not Having Jazz Fest is Not an Option”

The slow New Orleans summer is not a phenomenon unique to the music industry. Working restaurant jobs, I’ve personally experienced how tight money gets come mid-July, when business dies out completely and spring savings have trickled away. But for artists, especially those whose work caters to a tourist crowd, the situation is even more dire.

At Jazz Fest, I spoke with Dr. Foots, an artist who makes custom-designed, handmade jewelry— 2019 was his 44th year at the festival. “When I came here, my beard was black,” he said, stroking his grey facial hair. He gestured across from his tent at the Congo Square stage where Pitbull’s crew was setting up a massive screen for their light show. “This place would’ve been a dream, the technology and everything,” he said.

Dr. Foots owned a studio in the Treme until it burned down in 2008. “When my mother took sick, when she had an accident, I went home to take care of her, and during that time, my studio caught on fire,” he said. “Stuff had burned up in there—a lot of art, machinery, other tools.”

Since then, Dr. Foots’ practice has been nomadic, touring between festivals. Jazz Fest is the most important by far. “Artists don’t get money every day, every week steady,” he said. “So this has to last damn near a whole year. You’re an artist; it’s survival. You don’t get checks, so you have to be on it, or you won’t get paid. So we work.”

Many of the artists I spoke with did not seem to depend on the festival as much as Dr. Foots does. “I wouldn’t say we depend on it, but it certainly is a nice boost,” said Amanda Bennett, who makes mid-century pop art with a modern spin. “Sometimes it’s good for you, sometimes it’s not,” said Joy Gauss, whose pottery tells stories rooted in New Orleans folklore. “It’s just some extra money that we make,” said Joe Gallo, whose popular strawberry smoothie stand has been at the festival for 37 years. But it would be hard to argue that Jazz Fest does not positively affect the economic well-being of thousands of New Orleanians, even if its not essential to all of them.

Jazz Fest producer Quint Davis, who’s been with the festival since its 1969 conception, loves to talk about the pivotal Jazz Fest 2006. A net loss in 2004 and Katrina in 2005 made the festival’s future uncertain, but the Jazz and Heritage Foundation and Davis’ Festival Productions Inc. (FPI) managed to pull it off. Discussing the rocky lead-up to the 2006 festival, Davis glowingly recalls a benefit organized by Wynton Marsalis, during which then-lieutenant governor Mitch Landrieu famously proclaimed “Not having Jazz Fest is not an option.” Davis usually frames this statement as a tribute to Jazz Fest’s cultural importance to New Orleans. But it’s more likely that Landrieu was talking economics.

A Bigger Picture

A few factors made Jazz Fest’s 2006 return possible. After bad weather caused the festival to lose close to $1 million in 2004, the foundation reevaluated its relationship with Davis and FPI. Davis’ contract with the foundation expired in 2005, and the bad timing made a separation that previously seemed unthinkable, a sudden possibility. Members of the Board called for Davis’ dismissal, and the festival issued a request for proposals from other potential production companies. Eventually, the Board voted to retain FPI’s services, giving Davis another shot.

After the contentious recommissioning of FPI, Davis had to renegotiate his contract with the foundation. Under the new terms, FPI would be responsible for the financial risk of staging the festival in the event of a rainout.

Another producer heavily considered by the Board that year was worldwide entertainment company AEG (the second largest producer of live music in the world), whose reach and financial means dwarf those of FPI. After signing the new contract with precarious terms for FPI, Davis turned to AEG for help, resulting in a 15-year partnership. According to Davis, FPI looked to cut costs after the 2004 fiasco to minimize their risk, but AEG advised against the move. “They said, ‘You can’t cut your way out of this. In order to grow as a festival, you need to spend more money, not less,’” Davis recalled in a 2014 interview with Keith Spera for Nola.com. AEG’s infinitely deep pockets would help guarantee against any loss incurred, and their equally extensive rolodex would help the festival level up its marquee talent.

The partnership yielded a successful 2005 festival, but in August, Katrina hit. New Orleans’ future was suddenly on sinking ground, and so was the festival’s.

One of the keys to putting on Jazz Fest 2006 was a new partnership between the festival and Royal Dutch Shell. As the popular narrative goes, Shell stepped in when the situation was most dire and saved the festival.

Imani Jacqueline Brown has extensively studied Jazz Fest’s relationship with Shell. In 2018, she helped found Fossil Free Fest (FFF), a grassroots festival that “unite[s] community for one week with art, food, music, film screenings, and workshops, carving out a dedicated and open space for us to dig deep into the ethics and complexities of funding art and education with fossil fuel money,” according to its webpage.

Brown and her co-organizers posit that, by allowing Shell to put its name and logo front and center on Jazz Fest’s brand, the festival gives the oil company a “social license to operate.” FFF gets this term from a 2012 speech by British Petroleum (BP) Vice President Dev Senyal. “BP became sort of a corporation non grata in the state of Louisiana because of the Deep Water Horizon [oil spill] incident,” Brown explains. “People lost faith in [BP’s] ability to operate safely and in a way that would be healthy for Louisiana’s people and economy. In order to maintain operations in this day and age, a company needs to win the trust of the society in which it’s operating.”

This social license to operate, Brown believes, is what corporations in historically mistrusted industries, such as big oil or big pharma, are looking for when they sponsor beloved institutions such as Jazz Fest. “A corporation has responsibilities to its shareholders, not to the stakeholders of the community in which it is operating,” she says. “So by funding Jazz Fest, they have to get something back. And what they’re getting is that social license to operate. The placement of the Shell logo on Jazz Fest distracts the public from Shell’s operations. When you see Shell’s logo on Jazz Fest, you’re not seeing Shell’s logo on, for example, the miles of access canals that have been dredged throughout the wetlands that are causing massive land loss that is putting the entire region at risk.”

It’s probably a stretch to say sponsoring Jazz Fest is Shell’s master plan to distract Louisiana from the company’s harmful, extractive activities along the coastline, but it’s certainly part of the plan, along with the lobbying and interference they run at the state level. For evidence of the sponsorship’s transparently cynical nature, look no further than Shell’s website, where you can find propaganda pieces such as “Shell and Jazz Fest: More in Common Than You Think,” which argues that the festival and the oil company share “a love for Louisiana, volunteering and contributing to communities.”

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation does not disclose the dollar amounts of its corporate sponsorships on its 990 forms, but the general consensus is that Shell donates $1 million to the festival annually. Jazz Fest has other big-name corporate sponsors, most notably Acura. Acura came on as a sponsor in 2000, and their annual donation has been ballparked as high as $3.5 million. For this alleged amount, they are given bountiful ad space at the festival, including their name and logo on the mainstage and a tent where their cars are displayed. But their name and logo are not the ones embedded in the name and logo of the festival.

“We can’t rule out the possibility that Jazz Fest receives less money from Shell than some other corporate sponsors, but that those other corporate sponsors aren’t putting as much pressure on them,” Brown says. “If we are to take the social license to operate seriously, that front and center placement of the logo is the most important thing for the oil companies. Acura might be getting promotions and advertisement. They’re paying for ad space. A social license to operate is something very different from ad space.”

Shell has been allowed to shape the narrative surrounding their Jazz Fest sponsorship in the media. Pieces crediting Shell with providing the final push Jazz Fest needed to return in 2006 have appeared on WWOZ 90.7 FM, a station partly funded by the Jazz and Heritage Foundation and therefore beholden to Shell, but also on Nola.com, a company funded until this month by the Newhouse media conglomerate and apparently independent of Shell’s influence. It’s impossible to know how essential Shell’s donation is to the festival’s survival without knowing how much they donate. In the end, though, looking at the sponsorship in terms of Jazz Fest’s short-term success lends a myopic perspective.

“I’ve founded and run arts programs and fundraised for arts programs; It’s hard,” Brown says. “We live in a country where there is very little to no public support for arts and culture, so people who administer institutions are struggling, they are stressed out, and they are desperate. So it’s a very real conversation: What do these institutions do to survive in a country that does not value their existence enough to fund them sustainably? What are we sacrificing by granting these companies a social license to operate?” The Jazz and Heritage Foundation may believe its relationship with Shell is a necessary evil to keep the festival afloat, but what happens when the land it’s built on sinks?

“Louisiana is literally crumbling from [Shell’s] extractive activities,” Brown continues. “We have lost 2,000 square miles of land due to the dredging of oil and gas access canals. You look at communities like Norco, Louisiana, St. James, Mossville. These communities have been completely decimated by the activities of Shell, specifically.” New Orleans has not been as directly exploited by Shell, but it has certainly felt the full effects of climate change. Jazz Fest takes place outside of hurricane season, but another Katrina could still ruin the festival’s future prospects.

“When we think about the sustainability of an institution, and we think only about the financial sustainability, we’re missing the big picture,” Brown says. “We’re not talking about the sustainability of human communities. We’re not talking about the sustainability of the planet, the ability of our state to literally exist. And sure, great: Jazz Fest might be able to survive another year. But after that, what good is it if Jazz Fest has money if they’re unable to put on the festival because there are unseasonably torrential rains, or hurricanes become increasingly frequent and wipe the Fairgrounds off the map? What does financial sustainability mean in the context of complete ecological collapse or the toxification and poisoning of the communities of people who actually provide the musicians that play at Jazz Fest?”

Crowd Funding

Corporate sponsorships make up a large share of Jazz Fest’s funding, but the vast majority of the festival’s annual revenue comes from ticket, merch, and food and beverage sales. In other words, Jazz Fest runs on tourist dollars. These dollars fund the festival’s operations and expenses, and part of the surplus they create—averaging about $3 million annually since 2013—is funneled back into the community. Each year, the Jazz and Heritage Foundation spends $500,000 of its extra cash on 16 education, economic development, and cultural enrichment programs, and $250,000 more on free festivals in New Orleans throughout the year. And that’s a tiny fraction of the money spent by Jazz Fest tourists in support of bars, restaurants, hotels, and shows throughout the city.

Anyone in the city will tell you that Jazz Fest tourists are different from the other New Orleans tourists that come throughout the year. Whether that’s good or bad is subjective and extremely contentious. Much fun is made of the archetypal “jazz dad,” a wealthy out-of-towner who wears a Hawaiian shirt to the festival and sets up his lawn chair at the Gentilly stage. He definitely exists, and he’s drunker than anyone in his age group or tax bracket is qualified to be. But his dollars spend the same as anyone else’s do, perhaps even a little better.

Jazz Fest-compatible musicians seem to have a more enthusiastic take on the festival crowd than the rest of the city does. “The Jazz Fest crowd is there to listen to the music, regardless of what’s going on,” says Barnes. “If they like the music they’re walking past, they’ll stop by and check out whatever it is you’re doing. People are just there to have a good time.”

This energy is present outside the festival too. “It’s very, very rare that a crowd will give you more than you give the crowd, especially at the beginning of the performance,” Jusdanis says. “I’ve got to be doing a lot to get these people to loosen up. But, every once in a while—and I think this is the Jazz Fest thing—you get this very rare instance of the crowd taking two steps forward before you even take one step forward. They’re so ready to go. As a performer, it’s easy, and it makes your job so great because they’re just eating up everything that you’re doing. They love it. They let you know that they love it. They let you know that they want more. They tip great.”

How does Jazz Fest attract such an enthusiastic and generous crowd year after year? What is it about these very specific Jazz Fests tourists that makes them such cash cows? Part of it is that they don’t believe they’re tourists. Mostly white and mostly rich, they return to the mostly Black, mostly poor city of New Orleans at the end of each April and call it a second home. They come to know the brass bands, the Indians, the very real hallmarks of the city’s very Disneyfied public image, bands and tribes so specific to the New Orleans phenomenon that, in their minds, no actual tourist could ever understand them. The relationship between the city and the Jazz Fest crowd is inherently problematic, but it’s become so lucrative that criticizing it feels self-defeating.

In Jules Bentley’s excellent piece for Gambit, “On Bourbon: The Street Locals Love to Hate,” he argues that Bourbon St. is the place where the rubber meets the road for the New Orleans economy, the dirty little secret the Tourism Board needs and refuses to acknowledge. He calls the street “a smoothly running finance-extraction machine.” Jazz Fest is also a finance-extraction machine, but its seedy mechanics are less outwardly visible than Bourbon’s. Instead of selling lap dances and HUGE ASS BEERS, Jazz Fest sells New Orleans culture, commodifying it so perfectly that it doesn’t feel commodified. Like any good salesman, Jazz Fest never lets the buyers know they’re being sold.

To learn more about Brown’s work with Fossil Free Fest, follow @fossilfreefest on Facebook or go to their website, FossilFreeFest.org.