As Jazz Fest Looks At 50 ....

A second-line parade at the 2017 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, one of many sights underlining the event's place-based identity.

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival

August 21, 20177:00 AM ET
ALISON FENSTERSTOCK

At 46, Ben Jaffe is almost exactly the same age as Jazz Fest. Like a lot of New Orleans natives, he has memories of the annual event stretching back to childhood, though his experience is a little more rarefied than most. "That's where I got to sit on Fats Domino's lap and then hear him play," he says. It's where I heard Allen Toussaint play for the first time as a child. It was the first time I heard live hip-hop — I think it was like 1981 or '82, and it was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. And I was like, 'Wow.'"


Jaffe is the creative director of Preservation Hall, a role he inherited from his parents Allan and Sandra Jaffe, who took over stewardship of the local music institution in 1961. A conservatory-trained bassist and sousaphone player, Jaffe credits Jazz Fest — officially, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell — as one of the most powerful influences throughout his life: first, tagging along as a child with his parents, then the important adolescent milestone of being set loose to wander the grounds with friends, and lately, bringing his own five-year-old daughter. "I'd say it's as important to our cultural calendar as Mardi Gras," he says. "You always look forward to Jazz Fest."

read more at: http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/08/21/544532673/as-jazz-fest-looks-at-50-what-keeps-it-alive