Call It What You Will, It Still Spells Music to Your Ears

Euphoric? Splendorific? Phantasmagoric? Transplendent?

It is not easy to find the right words to communicate the myriad wonders of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival to anyone who hasn’t experienced them firsthand.

Promoter Sam Lanni of Huntington Beach experienced them last year. And a desire to evoke that same call-it-what-you-will spirit is, he says, behind his current efforts to organize “Celebration of Life,” a multicultural music and arts festival for Orange County later this year.

More than the money that a successful festival might generate, more than the attention it might draw, more than the music industry doors it might open for him, Lanni says he is interested in spreading the sense of musical community, cross-cultural exchange and unfettered joy that has drawn an estimated 300,000 people to the New Orleans Fair Grounds for the 19th annual festival there this week.

What makes it so special? you may well ask, as there is no shortage of jazz festivals around the country, including the Playboy and Queen Mary Jazz Festivals right here in Southern California.

Well, for one thing, the name is misleading--or, at least, woefully inadequate to capture the range and depth of culture that make the New Orleans gathering possibly the finest music festival in the country, if not the world.

In all fairness to its organizers, to be completely accurate they would have to call it the New Orleans Jazz, Blues, Cajun, Gospel, Zydeco, Folk, R&B;, Calypso, Reggae, Rock, Country, Soul, African, Etc. Festival. By the time you could say it, you would miss it.

But by any name, it is a unique event that honors old and new, traditional and experimental, mainstream and wildly exotic. Over two frustratingly short days last weekend I caught more than 50 acts spread out over the Fair Grounds--all the while knowing that for every performer I did see, I was missing five or six equally inviting others playing simultaneously on other stages and in other tents.

And that is just the half of it.

Along with this array of singers, instrumentalists and folk dancers, staggering enough to send any music lover into spasms of delight, the “heritage” portion of the festival translates into dozens of booths with regional food and crafts. You can watch artisans work on everything from handmade Cajun accordions to cornshuck weavings, and you can indulge in local delicacies from barbecued alligator to cochon de lait (Cajun roast pig).

That is the very sort of diversity and local color that Lanni envisions for the “Celebration of Life,” substituting the many talents in and near Southern California for those of southern Louisiana.

Sure, we may not have the same centuries-long heritage that Louisiana draws upon. But there is a genuine musical and cultural variety here that belies the stereotype of a homogeneous land of carbon-copy shopping malls and Top 40 bars, and Lanni wants to probe it.

For music--along with such national acts as B.B. King, Etta James, James Brown and Los Lobos, all of whom played New Orleans--he can look to local groups as diverse as the James Harman Band (fiery rock and blues), Firehose (jazzy, minimalist, muscular post-punk) and the Swamp Zombies (propulsive, Cajun-flavored folk songs). And for the food and arts and crafts side, he can tap a large pool of regional and ethnic groups--some indigenous, even more transplanted, but all of whom now call Orange County home.

Right now Lanni, who owned the once-spunky but now sadly defunct Safari Sam’s nightclub in Huntington Beach, is working to nail down a site for his festival. And before he can get it off the ground, he will face the imposing task of persuading city and county officials, as well as potential corporate sponsors, that it would be a boon to the community, not simply a string of administrative headaches.

If he can pull it off, it would be a major coup for Orange County, proving that Los Angeles need not corner the market on prestigious cultural festivals. Sure, as a businessman here, that is one of his reasons for wanting to do it. And there are others--not the least of which being his desire “to be known as something besides ‘the ex-owner of a now-defunct Huntington Beach nightclub.’ ”

But while it may be a factor, Lanni says, personal gain is not at the top of his list of motives. And I believe him. Why?

I saw the look of unmitigated fulfillment on his face last year in New Orleans as he sat in the Gospel Tent listening to the likes of the Providence Tones of Joy and the Famous Zion Harmonizers. I saw the same look again one night after the action had moved into town and Lanni, lounging aboard the Riverboat President as it paddled around the Mississippi, sipped a cool drink and listened to the hypnotic music of Nigeria’s King Sunny Ade and his African Beats playing on the floating stage below decks.

That is the kind of joy he wants to spread through the Southland. I, for one, am with him all the way.