Music fits moment at New Orleans fest

It was pure serendipity that Bruce Springsteen finished his new album, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,” in time to premiere it and his new band for the 37th New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Yet the way this project uses American folk music tradition to express and transform people’s pain, loss and anger, it was hard to imagine a more dramatic and exhilarating confluence of music with moment than the way the performance spoke Sunday to the effect of Hurricane Katrina on the region’s residents.

The passionate delivery of the album’s 19th and 20th century folk and gospel songs also represented a transformation for Springsteen.

On stage without his trademark E Street Band, he was no longer the Boss, but a newly minted Troubadour Evangelist fronting a fiery 18-piece ensemble that included banjo, accordion, fiddles, Dobro, steel guitar and even a freewheeling horn section that fit right in here in the brass band capital of the nation.

The massed forces, which also featured several backup singers, exuded an enlarged sense of the communal spirit that’s long typified Springsteen shows.

This, however, felt even above and beyond Springsteen’s high performance standards -- a concert infused with the shout-out jubilation of an unfettered hootenanny. Even though the album was released just days before Sunday’s show, which closed out the 10-day event’s first weekend, audience members empathetically jumped in without so much as a cue on sing-along choruses, cementing the feeling of a community coming together and rising above tragedy.

The veteran rocker opened with the spiritual “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” so filled with religious fervor it would have worked beautifully in the festival’s gospel tent as he sang, “Brothers and sisters don’t you cry/There’ll be good times by and by.”

Except for a few fittingly reworked numbers from his catalog, including “Johnny 99” redone as a New Orleans street parade workout, and a spare, deeply felt version of “My City of Ruins,” the show stuck with the “Seeger Sessions” songs, supplemented by a couple that didn’t make the final cut for the album.

One of those was “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” -- written in 1929 at the start of the Depression, to which Springsteen added three of his own verses with Katrina in mind. Before singing it, he spoke of driving through mile upon mile of storm-devastated New Orleans neighborhoods, and sharing citizens’ outrage at all the heartbreaking roadblocks that have compromised rebuilding efforts.

That also provided a contemporary context for the 1800s protest number “Pay Me My Money Down,” which Springsteen delivered as a Cajun two-step, repeating the title line until it became a mantra for anyone demanding justice.

Rather than succumbing to despair, the songs he chose almost invariably sought -- and found -- redemption through faith and the resilience of the human spirit.

Such was the restorative power Springsteen and the band channeled that midway through their treatment of Bill and Sis Cunningham’s Dust Bowl chronicle “My Oklahoma Home,” it didn’t seem the least bit coincidental that the gray storm clouds above parted to reveal the blue sky and shining sun behind them.

One concert, of course, cannot even begin to undo such monumental destruction as Katrina left, but Springsteen seemed to understand that even a moment of renewal can make a huge difference.

Preceding Springsteen, songwriter-producer-singer Allen Toussaint quietly asserted his authority as a patriarch of the New Orleans music scene during his set during which he was joined on several numbers by Elvis Costello.

The atypically easy smiles that Costello kept flashing, much like those Bob Dylan let loose here two days earlier, made it obvious this was no ordinary gig for him either. But then, what musician wouldn’t feel like a kid in a candy story being surrounded on stage by Toussaint at the piano, a deeply funky New Orleans rhythm section and a posse of Crescent City horn players?

But the British firebrand, resplendent in a plum-colored sharkskin suit, didn’t check his righteous indignation at the Jazz Fest gate. He unleashed his signature vituperation on Toussaint’s “The River in Reverse,” the decades-old title song from their collaborative album, due in June and yet another example of material written long ago yet seemingly made-to-order to address Katrina fallout.

How long does a promise last

How long can a lie be told? ...

There must be something better than this

‘Cause I don’t see how it can get much worse

Toussaint then did his own bit to contribute to the weekend’s sense of healing when he led a vamped chant of “Home, home, everybody come home” that acknowledged what comes across strongly in this region as the feeling of a Katrina-driven Louisiana diaspora.

And come home to Jazz Fest they did Sunday. The presence of such fest regulars Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, D.L. Menard & the Louisiana Aces, Sonny Landreth, Willis Prudhomme & Zydeco Express, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the Meters, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, the Rebirth Brass Band and dozens of others reinforced the idea expressed in signs visible nearly everywhere that “New Orleans is back.”

The responses to Katrina were as varied and imaginative as the plethora of culinary offerings (forget burgers and fries -- food at Jazz Fest means alligator sauce piquant, crawfish sausage po’ boy sandwiches and pheasant, quail and andouille gumbo).

There were buttons that said “Make Levees, Not War,” T-shirts with such slogans as “ReNew Orleans,” “C’est Levee” and “[Forget] Fallujah, Save New Orleans.” For the most part, they underscored the survival of a healthy sense of humor and the will to move forward.

At the end of the day, immediately after Springsteen and his plentiful cohorts paraded single file off the stage, an announcer said: “This concludes the first weekend of the resurrection of New Orleans.”

For once, such a comment didn’t sound the least like hype.