USA TODAY International Edition
Mash- ups light up New Orleans Jazz Fest
Levine battles Usher, Lorde gets emotional and Petty celebrates
NEW ORLEANS For decades, fans saw the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival as a refuge from the mainstream culture. The festival’s emphasis on the music of Louisiana and national artists who had timeless talent put it at odds with the pop culture zeitgeist, but the first weekend of this year’s Jazz Fest was all about television. On Saturday, The Tonight Show’s house band, The Roots, performed with Usher, former judge for The Voice. At the same time on another stage, Voice judge Adam Levine performed with Maroon 5, and an hour earlier, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s Jon Batiste and Stay Human played. The day before, Harry Connick Jr. closed the festival’s Acura Stage with the band from his daytime talk show.
In the Levine vs. Usher battle round, Usher won. He didn’t perform as a frontman backed by The Roots; instead, he temporarily joined the band, and when they detoured to covers of Instant Funk’s I Got My Mind Made Up ( You Can Get It Girl) and Kool and the Gang’s Jungle Boogie, he was as committed to the songs as he was to his own material. When the song said “get down,” he got down as only someone as smooth as Usher can. The show leaned heavily on Usher’s hits, including the climactic Climax, Confessions Part II, You Make Me Wanna and Caught Up, but the highlight came when The Roots mashed his O. M. G. up with Sly and the Family Stone’s Dance to the Music. One fan appropriately mouthed to his friend, “O. M. G.!” as Dance to the Music recast one of Usher’s most electronic hits as one of his most organic, and by the time they finished, an encore seemed superfluous.
Maroon 5, on the other hand, were simply Maroon 5 with no special tricks up their sleeves. Levine was a rock star in a sleeveless black Wu- Tang Clan T- shirt and ripped grunge jeans, and the band is consistently good for ontrend pop and rock. You couldn’t hear Maps from 2015’ s V and not notice Levine and the band riffing on The Police the way Bruno Mars did on Locked Out of Heaven. Unfortunately, blues guitarist Jonny Lang could also be heard in some of the quieter moments of Maroon 5’ s hits- laden set. During She Will Be Loved, the audible squeals of Lang’s guitar clearly upset Levine and the delicate moment. The band itself got rowdy when it finished with a cover of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy.
At the same time, The Alabama Shakes performed a set more in keeping with Jazz Fest’s traditions. The gospel in singer Brittany Howard’s voice gave the band’s songs gravity not written into the words, but the guitar, bass and drums come from indie rock, and they take musical turns more conventionally schooled bands would never think of. The abrupt way Dunes turned into heavy ’ 70s blues rock in the chorus gave Howard’s existential uncertainty a physical form.
This year, the grounds held up to the noontime deluge, and the festival opened at 3 p. m. for a shortened day that included none of the performers scheduled to play earlier in the day, and no Pitbull. He had been scheduled to close the Congo Square Stage.
Fortunately, the Cuban duo Gente de Zona easily compensated for his absence. Their high- energy reggaeton and cumbias started a dance party, and the largely Latino audience clearly appreciated being recognized as Alexander Delgado and Randy Malcom Martinez regularly inventoried the Latin American countries represented in the audience from the stage.
The old and new Jazz Fest manifested itself at the end of the day Sunday as well when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played at one end of the Fair Grounds and Lorde performed at the other.
Lorde played her new songs Homemade Dynamite and Sober, but she was more affable and chatty onstage than her musical persona would lead you to believe. She praised New Orleans, its weather, its beignets, and the audience. “You guys have danced more than the entirety of Coachella, and we’re three songs in,” she said. Later, she declared while sitting on the lip of the stage that she was a Tom Petty fan. She sang a couple of lines of American Girl before segueing into her own Liability while fighting back a few tears. “You have to learn to be your own first mate,” she said, obviously speaking from experience.
Petty celebrated his band’s 40th anniversary with a less predictable set that started with the first song from his first album, Rockin’ Around ( With You), but he didn’t skip the hits. One fan thought he went light on Damn the Torpedos, Petty’s 1979 breakthrough album, but by now, Petty has enough albums that he goes light on almost all of them except Full Moon Fever, which he returned to four times for his biggest songs.