New Orleans music’s old guard still star at Jazz Fest

NEW ORLEANS — Bassist George Porter Jr. and drummer Zigaboo Modeliste played the very first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage festival in 1970 with their groundbreaking funk band The Meters. More than 50 years later, The Meters are no more, but Porter and Modeliste are still among the festival’s mainstays.

So are singer Irma Thomas, the renowned “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” who first played the fest in 1974; and guitarist and singer Deacon John Moore, also a regular since 1970.

“Originally it was all local bands,” Porter said in a recent interview, reminiscing about days when he would close down one Jazz Fest stage with The Meters and run with Modeliste to another stage for a final set with piano legend Professor Longhair. “Local and regional bands — meaning Baton Rouge, Lafayette — those acts were always the headliners,” he said.

Plenty of nationally and internationally known acts populate the roster for the 2023 festival, which includes current megastars like Lizzo and Ed Sheeran and long-established crowd-pleasing artists like Santana and the Steve Miller Band.

Still, longtime Jazz Fest producer Quint Davis would argue that the home-based acts remain the real headliners.

Jazz Fest unfolds over seven days that play out over two long weekends. When it’s over Sunday night, around 580 acts will have played on more than a dozen stages. Davis estimates close to 500 of them are from New Orleans or southwest Louisiana. “That’s what the festival’s built on,” he said.

Thus, preceding Lizzo on one of the festival’s biggest stages last Friday were two New Orleans acts, Big Freedia, then Tank and the Bangas. Louisiana-rooted bands Sweet Crude and The Revivalists were on that same stage Saturday before Sheeran performed. Another veteran of The Meters, guitarist Leo Nocentelli, performed Sunday.

Thomas takes the big stage this Friday evening before Jon Batiste (a New Orleans-area native) closes. Porter and his band Runnin’ Pardners play that stage Saturday, followed by Anders Osborne, then the Preservation Hall Jazz Band — all New Orleans acts — before John Mayer takes the stage with Dead & Company.

Once a small affair that drew about 350 people to Louis Armstrong Park near the French Quarter, the festival now overflows the vast infield of the historic Fair Grounds horse racing track.

Moore, who turns 82 in June, doesn’t mind the influx of big-name pop acts that don’t necessarily have a Louisiana connection.

“We have to bring those kind of…