Fats City You don't have to go to the New Orleans Jazz Fest to explore the city of jazz. By Bill Heavey The Washington Post Sunday, July 13, 1997; Page E01

I'm remembering this scene on a warm Saturday afternoon as Antoine "Fats" Domino, in white pants and a shirt of many colors, takes one of 10 sound stages at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, the annual two-week extravaganza of music and food. He begins pounding out "I'm Walking" to shouts of joy from the crowd, which ranges from dreadlocked kids blissed out on Ecstasy to balding financial planners tapping their Tevas and sipping Miller Lite from neoprene insulators. For the next hour and 20 minutes, the reclusive New Orleans legend never lets up: "Blueberry Hill," "I'm Ready," "Walking to New Orleans," "Ain't That a Shame" and a raft of others I've heard all my life.

Fats Domino is 71 years old. He has not performed in two years, since a May 1995 concert in England with two other progenitors of rock-and-roll, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. But if you think this is a nostalgia act, guess again. The shy boy who grew up on the dirt roads outside New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward, who worked at a mattress factory and didn't even own a suit when he was discovered at the Hideaway Club in 1949 by a Hollywood record company executive, doesn't even address the crowd. He lets the music do the talking. And talk it does: music so elementary and basic that it seems to have been uncovered instead of composed, as if Fats is merely the antenna, picking up something that's always been out there in the ether and turning it into sound. It's that same roots mix of jazz and blues that Chuck Berry and Little Richard hitched their wagons to: elastic, primitive, unstoppable, indestructible. You can tear it up, but you can't wear it out. When he sings that "I'm ready, willin' and able to rock-and-roll all night!" he means it. Fats sets a blistering pace, pausing just long enough to let the chords from the last song fade before he launches into the next. The twinkle in his eyes is visible 20 rows back. His sidemen barely have time to wipe their brows between tunes. At one point, all five saxophone players are blaring at the same time and exchanging Can you believe this? looks. A guy in a wheelchair is dancing so joyously I'm afraid he's going to tip over.

At the end of the 80-minute set, Fats stands and begins actually slamming his hip into the piano on every downbeat. The long beast shudders under each impact and falls back about a foot. The crowd goes nuts. The huge instrument retreats slowly across the stage. And suddenly the piano has come to stand for everything that has ever gotten in a man's way, beaten him down, told him he couldn't. And the music is saying, I got news for you, baby. Fats and the piano leave the stage together. There is no encore. It would be like asking Moses to bring down an 11th Commandment.

You can say the words "New Orleans" and "puritanism" in the same sentence, but afterward your mouth feels funny, as if you'd followed up a taste of crawfish etouffee with a swig of Sustacal. There is a higher permissiveness at work down here. Frivolity is serious business, a path to the human spirit that bypasses the ponderous self. Food should make you happy before, during and after the meal. Music should cause your heart to beat stronger. All that preacher talk about self-denial is very nice, but answer me this: Why would God make us capable of having such a good time if He didn't want us to?

I walk into a K & B drugstore my first day in a rented room in the city's Garden District to buy sun block and discover a full liquor counter featuring the house brand of seven-year-old bourbon, available 24 hours a day. At a nighttime concert inside the University of New Orleans arena, I watch a kid leaning against a "Smoking Prohibited" sign light up a cigarette while a cop 20 feet away ignores him. At the entry to the Fair Grounds, a man being patted down for glass containers by a woman at the gate crows, "Oh, dahlin', I'm going out and coming through again!" She cracks up, cuffs him gently and sends him on through. A bar on Magazine Street that never closes posts a sign that says, "Sorry, no dogs."

It has been this way pretty much since 1718, when a party of six carpenters, four Canadians and 30 convicted salt smugglers who had been sent to Louisiana in lieu of jail scratched a rough square in the earth and called it Nouvelle Orleans. Despite the alligators and mosquitoes, floods and epidemics, the place prospered. In Congo Square, African slaves gathered on Sunday to sing, dance and talk. (Congo Square, now within Louis Armstrong Park, is credited by musicologists as the birthplace of the banjo, the quintessential American instrument.) Voodoo and Catholicism, Caribbean rhythms and Cajun fiddle tunes, Spanish architecture and Southern Italian spices: They all got mixed together down here in the rich ooze of the Mississippi.

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, better known as Jazz Fest, is the New Orleans experience in concentrated form. If you love jazz, blues, rock, ragtime, gospel, soul, rhythm and blues, reggae, funk, bluegrass -- heck, there's even Scottish pipe and drum and Jewish folk music, all infused with that Big Easy beat -- then coming here is the equivalent of the trip to Mecca, something every pilgrim ought to do at least once per lifetime. For two long weekends every spring, the 19th-century racetrack out past the Superdome sets up 12 stages, 60 food-vending stalls and invites thousands of the country's best musicians, dancers and artists to perform. Repeat visitors often rig up long sticks to which they've attached weird totems of string, tinsel, hula hoops, stuffed animals, dolls and whatever else strikes the owner's fancy, which are bounced up and down to the music. I tap one reveler on the shoulder and ask him what he calls the contraption. He makes me for one of those over-eager out-of-towners and leans in as if to take me into his confidence.

"I call it a pole," he says slowly, making sure I understand. Later I find out they're usually called "spirit poles." My favorite is one that is a green, orange and purple banner that bears the motto "PEACE, LOVE, PORT-O-LETS."

But you don't have to come to Jazz Fest to hear great music in New Orleans. Snug Harbor is a temple to straight-ahead New Orleans jazz. Performers like Ellis Marsalis, pere of Wynton and Branford, and Charmaine Neville are regulars. You are expressly forbidden to go to the Hard Rock Cafe except for the briefest pilgrimage to see Fats's piano suspended above the guitar-shape bar. You may go to Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, but why not just get a big stamp that reads "TOURIST" and slap it up against your forehead? And if you think you'll traipse into Tipitina's the way Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin did in "The Big Easy," think again. Advance tickets are rarely sold openly (though, this being New Orleans, there are people who somehow get them) and the lines for name acts are long and slow. A better bet is Preservation Hall, which is uncomfortable, unventilated and unkempt -- and a stupendous place to hear old-style traditional jazz by the likes of the Humphrey brothers, Kid Sheik and the Olympia Jazz Band. Some of these guys have been playing for 70 years, but it's the real deal.

The New Orleans version of Bethesda's legendary Twist and Shout dance hall is a place called Mid City Lanes, a combination music hall and bowling alley. Thread your way from the street up the narrow staircase to a small stage where the bands are strong enough to withstand the background noise of strikes, spares and gutter balls. (Bowlers are charged by the hour, not by the game, so there's not much standing around.) The locals call it the Rock 'n Bowl. You can get turkey gumbo and alligator po' boys (just to say you've had one), but the real reason people come here is to shake a leg. Thursday is zydeco night, and if you aren't dancing, get out of the way of those that am.

The Maple Leaf Bar uptown may be the best Cajun venue in town, where such groups as the File Cajun Band and Rockin' Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters carry on. Since accordionist Rockin' Dopsie passed on in 1993, his son, percussionist David Rubin (a k a. Dopsie Jr.) has been keeping the family tradition alive. By Sunday afternoon, you may want to change gears. Stop back by to hear local and out-of-town poets read from their work. Another weirdly named music hot spot is Fritzel's European Jazz Pub, a little doorway in the French Quarter that's easy to miss. The 1831 building is worth searching out, however, since it attracts some of the best jazz musicians in the city. The bar is stocked with a variety of cold schnapps and German beers on tap and in the bottle. Fritzel's is famous for late-night jazz. Be forewarned. By the time the jam session is over, it could be lunch time the next day.

It's impossible to take in even a fraction of what's going on at Jazz Fest. Some people work over the day's performance schedule with highlighters, plotting their every move. There are folks who've been coming for years who insist the absolute best is to plop yourself down at the gospel tent and stay, leaving only for food and bathroom breaks. Others graze, letting their ears lead them from place to place. My fiancee, Jane, and I relied heavily on the Hot Tips on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. It was through these recommendations, by music writer Keith Spera, that we got turned on to such local heroes as Mem Shannon, a poet and blues guitarist who was driving a cab until 1995, and Snooks Eaglin, a blind guitar player whose inventive playing and love of the crowd make him irresistible.

Heading for a mango ice, we listen to Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown shift effortlessly from rhythm and blues to a gorgeous version of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo." At the Buckwheat Zydeco concert, we find ourselves sandwiched between an entranced, bare-chested young man with hair past his shoulders and a guy in a polo shirt and pressed shorts who looks like a preppy David Letterman. It's a toss-up as to who is the better dancer. The band does a Cajun-flavored "Hey Joe" and then leads us in a joyous sing-along:

Hey, hey baby

I wanna know-oh-oh

Will you be my girl?

The first time, the band plays along to reinforce the melody. The second time, it stops, and all we hear are our own voices, curiously clear and innocent-sounding, as if we are suddenly back in high school.

The food is flat-out fabulous. It comes mostly in $3 and $5 portions, and while there must be dishes that don't go straight to the pleasure centers of the brain and stomach, we couldn't find them. You can get fried green tomatoes, alligator pie, a gumbo of pheasant, quail and andouille sausage. Crawfish come every imaginable way: in po' boy sandwiches, fried, steamed, baked, in salads, soups and in beignets (the French equivalent of a doughnut, only square). Under Jazz Fest etiquette, it is perfectly acceptable to stop people you've never met if they're eating something that smells good and ask what it is and where you can get some. It was in this manner that I came upon my personal favorite, the crawfish sack. It's an elegant, flaky pastry purse tied up with a bit of sugar cane containing crawfish in a delicate sauce. But I was also partial to smothered okra, a smoky, gelatinous mixture of the vegetable, shrimp and rice flavored with pork tasso. Tropical island salad -- a combination of cool greens, bleu cheese, fruit and raisins -- makes a nice change of pace before you head back into the serious stuff. You don't want to miss the Cuban pork sandwich, the barbecue turkey leg or the broccoli-and-cheese pie, which has the additional advantage of being pocketable for later consumption. Sweet potato pone is a rich, sweet, dense bread. You think a slice will hold you over for the rest of the day while you're eating it. An hour later, you catch a whiff of something being carried past and run after the person to find out about it.

The art of partying requires preparation and pacing. Sunscreen, comfortable shoes and a water bottle are essentials. A big hat, a fanny pack and something to put between you and the ground aren't bad ideas. Eight hours a day of Louisiana sun, fun and food can take its toll. Our first night, we bought tickets for one of the many nighttime concerts given at venues around the city during the festival. We took a cab from the Garden District out to the University of New Orleans to see Taj Mahal, Rita Marley and James Brown. Hearing us yawn, our cab driver smiled and said, "Don't worry. Mister Please-please-please gonna wake y'all up," but it was not to be. Brown didn't come on until midnight, by which time we could barely stay awake. At the Fair Grounds, I managed to sell the tickets we'd bought for the next night's concert (George Clinton and Isaac Hayes) to a couple of college students who looked as if they had more stamina.

If New Orleans is where jazz and blues were bred and nurtured, it's also the city that turns its back on its most talented progeny. There is a long tradition of its best musicians -- Louis Armstrong, Joe "King" Oliver, Edward "Kid" Ory and Freddie Keppard among them -- having to leave the city to find recognition and success. Many went north, especially to Chicago. Some had to go even farther. One of the events on the last day of the festival is a tribute to clarinet and sax virtuoso Sidney Bechet, who could barely make a dime here, but was an instant celebrity when he landed in Paris, where he died in 1959. Waiting in line for a beer, I strike up a conversation with an older man in front of me. Bob Wilber is a professional musician who studied with Bechet in the 1940s. "The man on the street in France knew Bechet. He sold millions of records. But he was a prophet without honor in his own country," he tells me. "He couldn't make a dime in New Orleans." Bechet, the grandson of slaves who gathered to make music in Congo Square, applied the New Orleans clarinet style to the soprano sax, essentially giving birth to the saxophone tradition in jazz. Listen to Johnny Hodges, Wilber told me, who played alto for Duke Ellington, or Coleman Hawkins, and you'll hear his influence.

Bechet wrote that music "is a thing you gotta trust . . . you gotta treat it gentle." Musicians were another matter altogether. At one performance, Bechet, outraged by miscues from a famous trumpet player, began hurling shot glasses at the man's head whenever he'd miss a note. He was kicked out of France for a while after serving 11 months of a 15-month sentence for hitting two bystanders while shooting at another musician. He talked frequently of New Orleans and dreamed of taking his young son back to show him St. Augustine's, the church and school he attended. He died before he got the chance. As we walk past one of the stages on our way to catch the Radiators, we hear faint strains of a saxophone, singing his praises.

Bill Heavey is a Washington writer.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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