Down to New Orleans: Bob Dylan at Jazz Fest 2003

"There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better."

- Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume One

Right now I’m reading a great book by Tom Piazza called Why New Orleans Matters, which was published just two months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As well as providing a detailed overview of the city's complex socioeconomics, Piazza tells the story of how he fell in love with New Orleans' culture and its people, and of his personal grief at the devastation caused by Katrina.

One of my favourite passages is Piazza’s description of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which takes place every year at the Fair Grounds Race Course and – despite its name – plays host to a wide variety of musical styles. Here’s a sample of what he has to say:

“New Orleans.... is filled with people who came for Jazz Fest and never left. Or who went home and quit their job and came back. I think Jazz Fest teaches them what to love about the city, and how to love it. It is a kind of distillation of the mythology of the city.

Jazz Fest constantly underlines the relationship between the music of New Orleans (and Louisiana) and the culture as a whole. The food, the parades, the crafts, are all part of a larger fabric, as they are in the city itself. You won’t find posters advertising individual artists’ appearances at the fairgrounds. Music, the logic seems to run, is bigger than any individual’s music. And, furthermore, culture is bigger than music. Jazz Fest brings this notion into focus, gives it life, better than any event I know of.”

Bob Dylan, who has long history with New Orleans dating back to his 1963 song 'New Orleans Rag', has played Jazz Fest three times: in 1993, 2003 and 2006. The 2003 show is my favourite of the three, despite it having been almost completely overshadowed by the non-Jazz Fest concert Dylan played the following day at the nearby Municipal Auditorium, which saw saxophonist Dickie Landry sit in for the entire show. (Incidentally, the Municipal Auditorium was badly damaged by Katrina and remains closed to this day.) While the April 25 show has no special guests to recommend it, it does have Dylan’s then-new guitar player Freddy Koella. 

Freddy Koella occupies a curious space in the pantheon of Dylan’s Never Ending Tour musicians. Whilst Dylan always seeks out highly skilled players, they are generally kept on a tight leash; there is never any doubt about who the star of the show is supposed to be. As former band member Larry Campbell put it during an interview in this month’s Dylan Review:

“I knew when I started playing with him the role of the band. Bob Dylan is unique in that Dylan and an acoustic guitar is all you need. He gets everything he is across with that. If you're gonna be a band backing him up, then you need to be as subjective as that acoustic guitar. You can't showboat. It's not a place to draw attention to your skills. It's not your place to detract in any way from the essence of what he's putting out.”

For reasons known only to Dylan himself, Koella was one of the few exceptions to this rule. Perhaps Bob recognised that Koella shared the same all-or-nothing-at-all attitude to his craft, a willingness to venture into uncharted territory despite the risk of total failure. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t, but it was usually interesting either way.

This particular New Orleans performance arrived just two weeks into Koella’s twelve-month stay in Dylan’s band. They hadn’t quite gelled yet as a group, which adds an extra sense of unpredictability, as Koella gradually becomes more and more prominent throughout the show until he and Bob are no longer a star singer and a backing musician, but collaborators, goading each other further into the unknown. The heart of the show is ‘Drifter’s Escape’, where Bob leaves his keyboard and straps on his electric guitar to engage Koella in a bizarre but very exciting guitar duel, which sounds like two Bobs playing at once. Later on, Bob delivers a powerful (and, in hindsight, ominous) ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.

This show may not sound like jazz, but that’s exactly what it is: an ensemble of musicians interacting and reacting to each other, creating something unique.

One bittersweet aspect of Why New Orleans Matters is the acknowledgement that, no matter how much New Orleans has rebuilt itself in the years since the hurricane, the scars of Katrina will always remain. This 2003 show is, in some ways, a time capsule of the old New Orleans, something that really hits home when you hear the announcement at the end of the show.

“Ladies and gentlemen Bob Dylan! The great Bob Dylan band! … We are now halfway through the first weekend of Jazz Fest 2003, the 34th Annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. What a beautiful, beautiful day. We’d like to thank Mr. Dylan for joining us today, and thank all of you for making this day possible, and this festival possible year after year after year. What a beautiful vibe. I’d like you all to go home safely, and come back tomorrow. One other thing we’d like you to keep in mind this year is that Jazz Fest recycles; what that means is...”

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There's no footage of Bob Dylan's show at Jazz Fest 2003, but I did stumble across a video of Bob and Freddy repeating their 'Drifter's Escape' guitar duel again nine days later in West Palm Beach: