For longer than the United States has been a country, New Orleans has been a gumbo of disparate cultures thrown together on a low-simmering boil, staying fairly warm even in late October. Despite the food metaphor, some of the best evidence of the city’s cross-cultural pollination is its music. It’s the voodoo that New Orleans does so well, going back to its Sunday tradition of giving slaves from the African and Caribbean a day off to mingle with white and Creole folks in Congo Square. The musicians of these groups coalesced to make the first strains of what would become American music.
Flash forward centuries and many technological advancements later, the Voodoo Experience is enhanced or entirely enabled by recent digital bells and whistles. It was the order of the day for at least a good half of Voodoo’s lineup and almost certainly the itinerary for more than half of its young crowd.
But the technology didn’t steal that voodoo away. If anything, it has transformed it– maybe enhanced it. It’s different, sure, but the wow factor of EDM icon Skrillex hitting a drop timed with lasers, flames, and pyrotechnics cannot be denied, even if you’re a dedicated roots music listener skeptical of EDM’s inherent artifice. A moment like that comes through keen planning but it still feels like something unworldly when you experience it live and in person.
Maybe through laptops and various digital instruments, artists like Los Angeles’ Low End Theory co-founder and Brainfeeder artist The Gaslamp Killer, French touch artist Etienne de Crécy, and the like found the same magic that Afropop legend Cheick Hamala Diabate found in the deserts of Mali and masterful classic-rock revivalist Gary Clark Jr. found in Austin, T.X.’s thriving modern music scene.
The fact that Voodoo Experience can harness all this talent from near and far, all their forms of magic, is the voodoo that New Orleans does. And it hardly misses a beat. This is Voodoo.
-Paul de Revere
Senior Staff Writer
Photography by Karina Halle
Friday, October 26th
Little Freddie King – Preservation Hall Stage - 2:15 p.m.
One thing you need to know about New Orleans: Older folks don’t just stop hitting the town for live music when they get “too old.” But you can bet they’ll plant their soft-back chairs in front of almost one stage exclusively. And they don’t stop playing it, either. Little Freddie King, who performed at the Preservation Hall Stage early on Friday, wasn’t feeble yet, emitting a loud rooster call that was far from it. King and his band featuring Guitar Lightnin’ Lee (guess how fast he plays?) swung out their blues like a train coming down the track, not dissimilar to what Johnny Cash did with his country. King, Lee, and company kept hammering down steady grooves with a little break to borrow from James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine”.
CC Adcock & The Lafayette Marquis – WWOZ/Bud Light Stage - 3:00 p.m.
CC Adcock can smooth talk a crowd or make a band member laugh with such ease. Despite his set starting a tad late, Adcock simply said to a solid 100-plus-people with a smile, “Welcome to the sound check, y’all,” and all was forgiven. The Lafayette native comes with a salt-of-the-earth bayou swagger on the mic and watery, sporting even psychedelic Frampton guitar sounds. In his native zydeco tradition, Adcock’s got a washboard player and upright bassist in his outfit, but his music is distinctly rock ‘n’ roll with equal parts Dr. John, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp (the opening riff of one of his new songs has the big ringing open tones of “Small Town”), or Ted Nugent depending on the song. He plays squeezebox accordion and flying V guitar without discrimination. He ended the set with his band The Lafayette Marquis on a doubled-up drum kit like The Allmans or The Dead. It felt heavy and muscular as hell, polished off with a sweet guitar solo from Adcock.
Delta Rae – WWOZ/Bud Light Stage - 4:30 p.m.
Delta Rae’s sound check alone elicited cheering from fans, but it was its torch-song lead off, “The Morning Comes”, that got a crowd fairly strong in numbers cheering loudly so early in the day. The crowd was there to see a band who, by their own admission, had never played New Orleans before. Songs like “If I Loved You” seemed to inspirationally surge, equally informed by Contemporary Christian rock, old-school gospel piano, and Britpop like Coldplay and Keane. Similar to many bands on the festival bill, Delta Rae is a family band, featuring the blonde-headed, stellar vocalists Ian, Eric, and Brittany Hölljes. Cello, acoustic and electric guitars, and electric piano gave the band a sweet feel. Give these guys a few years, they could give The Avetts and Mumford and Songs a run for their money.
Thomas Dolby – Le Carnival Stage - 5:15 p.m.
I was concerned that Thomas Dolby’s synth pop would sound downright soulless and inert next to my diet of old and new roots on Friday. “This is a song I wrote for my dead uncle,” Dolby said near the beginning of his set, bumming everyone out. Then he played “One of Our Submarines”, a lush, upbeat ditty in his native Britan’s New Wave tradition of making sad songs sound happy. Live, the song’s refrain of “bye, bye empire” sounded like Dolby was borrowing David Byrne’s vocal lilt. By the end of his set, Dolby played his radio hit “She Blinded Me with Science”, the song people came to hear — and he knew it. For a middle-aged electronic music icon, Dolby seems to have kept up with the times. Musing about politics, he tossed off an Internet meme: “It’s all horses and bayonets, innit?” Yes, Mr. Dolby, it is.
Gary Clark Jr. – Le Ritual Stage – 5:45 p.m.
Gary Clark Jr. roared onto Le Ritual Stage with galloping Zeppelin grooves, woozy Hendrix psych guitar sounds, and raw guitar talent untouched by almost anyone else at the festival as the sun set. The Austin wunderkind did heavy English blues better than folks two to three times his age. It makes sense, then, that even diehard baby boomers psyched for the Neil Young set later that evening gave Clark his propers. Songs like “Bright Lights Big City” tore it up but even Clark’s slow jams, which don’t work as well, get great by the time a smooth, sexy guitar solo comes in. All the starts to his songs lead you to believe they’re classic cuts from the ’60s, but they’re original and it’s to his credit that he can be as authentically evocative of the style and era. Clark is a promising artist reconstructing heavy blues/classic rock from his point of view.
Cheick Hamala Diabate – Preservation Hall Stage – 7:00 p.m.
Forget for a moment that Cheick Hamala Diabate hardly, if ever, does major festival dates like Voodoo. Forget for a moment that the Diabate family has a centuries-old tradition of West African griot oral tradition. Just listen to those joyous grooves, so bright and full of life! Diabate’s sounds didn’t strike the head like Neil Young would later that night, but his eight-musician line up of tambourine, ngoni (a form of African banjo), xylophone, bass, sax, djembe drum, guitar, drum kit and more (musicians switched instruments often) danced in the mild night air like fireflies. His tambourinist/percussionist danced, too, tossing her instrument aside for long sections of songs to bust a move. All the old people that would later be at Neil Young were dancing gingerly here, tapping into something deeply tribal and human in all of us. Trust.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse – Le Ritual Stage - 9:00 p.m.
Between setlist bookends “Love and Only Love” and “Like a Hurricane”, all of Young’s songs hit like the lattermost title’s fierce storms, content and loud in their seasoned simplicity. Though Young is old (and, sadly, doesn’t look as robust as he used to up there), you’re reminded that he always had an old soul, lyrically. Young rocked back and forth, stalking the stage with a squinty-eyed stoicism, like a monk unperturbed in front of walls of throaty guitar sound, swinging his arm back and forth over his guitar to control the elements.
Young and Crazy Horse (bassist Billy Talbot, drummer Ralph Molina, and rhythm guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro) huddled together in the kind of comfort, shared talent, and communal respect that can only come from playing together for ages. The band hardly acknowledged the audience, at least for the first few songs. “Born in Ontario”, a song off Young’s newest Psychedelic Pill, was plainspoken, like Young was talking to himself because no one was around. Same with “Ramada Inn”, so deadpan it’s as if the hotel chain paid for sponsorship. (But of course, it didn’t.)
“Powderfinger” off Rust Never Sleeps moseyed along mid-tempo, ringing out with a destructive crunch. It told a sad tale followed closely by another: the tearjerker “The Needle and the Damage Done”. Young’s classic hits were a bit sparse in this setlist (“My My Hey Hey”, “Cinnamon Girl”) but by “Like a Hurricane”, Young had seemingly grown tired of his guitar and showed some of his old fire, shredding its strings, bashing on its pickups and humbuckers and kicked it away, toward the audience, as if saying, “That’ll show ya!” And boy, he did. He sure showed us.
