Roger Hahn

Editor’s note: When contemporary roots rockers My Morning Jacket stopped by New Orleans’ Preservation Hall for an unplugged midnight show that served as a prelude to MMJ’s spring tour with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band as opening act, Rolling Stone made due note of the event in its May 27th issue with feature coverage.

Preservation Hall

The MMJ gig is one of many changes happening at the world-renowned French Quarter home to New Orleans jazz, all part of an historic attempt to forge a new identity as the Hall approaches its 50th anniversary and looks forward to a new life in the 21st century.Our Man in New Orleans, Roger Hahn, has the full story.

Our Man in New Orleans Roger Hahn concludes his report from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival 2009 and meditates on its future. You'll think you went!-ed.

New marketing trends had begun to establish an exploitable connection between highly educated consumers with gobs of disposable income and their fascination for the aura of “authenticity” naturally connected to the “roots” music world.

Corporate leaders began to understand this, too. In 1996, one of the world’s largest software vendors, Computer Associates, began holding its annual trade show in New Orleans and by 1998, had specifically connected attendance at the trade show with a Jazz Fest hospitality tent on festival grounds, spawning an unlikely influx of logo-bearing, polo-shirted Computer Associates employees.

New Orleans' second-line parade culture and Mardi Gras Indian culture share a number of attributes.

Both emerged as casually formalized neighborhood practices in the post-Reconstruction decades of the late 19th-century, with Indian imagery likely influenced around that time by the popularity in the U.S. of traveling 'Wild West' shows.