Fun keeps on through May 6

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN PRESS

NEW ORLEANS — The first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival closed on a high note Sunday night with a performances by elder statesman trumpet and flugelhorn player Clark Terry with the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra, led by John Faddis. Simultaneously, pop/soul singer and songwriter Van Morrison, in his second Jazz Fest performance in as many days, attracted the largest crowd of the weekend to the open-air Acura stage.

Record crowds attended Jazz Fest in the first weekend, roughly estimated at 220,000. Warm, dry weather was credited with the sizable upward bump from the previous best-selling festival in 1998.

Playwright-historian Carolyn Woosley, a Lake Charles and New Orleans resident, raved about two lecture workshops she attended at the grandstand's African-American Heritage Stage — one on Creole culture and the other on the Negro Musicians Union. Woosley spent an hour taking in the very well-attended Louis Armstrong exhibition arranged in a grandstand corridor.

Lake Charles resident and former recording engineer Richard Hogarth said he got better at moving around the Fair Grounds.

"You can't hear all of everything," Hogarth said, "but you can hear some of it all." He raved about jazz trumpeter Marlon Jordan and the New Orleans Night Crawlers Brass Band, who played Sunday.

He described Friday afternoon's Beausoleil show as a "guitar gumbo" for its wall-of-sound phalanx of guest guitarists Sonny Landreth, Richard Thompson and Cindy Cashdollar.

Gumbo is the perfect metaphor for one-time only Jazz Fest musical mixtures, but it's also the yardstick by which all festival foods can be measured. The food concessions are so popular that one Beaumont, Texas, couple walked in one entrance to the Fair Grounds, ate their way to the other side and exited without listening to any of the music.

And as for gumbo, Prejean's exotic mixture of pheasant, quail and andouille wins hands down. But this year's food favorite — edging out the world-famous creamy pasta dish, Crawfish Monica — is the crawfish sack created by Chalmette's Patton's Caterers: pastry squares filled with crawfish in a delicately spiced sauce and tied into tiny pouches, then baked until browned.

Patton's offers a combo of crawfish sacks, crawfish beignets and puff pastry cups filled with a pale green sauce and floating oyster bits. One enterprising woman brought a home-made cardboard tray to carry out half a dozen of Patton's combo plates.

"I made a mental note to do this last year," she told admirers waiting in line.

Strangers gave each other spoonfuls of food to taste. "You don't know me, and I don't know you," one woman said, dishing up a spoonful of oyster and artichoke soup to her neighbor. "But, hey, this is Jazz Fest. You gotta be good people, right?"

Jazz Fest continues this weekend with more than 60 performances each day, including Lake Charles native Lucinda Williams, the Magnolia Sisters and Widespread Panic on Thursday; Lake Charles' Sean Ardoin & ZydeKool and Paul Simon on Friday; Cowboy Mouth, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys and the Dave Matthews Band on Saturday; and Fats Domino, Al Jarreau and the Neville Brothers on Sunday.

Tickets are $20 at the gate. A souvenir program is $5 and includes coupons for Jazz Fest food concessions. The "amazing tastings" range from $3 to $8 per dish, and bottled water is $2.

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