Inside A New Era For New Orleans On Eve of 2023 Jazz Fest

Keep your eye on us!” declares New Orleans music entrepreneur Nate Cameron Jr. “We’re in a very unique renaissance now.”

Cameron, a co-founder of the New Orleans creative collective glbl wrmng and tour/space production manager for the Grammy Award-nominated group Tank and the Bangas, gives a shoutout to the global music community with an enthusiasm that reflects the current upbeat mood in New Orleans music industry circles.

Such excitement is sparked in part by the emergence of a sophisticated music business infrastructure in a city where that essential knowledge has been conspicuously absent in the past. Despite the abundant talent in New Orleans — one of the world’s great musical locales — this shortcoming previously made some view it as something of a business backwater. As a result, hometown musicians missed many lucrative national-level opportunities and were vulnerable to industry exploitation.

Many New Orleans artists who sought to bolster their careers by connecting with respected professionals felt that they had to relocate to New York, Los Angeles or Nashville — and some pros who stayed home came to feel stigmatized for hailing from New Orleans. “I know someone in the music business here, now, who has an L.A. phone number so that people from out of town will take him seriously — and that is just bananas,” says Melissa O’Brien, producer of NOLA MusicCon, the music business conference that will return for a second annual in-person event Oct. 24-27.

“Many people think of New Orleans music exclusively in terms of its historic traditions, especially from the classic R&B era of Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, The Neville Brothers and Irma Thomas — the ‘giants’ of New Orleans R&B. And we have The Radiators, who are like our own Grateful Dead,” says Quint Davis, producer-director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which runs April 28-May 7. “But I think people need to understand that New Orleans music is not frozen in time, that another generation of younger artists has emerged who are commercial and hot and rocking. They are very innovative and forward-thinking, and they are building high-profile, nationally successful careers — artists such as Trombone Shorty, Jon Batiste, Big Freedia, Galactic, The Revivalists, Tank and the Bangas, Boyfriend, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk. In contemporary jazz, there’s Nicholas Payton, Donald Harrison and Terence Blanchard playing a role on the national stage. The list goes on and on in all genres. This exciting surge of fresh creativity is important for the global music business to understand about New Orleans today.

“There is now a significantly increased level of management,” Davis continues, “that can lead artists into making wise career choices; getting good publishing deals, which was lacking here for years; getting good record deals; and all the other career benefits that come with having national-level, nationally respected, well-connected, competent professional management people, such as Dino Gankendoff and Rueben Williams. There are good, new recording studios here as well. It has taken a long time for the highest standard of business infrastructure and technology to come to New Orleans. Now we have a lot of it, and that is a very promising recent development.”

Today, the word is out that local musicians can acquire essential business acumen without leaving town. Jonathan McHugh, the Hilton-Baldridge eminent scholar and chair of music industry studies at the city’s Loyola University, is “enthusiastic about the opportunities to be a filmmaker, record producer, publisher and music supervisor here. I’m invigorated by the potential to help [continue to build] the industry here and supply it with great young talent entering the workforce.”

Reid Wick, senior manager of membership and industry relations with the Recording Academy in New Orleans, explains that “over the last 15-plus years, many of us in the music industry here, with the support of the Recording Academy, worked to establish an impressive set of incentives for music industry growth. The state of Louisiana now has the strongest suite of incentives in the country, which includes investor rebates for recording and touring projects, as well as the growth of music jobs via payroll tax incentives.

“Additionally, we have garnered support from the economic development, tourism and government sectors to give the local music industry a seat at the table … These developments have led to the creation of the New Orleans Music Economy initiative, working with the international consulting firm Sound Diplomacy, under the auspices of [the economic development agency] Greater New Orleans Inc. We have been able to raise the awareness of the economic impact and importance of the local music industry as a true industry, as well as a cultural driver of the city’s overall economic health and well-being.”

Greater New Orleans Inc. vp of communications Matt Wolfe agrees. “The next step for the city is to execute on the business side of the industry — managing intellectual property, legal work, marketing, record labels, tour coordination and the other services that artists utilize in their growth trajectory,” he says. “The opportunity is here for the majors to capitalize on a market where artists already come to write and record.”

Walt Leger, president/CEO of New Orleans & Company, the city’s tourism board, credits this new climate to, in one word, “partnerships. I think what you are seeing is planning and ideation around the music business and its development happening in a very collaborative spirit, with higher education, the business community and state and local leadership.”

Cameron explains, “The global music business needs to know that New Orleans today is as vital, unique, innovative and modern as it has always been. At the core, New Orleans music has always been known for having genre lines that are blended by people from different cultures and different communities. The most promising recent development is the intentionality of our leading artists not only working together, collaborating with each other on music, collaborating with each other on tours, and collaborating on business ventures and properties, but also the spirit of fellowship and collaboration leading artists and cultural bearers and influencers, having the intentionality of bringing along the younger generations. We have a lot of young artists who are authentic to New Orleans, but they’re also very plugged into the national and international mix.”

Reid Martin, owner of New Orleans-based artist services firm MidCitizen Entertainment, is pleased that “we have some of the best business incentives in the country.” Recently, Louisiana launched the MIC’D UP (Music Industry Career Development University Partnership) program. To offer a $15-per-hour internship, “the state pays half of the wages, so the private business only has to [pay] $7.50 an hour,” he says. “At the end of the year, the hope is that the participating companies hire their interns, thus creating a new full-time, music industry job in New Orleans, and start the process all over again the next year with a new intern.

“In addition to this program,” adds Martin, “we have two sets of tax incentives, the qualified music company tax credit and the qualified entertainment company tax credit, that give tax breaks to companies that hire three employees at $35,000 per year [the QMC credit] or five employees at $45,000 per year [the QEC credit].”

Historian, educator and event planner Melissa A. Weber points out that local artists can benefit from “several endeavors that are invested in educating musicians about the business of music,” she says. “My favorites include workshops and legal clinics presented by the Ella Project, a nonprofit that offers pro bono legal assistance, arts business services and advocacy to the local cultural community; the New Orleans Music Economy Initiative, a project of Greater New Orleans Inc., focusing on intellectual property management and a competitive economic development strategy for New Orleans music; and Loyola University New Orleans’ Music Industry Studies program, which allows students to work with producers, managers, attorneys and other music business professionals.”

New Orleans’ brick-and-mortar facilities, large and small, also inspire enthusiasm. Since opening in 1975, Caesars Superdome has hosted The Rolling Stones; the Ultimate Event bill of Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr.; the Essence Music Festival; and the Bayou Country Superfest headlined by George Strait and many others. The iconic stadium is in the home stretch of a multiyear (2020-24) upgrade of its physical spaces and technology. “We’ve got character other buildings wish they had,” says Evan Holmes, GM of Caesars Superdome, the adjacent Smoothie King Center and LSED Properties.

Robert Mercurio, bassist for Galactic — the band that bought renowned nightclub Tipitina’s in late 2018 — says that, for promising new developments, “one of the best things is that we have a record-pressing plant in the city limits now, New Orleans Record Press, vinyl only. I feel like this has opened up the window for artists to have easy access to the most popular album format and actually make some real money from their music.” Since launching in late 2020, Tipitina’s Record Club has released albums, many of them archival, by Dr. John, Ernie K-Doe, Danny Barker, Donald Harrison, Fats Domino, Johnny Adams, Etta James, Trombone Shorty and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band with Dizzy Gillespie and James Booker, with more on the way.

And PJ Morton — a Grammy-winning musician, vocalist, songwriter, producer and label owner — is proud to announce that “we just [began] renovating the historic Dew Drop Inn, a place that brought so much talent to town years ago. I feel that it’ll be that same type of go-to club now.” From the mid-’40s through the late ’60s, the Dew Drop was one of the most important venues for classic New Orleans R&B performed by masters including Allen Toussaint, Earl King and Huey “Piano” Smith.

New Orleans’ newfound business climate doesn’t mean the city has become too serious or lost its charm. As music, sports and entertainment banker Charles Gaspard of First Horizon Bank says, “I know everyone says this about their hometown, but there is something about New Orleans that you just can’t find anywhere else. There’s a magic to this city. A dysfunctional magic, maybe, but a magic nonetheless. It’s in our architecture, it’s in our food, it’s in the people, it’s even in the potholes, and it lingers in the air as thick as the year-round humidity. It seeps into the sounds mastered here and feeds the creativity of the artists that welcome our beautifully chaotic energy.”

New Orleans native, NPR journalist and author Gwen Thompkins feels that the city “is as it ever was — a wellspring of tremendous talent with multiple opportunities every day to hear live music worth listening to.” She notes that the public radio station WWOZ-FM (90.7) makes on-air announcements every other hour about upcoming concerts. “Those announcements usually take more than five minutes to deliver because of the sheer number of performances,” she says. “Musicians here are both singular and awe-inspiringly collaborative. They play well with others, cross-pollinating in ways that musicians in other locales often do not. Players known mostly for their work in funk, for example, will perform live with others known for contemporary jazz. A bounce artist will organize a gospel music concert for the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Other artists may explore the connections between jazz and opera, or join hip-hop, electronica and the musical traditions of the city’s Black Masking Indians. Singer-songwriters and avant-garde artists have standing dates in clubs around town.

“And, most importantly,” adds Thompkins, “many artists here shoulder the responsibility of tutoring younger generations in the city’s music traditions — from early jazz to hip-hop, to bounce and R&B. The city is, and has always been, a giant incubator of talent.”

As Cameron says, “It’s a new day for New Orleans, an exciting new day for our culture, in a way that our ancestors never could have imagined.”

Contributor Ben Sandmel produces the oral history/interview venue at New Orleans’ Jazz Fest, produced and played drums on the Hackberry Ramblers’ Grammy-nominated Deep Water and wrote Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans.

This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.