Coco & crawfish

The idea is to get to as much of this stuff as possible at the Fair Grounds racetrack, where the festival is held -- the 11 simultaneously running open stages and tents, the innumerable craft demonstrations and retail tents, cooking demonstrations, folklore discussions, and all those food concessions. In that atmosphere, with as many as 90,000 people swarming the fest (on Saturday May 4, when Joan Osborne, Better Than Ezra, and Van Morrison were the big headliners) and the 85-degree heat beating down, arguments about relative quality wilt quickly. While we wolf oyster po' boys and baskets of boiled crawfish, we debate the next destination. The Dixie Cups (the trio who gave us "Chapel of Love" as well as the first "Iko Iko") versus Van the Man? "The Dixie Cups always do the same set," goes one friend's argument. "But I like the Dixie Cups," comes the retort. That's the only argument she needs.

In truth, real fest hounds go to the event not to see the big national touring acts but to make discoveries -- whether it's the Oyster Tasso Pasta or a grizzled club dog named Coco Robicheaux, who plays what the fest program calls "spiritual gris-gris blues," and that's as good a description as any of Coco's Howlin'-Wolf-via-Dr.-John rumble. Getting into the flow, the rhythm of the place, into that word "heritage" that you see everywhere, is a matter of getting sucked into the stories, from the endless narratives that might entail Coco Robicheaux's partial emergence from 30-year obscurity, to the three generations of family that seem to be represented in every Cajun and zydeco band (there's always someone under 10 up there scratching away at a rubboard), to the tale spun out by a solemn chef in the food demonstration booth while he makes Oysters Bienville, to the way everyone on stage, from the Frogman to Dr. John and the Nevilles, seems to owe a portion of his career to songwriter/producer Allen Toussaint.

This year we do the second weekend, Thursday to Sunday (Jazz Fest always takes place the last weekend of April through the first weekend of May). From the airport, we stop at the hotel, then head straight for the Fair Grounds, where the first act to raise the hair on the back of our necks is the Dixie Hummingbirds, an ancient gospel quartet who're all rhythm, from their call-and-response vocals to the snapping blues chords pounded out on a big hollow-bodied Gibson and the accompaniment of a slamming tambourine. On Day Two, the Frogman sings Ray Charles's C&W hit "I Can't Stop Loving You" with a Fats Domino-like New Orleans boogie piano, "I Like It like That" (which sounds a lot like "Chicken Shack"), and his most famous hit, "Ain't Got No Home," where he creates a male-female dialogue by alternating a high falsetto with his deep froggy growl.

At the Congo Square Tent, the Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indians create a spooky joo-joo, nothing but percussion and deep growling vocals, led by Big Chief Monk Boudreaux. The tribe, we're told, are from the Central City neighborhood of Second and Dryades Streets; they performed at the first fest in 1970. Now they're working deep rhythms, hocketing layers of call-and-response to "Shotgun Joe," driven by Devil dread. "I know the Devil's in you (I know, I know) . . . Indians, here they come . . . " There's imagery of a big black limousine, and a humming drone of backing vocals against percussion while the chief tells his tale, a fearful story whose history extends from Buddy Bolden to Robert Johnson to Eudora Welty's classic fictional piano man "Powerhouse" to the percussion-driven incantations of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. It's a stirring performance, worlds away from the latter-day guitar funk of Mardi Gras tribes like the Wild Magnolias.

At the Fais Do-Do stage, Rosie Ledet, a 25-year-old raven-haired cutie called "The Sweetheart of Zydeco," plays "Sweet Brown Sugar" and other pieces that are hardly double entendre, including one about a dog that keeps sniffin' round and Rosie's gonna show him where to bury his bone. Well, none of it's dirtier than Boozoo Chavis's "Uncle Bud," but then it's a lot more difficult to understand what Boozoo's singing.

The fest spills into the clubs at night. At Mid City Lanes, "Home of Rock 'n Bowl," tenpins clatter and the dance floor shakes as Boozoo once again takes on his younger zydeco challenger Beau Jocque in one of their perennial "Boo vs. Beau" confrontations, with Rosie Ledet in a striped referee shirt moderating and being dubbed by Boozoo the new "Queen of Zydeco" (don't tell Queen Ida). There's a night at Checkpoint Charlie's on the edge of the Quarter where Coco Robicheaux's tight little outfit brings us down from the sunny sprawl of the Fair Grounds to the throbbing confinement of clubland, his band cranking hard and Coco howling. At the Fair Grounds, there's a brilliant performance by the unfortunately named family gospel group the Johnson Extension, four women and two men with keyboards, bass, guitar, and drums, rapidly spilling out "If God has been good to you" against the exclamation "Praise Him!" and a frenzied "Nobody moves me like Jesus."

On Sunday morning we gear down, take a trip seven miles downriver on the Natchez paddle-wheel steamboat, a classic white-with-red-trim three-decker, 270 feet long, capacity 1600 passengers. The narrator/tour guide reads the story of the river for us as it unfolds in front of us. A barge passes heaped with coal from the Kentucky on its way to a paper mill in St. Jo, Florida. There's a Maltese freighter in for repairs, a Dutch cargo carrier, and on shore the Domino Sugar refinery, the Mobil oil refinery with its tall narrow stacks that lick flame, and a barge of logs from Alabama forests on their way to the Scott paper mill.

At the festival, the trad jazz catches our ears for a change. This isn't "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" but something else -- a shifting, joyous polyphony marked by precise cymbal splashes, and a tuba alternating beats with a banjo strum. On stage, Fred Starr of the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble of New Orleans tells the story behind every piece -- the early jazz of Dodds and Oliver and Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. "Meat on the Table" comes from one of the "uptown" bands, the New Orleans Owls, the kind of thing they used to play in a joint called the Cave in the '20s, a succession of themes and soloists, rocking off drummer John Joyce's cymbal splashes and banjoist John Chaffe's four-beat strumming.

Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Cha's rock R&B into the zydeco cross-rhythms, setting the big crowd in front of the Fais Do-Do stage dancing. And in the final performance of the day, 91-year-old Doc Cheatham plays his horn, sure-toned and elegant, and sings, "I'm as happy as a baby boy/With his new choo-choo toy/When I'm with my sweet Lorraine."

Perhaps the most moving performance of the festival comes from Chef James Battiste of Courtney's Deli, a hole-in-the-wall take-out stand he took over three years ago after spending more than 20 years at the fabled Chez Hélène under the tutelage of its legendary Chef Austin Leslie. In his 90-minute "set," Battiste works under a big tilted mirror so the audience can see what's happening on his burners and his cutting board. He's a big man, in his kitchen whites and tall chef's hat, 36 years old, cooking up Oysters Bienville and then, with the leftovers, oyster pie ("I can make a pie crust, but I can't make a pie crust that I like"), holding up the season's fine catch in the palm of his hand ("I'm gonna brag on these oysters"), drawing an appreciative chuckle and gasp from the audience when he pours red-hot sauce into the pan of boiling shellfish, and offhandedly spilling out his life story along with the story of the food.

His words come out in heavy cadences, a dignified, deliberate delivery, as deliberate as John Joyce's cymbal splashes. When he says "boil," it tends to come out "burl." He talks about his many jobs, working for his father's bread-delivery business, trouble in school, starting at Chez Hélène washing dishes at the age of 13, "the military," hints at trouble with alcohol ("You can always tell what wine a chef likes to drink by the wine he puts in the food"), and a pivotal experience at age 16, when his father was injured in a fire. "When my father was laid out on the garage floor after the fire, he gave me the keys to the business, and he gave me his wallet, and he said, `You always wanted to be a man; well now you the man.' " All while he spoke, Chef James cooked up an oyster pie, sweet and fragrant. "The name comes from Bienville Street. In New Orleans, like in most cities, there's a story behind everything. Nothing happens by mistake; nothing happens for no reason at all."