The New Orleans Suspects started off the Sunday of New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on the Acura stage with their well-known Big Easy funk.
This is the first jazz fest for the band, multiple members have been playing the festival for decades. After their set concluded, The Daily Reveille sat down with lead guitarist Jake Eckert to explore the evolution of the festival and the band’s roots.
The Daily Reveille: How did you think your set went?
Jake Eckert: Oh, it was great. I had a blast. The crowd was great. We got lucky with the weather- you really can’t hope for more. With these festivals, it’s all about the weather. If it’s a beautiful day, it’s a beautiful time. If it is wet and muddy, it’s wet and muddy, figuratively and literally.
TDR: How do y’all like playing Jazz Fest?
JE: I love playing Jazz Fest, it’s my favorite time of year. We’ve been lucky every year to have been on the Acura stage, which is great because a lot of these guys have been here almost since the conception of the festival.
TDR: How many times have the New Orleans Suspects played the festival?
JE: It’s this band’s fifth year, and we all have played for years. This is my tenth or eleventh time on the Acura stage. I used to play with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Reggie [Scanlan] and Willie [Green] have played for 30 years, at least.
TDR: How long have you been with this band?
JE: Well, all those guys you saw on stage have been there since the beginning. This band started in 2009, so this is our seventh year together, with four albums. That’s the founding band pretty much, that you see up there. It’s a real band, and without one member it’s incomplete.
TDR: Do you think the festival has changed since you’ve started playing it?
JE: Yes, I do. It’s grown. It’s still great, it definitely is. Coming from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, who was there from the beginning, I saw pictures of the festival as it was, before there were even any stages. If you really look at Jazz Fest, you can still get the real New Orleans music, it’s just within the spectrum of these big pop bands. We can go to the Jazz and Heritage stage or the Lagniappe stage right now and see something that you’re going to see on any given day in New Orleans. As it’s grown, they’ve maintained the culture and the heritage of New Orleans, and I think that’s the trick with these festivals, too; let it grow, while preserving the culture of New Orleans. And that’s in general as New Orleans grows. I don’t think I’d know what to do without the New Orleans Jazz Fest.
TDR: Touring outside of New Orleans and Louisiana, how is it representing this city to other people?
JE: It definitely represents the city— New Orleans music has an infectious thing about it. When you’ve been taught it or grew up with it, people feel that. We have a lot of little elements of different places we came from, and we bring those with us and present them in a new way. People often come to me at the end of a show and say, “You know, I felt like I was in New Orleans for the night.” And that’s what I feel like, as we progress also preserving that, has made people feel like they’re in New Orleans.
TDR: Is that what you want your audience to feel like when you play, like they’re here?
JE: Of course, expressing ourselves in our original music, artistically. Also, that’s within us, we can’t really help that. So, we do; it unconsciously happens, but we emit the New Orleans thing. It is a feeling, you come down to New Orleans and it’s a feeling, not just a geographic place on a map.
TDR: Can you tell me about your songwriting approach?
JE: When the band started, we played a lot of New Orleans standards, and as we started writing we brought tunes. The first album we brought songs kind’ve in our pocket, the second album was live and the third album we really started writing. CR and I really did the bulk of the writing, and Jeff, the saxophone player. The newest album, the songwriting is a little different. There are some songs like that, and then there are songs where we all wrote it, it was conceived by everybody.
TDR: With five members, how do you all effectively work together to contribute and produce something like that?
JE: You’ve got to find each person’s strength. Everybody has a strength, even if it’s something you may not expect. You really have to figure out where each person’s strength fits in the puzzle, that way you can move forward with it. After seven years of working together, we’ve figured out who does what and who doesn’t do what. That way the group effort is productive, otherwise that’s how people get into a headbutting contest.
TDR: What do you see for the future of the band?
JE: Until something stops us, we’re going to keep rolling. We don’t know what else to do, so we’re going to keep plowing along. We’ll be travelling all over the place, we’re booked all over the country for the rest of the year.
Spectators watch as The New Orleans Suspects perform Sunday, April 24, 2016 during the third day of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
