Yesterday the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation announced that the annual festival will be held this year at the usual venue, the Fair Grounds racetrack. Katrina be damned!

As always, the festival will be held on the last weekend of April and first weekend of May. This year, there will be two three-day weekends (Fri/Sat/Sun), just as there were during the first 15-20 years of the festival ~ the Thursday sessions added in recent years have been eliminated for the time being.

This annual announcement has traditionally included a long list of the year's scheduled performers. This year, the mere fact of the festival's survival and the decision on the number of days were newsworthy enough to suffice. Only one performer was identified as having been signed: Fats Domino, who rode out the storm in his Lower Ninth Ward home and who was widely assumed to have died before he was found and rescued several days after the flood.

The official Festival poster for 2006 was unveiled, featuring a portrait of Fats.

Director Quint Davis noted that organizers are having difficulty lining up the usual "local" musicians because so many have had to relocate and are now scattered around the country and the world. However, many of the local nightclubs and other venues are located in "high-and-dry" areas of the city and have been able to reopen, so the local music scene has resumed operation, providing gigs to support returning players.

The local rumor mill is rife with rumors about world-famous acts who will come to Jazzfest as a gesture of solidarity and to help draw audiences who will contribute to the resurrection of the local economy. Discussion centers around U2 and the Rolling Stones, but there also has been a revival of an old favorite rock-festival tradition, the usually-wrong prediction that "Dylan will be there!"

The most likely to actually appear of all the big-name "outsiders" is probably Elvis Cosello, who has been collaborating with New Orleanian Allen Toussaint in recent months, while the two have been living in New York.

Hopefully, by late April a number of local residents currently living in FEMA trailers will have begun moving into their houses, creating an underground economy of subletting trailer housing to Jazzfest visitors. (Of course, an even larger number of folks will still be waiting for their trailers.) It has occurred to me that some visitors might find a stay in such cramped quarters as an interesting experiment in reality-based tourism, a way to vicariously experience a few days of live as a flood survivor in 2006 New Orleans.

And, oh yeah, in the more immediate future: Mardi Gras will be celebrated on Tuesday Feb 28 (and over the preceeding two weeks). Come see us, spend some money, and see not only the usual attractions (most of which are found in the older, higher-elevation, unflooded neighborhoods), but also take a drive or tour through flood-devasted areas (like mine) to witness both the devastation and also the determination of homeowners to rebuild and return, with or without help from our astoundingly boneheaded and ineffectual government.