How do music festivals adapt to a pandemic? They Fest in Place, of course

Ben Gibbard, I salute you for doing an at-home live-streamed concert every week from March through May as we all adjusted to the quarantimes.

Like so many current realities, no one could’ve seen “musicians as the new Twitch stars” coming back in January. Yet in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the music industry relied heavily on livestreams—typically just one artist in a room with webcam doing an acoustic performance.

In our ever-connected present day, it was the adjustment of least resistance. At first, there was some novelty to seeing artists like Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard interacting with fans in the chat and taking an occasional request. But this summer, longtime New York Times music critic Jon Pareles succinctly summed up the audience experience for this impromptu livestream era: “So many good intentions, so little joy.”

When the bedrock of the music industry—concerts and music festivals—becomes impossible, though, what can anyone do? Drive-in shows have recently become a thing, but those can’t replicate the sheer scale (number of artists, stages, or fans) of even the smallest US music festivals. Most events simply embraced the livestream, like the annual counter-SXSW programming of Willie Nelson’s annual Luck Reunion festival transforming into a coordinated set of at-home performances.

Like it has throughout history, however, the music community in New Orleans had a different idea that would eventually spread all over. This time, it dealt with adapting the city’s beloved Jazz Fest for 2020.

Leverage the archives

Festing in Place—and the idea of an archival, online music festival—was born out of some combo of necessity and preparedness. SXSW became the first major US music festival to cancel due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March; Jazz Fest typically takes place each April into May. So while SXSW seemed to hold out hope of an in-person experience until it became too late to pivot, community radio station WWOZ had already been updating its daily operations for the possible arrival of this novel coronavirus when the news broke in Austin. Even more pertinent, WWOZ Director of Content Dave Ankers had already been considering the possibility that Jazz Fest would be following in SXSW footsteps. And since WWOZ would typically broadcast full days from the fairgrounds, the station was going to have to do something.

Unknowingly, Ankers had been preparing for this. Two years earlier, he spent quality time with the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archive’s collections as part of a team that produced a five-disc set for Jazz Fest compilation with Smithsonian Folkways. So Ankers knew the kind of unique sets and the wide array of recordings available down the street at the physical archive, and he started to envision putting together a schedule filled with Jazz Fest greatest hits.

Ankers said:

I had spent a lot of time at the Archive, pulling stuff out and figuring out what was in the collection. I was in a unique position to say, “I want this, this, and this for a broadcast,” and I knew what would require extra work to get the rights… So I thought, “I’m going to have this idea in my back pocket, I’m going to start scheduling it out.” I even remember bridging the conversation at the station: “I don’t know what’s going to happen and I don’t want to alarm anyone, but if Jazz Fest doesn’t happen, we can do a thing—I’m the station liaison to the Jazz & Heritage Foundation, and we can put together a special broadcast.”

Let’s rock

The concept was simple: if a genuine Jazz Fest couldn’t happen, Ankers wanted to broadcast a multi-day event built entirely out of notable archival performances from the festival. This theoretical event would be structured in a way to mimic the experience of being at Jazz Fest. It would span genres from Zydeco and Jazz to Gospel and Pop. It’d maintain Jazz Fest traditions like midday Second Line parades or local legends like the Neville Brothers or Trombone Shorty occupying weekend closing spots. It’d highlight some of the biggest names to ever play the festival—Ella Fitzgerald at one of the first events, Bruce Springsteen at the first fest post-Katrina. And, crucially, this would be an event: performances would be scheduled for a specific day and a specific time slot, giving listeners something to look forward to and giving the whole thing a slight bit of ephemera to make it feel special (versus any kind of live performance you could queue up on Spotify or revisit on Facebook Live whenever).

Soon, WWOZ formally partnered up with their neighbors at the Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archive (Archivist Rachel Lyons became an event co-producer). The plan moved forward, as Ankers recalls:

I said, “We’re going to recreate the festival in a manner of speaking. It’s going to feel like you’re there for the same hours every day.” But Beth [Arroyo Utterback, WWOZ’s general manager] came up with the name—it’s a term her parents used. They didn’t go every year as they got older, but they’d listen on WWOZ. “We’re not going, we’re festin’ in place!” And it kinda took.

Listeners interest turned out to be significant. Ankers says typically WWOZ’s busiest day happens on Mardi Gras, when streaming numbers tend to be four times larger than daily averages. But within minutes of the 11am start on day one of Festing in Place back in late April, things had already surpassed Mardi Gras levels.

“In 10 minutes, we were at four times our Mardi Gras listenership—and that meant we reached capacity with our streaming service. We all started looking at each other, ‘We’ve created a monster,’” Ankers says. “With the FM feed, of course, no one in New Orleans had any trouble. But our streaming service had trouble right during the highlight of the day—a performance by Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder. So people outside of New Orleans didn’t hear that at first.” (Don’t fret: Ankers graciously replayed that historic set to close day one after the initial technical difficulties.)

Like many community radio stations nationwide, WWOZ relies on a content delivery network (CDN) company called StreamGuys to power online listening. After WWOZ staff got them on the phone in a panic, StreamGuys came through—the radio station quickly had its capacity upped to handle 50,000 concurrent streamers, which proved to be enough to sustain the Festing in Place swells. “By the end of Festing in Place, we had an audience that was 32 times our daily audience on the stream,” Ankers says. “We felt like we had taken over the city.”

Fall festin’ season

The surprise enthusiasm and reach of Festing in Place was not lost on WWOZ. Neither was it lost on other radio stations and music festivals, for that matter. Over the summer, Ankers and WWOZ fielded calls from other community and public radio stations asking how to go about planning similar virtual archival music festivals (KOTO in Telluride virtualized its bluegrass festival, for instance). Soon, other world-renowned festivals seemed to adopt the blueprint that WWOZ’s Jazz Fest helped put in place: just last month, the Newport Jazz Festival held its Newport Jazz Revival and San Francisco’s Outside Lands did Inside Lands, for instance.

And almost as soon as Festing in Place wrapped back on May 3, Ankers and the WWOZ team started looking to September.

“When we started planning Festing in Place, we thought by the middle of the summer, ‘OK, everything could be back to normal.’ But there we were, mid-May, and my boss came to me with raised eyebrows: ‘Think we can do it again? Maybe Labor Day?’”

That’s how this month’s second virtual event—The Next Fest Thing—came to be. Starting on the Friday before Labor Day and spanning another two full weekends, Ankers and WWOZ expanded upon what they’d built impromptu this spring. Instead of mimicking one festival loyally, they expanded the scope. Ankers listened to hundreds of hours of sets from different organizations—that includes things recorded at different venues across the city from musicians who may have never played Jazz Fest. Some recordings even required a little extra leg work, with WWOZ’s chief engineer taking what’s available (say, only a multitrack master recording) and transforming it into something that can be put into Adobe Audition and mixed down for air.

Ankers says:

I didn’t want to do the same thing again. We wanted to do another “fest in place”—we need people to stay home and stay safe—but what if we didn’t do just Jazz Fest?… This time, we tried to give you New Orleans instead of Jazz Fest. I realized I made up all the rules myself last time, so I could break them. I don’t need recordings all from WWOZ. The Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane has recordings of Professor Longhair and James Booker no one had heard since they happened 40 years ago. I put out feelers, “Does anyone have a recording of Louis Armstrong?” And someone in a record store here talked to a friend who talked to a friend in London, who had a recording from 1945 that’s only 16 minutes long, but it’s Louis with Sidney Bechet recorded in New Orleans at the Municipal Auditorium. So you know what? I want 15 minutes of Louis Armstrong, he’s the grandaddy of New Orleans.

The schedule for The Next Fest Thing. Click here to enlarge, click the image credit to head to WWOZ’s Two-Week Archive to listen.

Credit: WWOZ

The results again spoke for themselves. WWOZ’s last two weekends have been stuffed with incredible archival material, from historical Mardi Gras Indian groups like the Wild Tchopitoulas having Ernie K-Doe drop in (1984 at Tipititina’s) to a 1958 Al Hirt set at the New Orleans Jazz Club to a replay of that famed Ella Fitzgerald Jazz Fest performance (1977) where a young Stevie Wonder came to the stage from the crowd. And thanks to the station’s “creatively named Two-Week Archive,” as Ankers calls it, those longing for the sound of a crowd and the spontaneous energy of a live festival performance can listen on demand for a bit longer (Friday, September 18 marks the last day to access The Next Fest Thing Day One).