The first weekend of the 2025 edition of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is underway, with one historic moment for the festival and the city set to take place during the first Saturday.
New Orleans native and global hip-hop icon Lil Wayne will headline the Festival Stage — the main stage on the festival grounds — for the first time in his 30-year career. He’ll be backed by The Roots, the equally-iconic band known for blending hip-hop and jazz and serving as the house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
New Orleans and music are synonymous. While jazz music and brass bands may be the first genres that come to mind for some, the city’s bounce music and hip-hop created over the last couple of decades has made its way into the conversation.
At Jazz Fest, fest-goers will hear a little bit of everything, ranging from rock and roll, bluegrass, country and, of course, hip-hop — like local artist Alfred Banks.
If you’re a musician from New Orleans, Banks said, performing at Jazz Fest is on your bucket list.
“Jazz Fest is kind of like the local mecca for performance,” Banks said.
Banks is a rapper born and raised in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans. He performed at Jazz Fest last year and played on the Congo Square stage. The stage is named to pay homage to the real Congo Square space in the Tremé neighborhood. Local historians say enslaved African people would congregate there every Sunday to play music, dance, and sing.
Critically acclaimed rhythm and blues, soul and hip-hop artists have graced the stage in years past, including Queen Latifah, the Wu-Tang Clan, Kem, Teena Marie, Nelly, Charlie Wilson, Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, Kool and the Gang and more.
“That’s just where you play,” Banks said. “If you’re Black artist, you know you’re playing the Congo Square stage.”
Some of those artists have crossed over to the Festival Stage or Gentilly Stage, the other main stage at the festival. But when it comes to hip-hop, Banks said it seems rap artists, whether national or local acts, tend to play that stage by default.
“It does feel like no matter how big you get or how much notoriety you get…you’re probably playing Congo Square. That’s just kind of where the artists go,” Banks said. “I don’t know if I’d be wrong to say this, but I don’t think [Lil Wayne] would have got booked [for the Festival Stage] if he didn’t have The Roots with him.”
This is why Lil Wayne and The Roots playing the main stage on Saturday — let alone headlining it — is a big deal. Banks said he, along with other rappers around the city, are excited for Lil Wayne.
“I’ve been seeing people very excited about it, but the thing is, Jazz Fest isn’t marketed to people who would like Lil Wayne,” Banks said. “So to have Lil Wayne on there, they’re trying to get those people in.”
Locally, Jazz Fest is sometimes known as “Dad Fest,” targeting middle aged or older people. Getting artists like Lil Wayne can be seen as an attempt to broaden that audience. However, Louis Edwards, the associate producer of Jazz Fest, said the festival caters to everyone and that it has embraced hip-hop since its inception.
“Getting Lil Wayne, of course, is a real coup,” said Edwards, who’s worked with the festival for 40 years — nearly as long as it’s been around. “We’ve wanted him for years. But there’s been hip-hop throughout [the festival’s history], whether it’s Juvenile and Mystikal on a local level, or on a national level.”
“Nas, Common, Drake [all have] played Jazz Fest. I don’t know that those artists are thought of as just appealing to middle-aged people.”
Edwards heard about Lil Wayne and The Roots teaming up after their performance last Summer at The Roots Picnic — an annual festival in the band’s hometown of Philadelphia. At that moment, he knew they would be a great fit for the main stage at Jazz Fest.
“That was new, that was fresh. We felt like it was something that would play really well at the festival, which for the most part is driven by acoustic music,” he said. “Some hip-hop shows are recorded music. It’s a track, right? But we love it when the music is really acoustic and it’s live and this was going to deliver that.”
Another rapper who’s performing on the main stage right before Lil Wayne is none other than the Queen of Bounce herself — New Orleans’ own Big Freedia.
Big Freedia is basically royalty in New Orleans. She’s helped bring the hip-hop subgenre of bounce music — known for its fast paced and repetitive drum beats and call and response lyrics — to new audiences over the last decade-plus.
This year, fans will get two chances to catch Big Freedia at the festival — once on the main stage, and again at the Gospel Tent with the New Orleans Gospel Soul Children. She has a new rap gospel song with Tamar Braxton, “Sunday Best.”
She said she hopes she gets a chance to perform the song she has with Lil Wayne. Her music is a testament of how hip hop intersects with a variety of genres and fits seamlessly into The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
“Jazz Fest is expanding their horizon and they are trying to bring more of our Black folks to come in to support the Jazz Fest and to support just our own city and our natives who grew up here and are from here,” she said.
Big Freedia has performed all over the world, but says it’s nothing like Jazz Fest and performing at home.
“You get to see the local acts, you see the Mardi Gras Indians and the whole cultural thing behind that. You get to experience all of these different food vendors and it’s just no experience like that,” she said. “I think it’s very diverse for every type of person and it is just different from everywhere else I’ve been.”
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
