By Gerald Peary

If the filmmakers are going to delve into the Jazz Fest vaults, how is it possible to show only a few seconds of Professor Longhair and nothing of James Booker, the Meters, the Neville Brothers? Not good.

Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story, directed by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern. Screening at Boston Common 19 beginning on June 2

A scene from Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.

For the second time in a month, I am reviewing a documentary which misuses its time having subjects on camera testifying to the obvious. Everyone in The Automat, which I previously wrote about, loved Horn & Hardarts cafeteria and kept telling us they loved it. And everyone in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story is crazy about the New Orleans Jazz Festival and daffy about the city that sponsors it, and announces its devotion in platitudinous words. Yeah, yeah, the Jazz Fest brings us all together and there’s no city quite like New Orleans. (Editor’s Note: Shell, one of the fossil fuel giants despoiling the planet for profit, is the festival’s presenter.)

With Jazz Fest, we get dangerously close at times to an infomercial. Jimmy Buffet is the executive producer of the documentary, and the filmmakers, Ryan Suffern and Frank Marshall, allow Buffet to be praised on screen for his contributions to the Fest, and interviewed at length on camera. He also gets two featured numbers with his band, not only the expected “Margaritaville” but he ends the film with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Buffet’s cover version of the Stones is a good one, the always-casual singer barefoot and in Bermuda shorts. But wouldn’t it have been more respectful to conclude the documentary with several of New Orleans’s homegrown African-American legends? Aaron Neville and Irma Thomas perhaps?

Most of the footage was shot at the 2019 Jazz Fest, the 50th anniversary. And, fortunately, it was a great year for memorable performances, including Thomas’s spirited “Iko Iko.” Reverend Al Green left his Memphis church for his first secular appearance in nine years, doing his soul classic, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” It was the last time ever that the four younger Marsalis musicians—Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo, and Jason — played with their pianist dad, Ellis, who died in 2020. And there’s great music from a series of touring African bands, and from blues guitarist Samantha Fish and jazz pianist Herbie Hancock. I could have done without Katy Perry in high boots, showy butt, and angel wings singing in front of a backdrop Black gospel choir, she strutting about as if this was halftime of the Super Bowl.

For both good and bad, Jazz Fest breaks away from the 2019 celebration to show us all kinds of things, from historic film of Hurricane Katrina to an interesting explanation of the difference between Cajun music (white musicians, leisurely rhythms, fiddles) and Zydeco (Black musicians, hard-driving, a washboard). There is also some footage of earlier Jazz Fest guests, including an ebullient Mahalia Jackson and, singing after Katrina, an earnest Bruce Springsteen emoting “My City of Ruins.” Springsteen is fine, but with Buffet and Perry, maybe too many featured white stars. If the filmmakers were going to delve into the Jazz Fest vaults, how is it possible to show only a few seconds of Professor Longhair and nothing of James Booker, the Meters, the Neville Brothers? Not good.

Gerald Peary is a Professor Emeritus at Suffolk University, Boston; ex-curator of the Boston University Cinematheque; and the general editor of the “Conversations with Filmmakers” series from the University Press of Mississippi. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of nine books on cinema; writer-director of the documentaries For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism and Archie’s Betty; and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess. His latest feature documentary, The Rabbi Goes West, co-directed by Amy Geller, has played at film festivals around the world.