I did this show in 2001 in San Francisco called the Harvest Moon Funk Jam. I flew up to New York and talked with several different people like Melvin Sparks, and I got ahold of Dr. Lonnie Smith and said I wanted to put together this big show. I was able to meet with Idris Muhammad, too. So we had Idris Muhammad, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Melvin Sparks and Babtunde Lea, and I decided I was going to put in this young kid on bass, Robert Mercurio from Galactic. Lonnie was like, “I don’t know if we need this bass; I’ll play the bass on the B3.” I told him, “Lonnie, here’s the thing—what’s the average age of your female fan base at the small gigs that you play in New York? Is it fair to say 50?” And he says, “Well yeah, I guess so.” And I was like, “Look, I’m going to put together this show at this warehouse in San Francisco. We’re going to get a lot of 21 and 22 year olds, and I am going to educate them.” On my fliers I had explanations of who these people were on the back. “You’re gonna get a lot of press from it, and it’s going to put you in the public eye in a burgeoning jamband scene which will embrace this. And they did! I have yet to release that—I have over 900 hours of multi-track recordings, which obviously I would need to do negotiations with these people in order to release them for sale. 

Then all of a sudden I started doing 18-22 shows at Jazz Fest over the course of 10 days. I took over Dream Palace and then I worked at the Blue Nile. I believe I did a show at the d.b.a as well. Then I did shows at Tipitina’s—so many different venues going on all at once. It beat the hell out of my crew, but I had two or three crews with a production manager in each one coordinating while I was jumping around in a taxi from one place to the next all night. This was pre-Uber, mind you. 

Then I started putting more great configurations [of musicians] together. I created Dragon Smoke at [New Orleans’s] Dragon’s Den, a very small place. Rob and Stanton [Moore] had already played together, but they didn’t know anything about these other musicians [Ivan Neville and Eric Lindell]. I also created a band called Frequinox [Moore, Mercurio, Bernard, Robert Walter and Donald Harrison]. Those guys were even from New Orleans and they didn’t know Donald Harrison, and they also didn’t know Will Bernard. None of these guys have ever played together before. Will had asked me, “Can you put together one of these projects you do and get me involved in it?” 

From there, I continued doing these lingering shows which were really starting to take off and become really popular and people were like, “The Boom Boom Room does these great late-night shows!” Not only the regular shows from 9-2, but from 2-6. So they became wildly popular. If you’re a music head down in New Orleans, you can’t get enough of music. If it stops at a certain hour, you go, “Well, now what are we going to do?”

I was working with Adam Deitch when he was like 19, Will Blades, too. I was working with Joe Russo and Marco Benevento before they were the Duo. I had them come out from New York to play a Will Bernard West Coast show. I can tell how people can work together, what kind of versatility they possess, which is maybe not obvious to other musicians. Nobody knew to do that kind of stuff—Boom Boom Room Presents did it. Now, superjams are all over the place in New Orleans. At Jazz Fest, with rock-and-rollers and jazz players—the old guys were re-inspired by these young guys that were playing music based on what they created as pioneers of soul jazz and afro-jazz from the early ‘70s. Some really amazing people that were in obscurity in some sense. 

Boom Boom Room Presents continued putting on shows. Frenchmen Street blew up while I was doing Blue Nile. I actually helped it get re-opened after Katrina, because they were going to sell it. I was working primarily there at the Blue Nile, but I would also do stuff in Dragon’s Den and shows at the Maple Leaf and some at Preservation Hall, which is a huge place and a great spot. But I had to bring in all my own sound and lighting. And from there, the Blue Nile kind of lit up and eclipsed a lot of other places.

It’s been going strong ever since. And now that it’s my 20th anniversary of Jazz Fest, I have it down to only eight shows. I thought, “I want to enjoy at least the second weekend a little bit. I want to actually relax and enjoy Jazz Fest.” It can beat you up, and you’ll never make it out to the fairgrounds. Night, day, night, day, night, day. So I dropped it down, anywhere between 8-15.

I brought MonoNeon down to New Orleans for the first time three years ago. I have a little knack for naming bands—Neon-Medeski got together, which is basically Worship My Organ without Marco but instead having Medeski and Daru Jones on the drums. Daru Jones, he’s into hip-hop and everything else, but he was a jazz drummer. He also has a band now which I am working with called DMD. the Vibes—that’s Doug Wimbish from Living Color and Marcus Machado on guitar and Daru Jones on drums, with a couple other cats in there. And that’s the next band to blow up; I love those guys. They should be put on your radar.

That’s the thing about musicians I work with—John Lee Hooker was my partner, and we’ve become good friends. Especially jazz musicians, but most musicians can be quirky because they get so much attention from people and have their own particular geniuses in their head with music. That’s where their creativity comes from, their own ingenuity. The idea was to take the best of the best from different generations of players, or even from same generations but from different musical styles that might crossover, and then put them together. Not just throwing big-name people together, because they weren’t big names, they were just great players who could create a whole new genre themselves. That has always been my idea. You know, new music can be created. New outlets and stretching out into different places all of a sudden creates new music and new genres. 

At least to me, there’s nothing better than new music. All of a sudden, you put together people who go, “Yeah, let’s put some hip-hop beats and some driving soul jazz into some psychedelic rock.” That one little piece that I see in a particular musician that I know is going to work with another musician, it gets drawn out when they play together. They are going to find that commonality that I saw. My thing is putting together people not just to jam, but to put together an actual project. I’m trying to allow these guys to look beyond what their particular project is is that time and give them the inspiration to create something completely new that they may have not thought about. And that’s the kind of magic that had happened with Boom Boom Room Presents shows. The magic is in putting together these great players and having that one little piece that they share, that one little aspect that is probably not at the forefront of what they are playing in their own bands. But once they are together, it comes together in what I like to call pure magic. It really is. And then from there, they get more excited to continue with that project, and it becomes its own thing. 

So, this year I am excited that it’s the 20th anniversary of the hallmark. Prior to me, there weren’t any outside promoters in New Orleans. It was sort of a mystery there. Now, there are promoters from everywhere. I sort of opened the door for that. I think about five years after that, more and more promoters started coming through. And then it got crazy just before Katrina. Promoters were coming in from all over the place trying to put on 100 shows and over-extending themselves. It’s not about just putting together events; it’s about making music. And that’s the difference from people who just want to put together 30 people on a stage like it’s the Last Waltz. A Boom Boom Room show is groupings and pairings of musicians from different bands who would think have been playing together forever. That’s all because they are professional, intuitive musicians who are so skilled and have so much imagination that they can just step up. They feel it; they listen to each other. If you slap together one big package because it looks like bells and whistles, then you are probably going to get a lot of egos who want to play over each other and are not giving enough space for the music to have real significance.

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