NEW ORLEANS — A day after thunderstorms forced the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival to close early, another downpour Sunday turned parts of the Fair Grounds Race Track into swimming pools for geese and forced several of the last day’s acts to end their sets early.
Other performances in big tents were not affected, festival spokesman Matthew Goldman said.
Ketha Page waded across calf-high water to help her husband pack up their folding chairs and get under the Blues Tent.
“Yesterday, it was up to my knees,” she said. “But when we got here this morning, it was dry.”
Page said she stayed Saturday until 4:45 p.m. in hopes of hearing Stevie Wonder, who was supposed to close out one of the main stages. Instead, Wonder gave an impromptu performance hours later at a nightclub. On Sunday, Page hoped to hear Bonnie Raitt and Neil Young.
Organizers let people who came Saturday use that same ticket Sunday.
At the General Store, owner Debby Shapiro said she couldn’t remember how many umbrellas they’d sold. By late Sunday morning, they had eight left.
Rain ponchos were common. One girl and her mother wore matching red one, the woman’s down to her thighs, the girl’s just a few inches above the ground.
Acts Sunday include jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis; the Isley Brothers; gospel singer Mavis Staples; Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue; and singer Lena Prima.
She has an interview on one of the festival’s 12 stages and a performance 2 hours later on another, with the Lena Prima Band.
Prima’s show includes both songs she’s written (mostly with her husband, bassist Tim Fahey, or with singer-songwriter Ingrid Lucia) and songs written or made popular by her father, whose many hits included “Sing, Sing, Sing,” `’Jump, Jive an’ Wail,” and “A Sunday Kind of Love.”
Her own songs embrace many genres, including reggae, country, rock, and New Orleans sound, sometimes with a gospel vibe.
Her father’s music is also hard to classify, she said in an interview ahead of the festival.
Louis Prima, who voiced the orangutan King Louie for the 1967 Disney animation of “The Jungle Book,” moved from New Orleans jazz to swing, big band, a Las Vegas lounge act, and a pop-rock band.
Prima said she’s always loved her father’s music. She also loved his stories about growing up in New Orleans, which included running after Louis Armstrong’s band as it drove around town on a flatbed truck, playing to publicize appearances.
She grew up mostly in Las Vegas, with intermittent stints in New Orleans and in suburban Covington, where he owned a golf course.
At 18, Lena Prima was fronting a heavy metal band. Working two or three day jobs and singing at clubs at night was exhausting, and heavy metal gave way to grunge. Prima’s best high school friend was singing in Las Vegas casinos with cover bands and suggested she try it.
It was a hard decision, she said, but she eventually took her friend’s advice and enjoyed full-time singing: “Three, four, five sets a night. It was hard but great.”
After 10 years, she put her own show together. She’d been featuring a few of her father’s songs, and found fans coming up afterward to talk about him. In 2000, the tribute became the show.
Prima played the 2010 Jazz Fest and was entranced by the city’s passion for music and musicians’ support for each other.
“People go to New Orleans for music. They don’t do that in Vegas anymore,” she said.
She and Fahey moved around Christmas 2011. During the move, they got a call from the Monteleone hotel, which was opening a lounge and asked if she’d like to open it in January. They have a standing Friday date.
“From the moment I went up there and sang that first song with that band, I felt … `Ahhhh.’ I felt great,” she said.
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