JamFest | What Is Hip?! Radio Show | Every Friday Night on JamFest, All Night Long
New Orleans does not slow down in July. Most American cities retreat in the summer heat, pulling their cultural calendars back to a minimum and waiting for September to bring people back out into the streets. New Orleans looks at July and decides to do more. This weekend, the Crescent City is running at a frequency that even by its own extraordinary standards qualifies as exceptional, with the X Games making their Superdome debut, Tales of the Cocktail finishing its legendary final days, Chance the Rapper hosting an intimate birthday show in the French Quarter tonight, and the calendar already filling with the summer arts events that define what this city gives the world when it is operating at full creative capacity. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
The X Games Come to the Caesars Superdome: A New Chapter for NOLA Sports
From July 24 through July 26, New Orleans is hosting the X Games for the very first time in the event’s history, and the venue choice alone tells you something about the ambition of the moment. The Caesars Superdome, the most famous domed stadium in the American South and a building that carries more history than most cities accumulate in a lifetime, is receiving an extraordinary transformation as the world’s premier action sports competition builds skateboarding ramps and BMX courses and freestyle motocross setups inside one of the most iconic indoor spaces in American athletics. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
Tales of the Cocktail: The World’s Bartenders Say Goodbye to Bourbon Street for Another Year
If you have spent any time on or near Bourbon Street this week, you have been sharing the sidewalks with some of the most accomplished drink-makers on the planet. Tales of the Cocktail, the annual global cocktail industry conference that has become one of the most significant gatherings in the world of spirits, bartending, and cocktail culture, is wrapping up its final days in New Orleans this week after running from July 19 through July 24. The conference brings together bartenders, distillers, brand ambassadors, spirits educators, and cocktail enthusiasts from dozens of countries for a week of seminars, competitions, pop-up bars, tastings, and the kind of informal late-night experimentation that happens when the world’s best bar professionals are in the same city at the same time with access to each other and to New Orleans’s own formidable cocktail heritage. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
Chance the Rapper at the Toulouse Theater: An Intimate Evening in the French Quarter
Tonight, July 25, while the What Is Hip?! Radio Show is broadcasting live on JamFest, something special is happening just a few blocks from the heart of Bourbon Street. Chance the Rapper is hosting an intimate album release and birthday party at the Toulouse Theater in the French Quarter, a small and beautiful venue that provides exactly the kind of close, personal setting that makes a live music event feel genuinely different from a concert in the conventional sense. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
Hubig’s Pies, Brothers Three, and the Soul of the City
Not every important thing happening in New Orleans this week is a major ticketed event or a nationally recognized conference. Some of the most significant moments in the life of a city like this one happen at the level of the neighborhood, the corner bar, the bakery that has been making the same product for generations and whose continued existence is itself a form of cultural preservation. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
White Linen Night and Satchmo SummerFest: The Summer Arts Calendar Heats Up
Looking just one week ahead, the New Orleans arts calendar is already preparing for one of its most beloved annual events. Fidelity Bank White Linen Night takes place on Saturday, August 1, transforming the 300 through 600 blocks of Julia Street and the new 500 block of St. Joseph in the Warehouse Arts District into an open-air celebration of visual art, community, and the particular New Orleans talent for turning a summer evening into a memory. Guests traditionally dress in white linen, and the effect of a crowd in white moving through galleries and street activations on a warm summer night in the Warehouse District is one of those quintessentially New Orleans images that is impossible to fully convey to someone who has not experienced it. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
New Orleans City Council Rewrites the Mardi Gras Rules
In city governance news that will affect everyone who participates in or plans around the world’s most famous carnival celebration, the New Orleans City Council has approved a comprehensive overhaul of the structural rules governing Mardi Gras parades and events. The new regulations include earlier parade start times, tighter restrictions on parking along parade routes, and stiffer penalties for violations, all designed to reduce municipal costs and improve public safety across a celebration that draws millions of visitors and requires enormous logistical coordination across multiple city agencies. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
The Broader Live Music Scene: Hardly Strictly, Widespread Panic Returns West, String Cheese Covers U2, and DMB Surprises
While New Orleans is the heart of tonight’s What Is Hip?! Radio Show, the JamFest community is always paying attention to the broader live music world, and this week has produced a series of announcements and performances across the jam and Americana landscape that deserve serious attention. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
Why What Is Hip?! Radio Show Exists and What Tonight Means
The What Is Hip?! Radio Show on JamFest plays New Orleans music every Friday night, all night long, because New Orleans music is the most important music America has ever produced. That is not a regional boast or a promotional statement. It is the conclusion that the history of American popular music forces you toward when you trace the lineage of jazz, blues, funk, R&B, rock and roll, and the improvisational tradition back to their sources. Every path leads to New Orleans. The city did not simply participate in the creation of American music. It was the laboratory where the essential experiments were conducted, the place where African musical traditions and European harmonic conventions and Caribbean rhythms and the experience of people living under specific and extraordinary social conditions came together and produced something that changed the world. Read the Full JamFest Substack Here!
That is what we play every Friday night on the What Is Hip?! Radio Show. That is what we are playing right now. Turn it up and let New Orleans find you wherever you are.
JamFest | What Is Hip?! Radio Show, every Friday night, all night long. New Orleans music in all its forms: funk, brass, jazz, zydeco, soul, and the complete NOLA groove, broadcasting with love from the heart of the American musical tradition.
Coming Up on JamFest
🎵 All Things Considered Live— Mondays at 7 PM EST
🎵 NewGrass Radio — Mondays at 7 PM EST
🎵 Live Nuggets — Tuesdays at 9 PM EST
🎵 NRN Radio Show — Wednesdays at 9 PM EST
🎵 Festival Radio Show — Thursdays at 9 PM EST
🎵 What is Hip?! — Fridays at 10 PM EST
🎵 Club Night — Saturdays at 10 PM EST
🎵 Sunday Spunday — Sundays at 2 AM EST
🎵 Gospel Lunch — Sundays at 12:30 PM EST
🎵 Project Reggaeologist — Sundays at 10 PM EST
🎵 Live From The Vault — TBD Coming Soon!
Stay tuned to JamFest for breaking music news, concert coverage, festival updates, tour announcements, and the greatest live recordings ever captured.