The New Orleans Jazz & Blues Market Finds the Sweet Spot
The only time guitarist Larry Carlton looked a little bored came when he played the song everybody came for. His show at the new Jazz & Blues Market was billed as “Greatest Hits & Steely Dan,” and he introduced a set-closing version of “Kid Charlemagne” by telling the story of being invited by Steely Dan to play a show and realized he had a decision to make. Should he play the beloved solo the way he did in the studio in 1976 or the way he would play it now? He went with the 1976 version that night and whenever he has played the song since. He gave the audience the moment many came to see, but he remained straight-faced and focused as he played a memory more than music.
You could hear the guitarist Carlton has become in the more delicate touch he showed in other songs, thumbing strings, gliding to notes, and finding unexpected ways to fit lyrical phrases into rhythmic spaces. He played with dynamics by gently coaxing passages out of his guitar in one moment, then locking into parts that were so rhythmically assured that you could groove to his playing alone.
It was a show that made the case for the new Jazz & Blues Market because it wouldn’t have worked anywhere else in town. The venue is the renovated New Orleans Jazz Market in Central City, now with improved acoustics and tables on the floor that give it more of a club vibe. The seated audience and pristine sound make it a distinctive space to see a show, and one that other venues in town don’t match. In the funkier sections, I wished Carlton was playing Tipitina’s, but the quieter, slower material would have been a harder sell there.
If we were to see Carlton somewhere else in town, the most likely option would be at Jazz Fest’s Jazz Tent, but a lot would have been lost. Its boomy acoustics mean that drummer Marcus Finnie’s aggressive presence would have almost certainly rolled over the bass and some of Carlton’s quieter moments. The new venue let Carlton play the set that he wanted to play, confident that the audience would hear it as intended.
Jazz Fest serves as a useful reference point because the Jazz & Blues Market’s upcoming lineup leans heavily on Grammy nominees and winners that would make sense there, like Jeff Lorber Fusion, Acoustic Alchemy, and Curtis Stigers. Charlie Musselwhite and Marcus Miller have played the festival. The bookings through March 2026 suggest that the room is first and foremost a prestige gig for established touring artists with only Bonerama, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, Maurice “Mobetta” Brown, Kenny Neal, and Bobby Rush representing Louisiana on the schedule so far.
When Carlton introduced “Soul Caravan,” a song he recorded in 1975, he asked if there was anyone under 40 in the room. That set up a self-deprecating joke—“I was a young pup then; I had a wife; I had hair”—and put a fine point on something no one in the room could miss. He had aged and his fans had too. Many were old enough to remember hearing “Kid Charlemagne” the first time around. It’s easy in a music industry that fetishizes youth to see a night like this as old boys unwilling to hang it up, but a generational change happened in plain sight. In the same way that musicians who’ve spent their lives playing music don’t quit anymore, neither do their fans. Their parents put away music when they got straight jobs and families, but they didn’t. Music wasn’t just the soundtrack to their teenage lives; it gave them something that they couldn’t let go.
The premise of the Jazz & Blues Market appears to be that 50- and 60-somethings have money, and Jazz Fest is just one occasion that demonstrates how they’ll spend it on music. The Eagles’ residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas aims at that audience too, and it has been extended through February 2026. The Eagles have only released one album of new music since 1979, but despite being musically dormant and nearly immobile onstage, the band will play more than 50 dates with tickets that go for between $500 and $1,000 each. They’ll be followed by a residency with No Doubt, whose breakthrough album Tragic Kingdom dropped in 1995. Fans who were 20 when it came out are 50 now.
The Jazz & Blues Market exists at the other end of the venue spectrum. It’s not showy, but an intimate venue that allows people to sit comfortably with a cocktail to see credible music makes good business sense as well. It also offers fans far more reasonable ticket prices than those at the Sphere, which charges at least $200 to see a screening of The Wizard of Oz.
Many of the upcoming shows at the Jazz & Blues Market have table tickets on the floor going for $50 or less, and there are far more tickets available for those shows than you might expect. Right now, it appears that the Jazz & Blues Market shows are flying under the radar, perhaps because the venue missed its opening week or two of shows when renovations took longer than planned. It is still working to establish its digital footprint, which currently shares a number of handles with the New Orleans Jazz Market. That makes it harder for the venue to connect to its audience—one that, to be fair, may take some work to reach because the digital pathways to them are not as well-worn as those that reach younger audiences.
It doesn’t help that the space has lived under a cloud since New Orleans Jazz Orchestra artistic director Irvin Mayfield helped direct public library funds to build the New Orleans Jazz Market in 2015. Many music fans have taken a “dead to me” approach to Mayfield, and the venue may have caught some strays in the process.
Still, if the Jazz & Blues Market finds its audience, it represents some interesting possibilities. It expands New Orleans’ live music footprint out of the CBD and the French Quarter, and it adds life (along with The Rabbit Hole) to a historic and culturally rich neighborhood that would benefit from the attention.
For more info on the New Orleans Jazz & Blues Market, check out jazzandbluesmarket.com.
For more Alex Rawls musings, check out myspiltmilk.com and @myspiltmilk on socials.
Photo by Dan Fox: Detail from the exterior of the New Orleans Jazz & Blues Market
