Power of creativity: How a jazz festival is resurrecting New Orleans

Nearly four years ago, in August 2005,Vance Vaucresson’s city drowned in a storm. But when the 40th annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival opens today, Vaucresson will be there, as he has every year of his life, to celebrate the Creole culture of which his particular craft is famously a part.    

He’s a sausage-maker, the latest in the long line of New Orleans Vaucressons who have produced the delicacies since 1899. His family has been closely connected to the jazz festival ever since Vance’s father, Robert “Sonny” Vaucresson, helped the founders dream it up and began selling his wares at the very first one in 1970. 

 Vance Vaucresson

Born the same year, Vance and the festival grew up together. And you might figure it was deeply rooted people like him who kept the festival alive after Hurricane Katrina. But Vaucresson thinks it was the other way around: The festival’s survival helped keep him from giving up.

“The festival, in a way, was hope for us,” he said.

His family and many others like them needed hope badly after Katrina’s wind and rain caused the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain to break, flooding most of the below-sea-level city, killing nearly 2,000 people and dispersing most of the rest across America in a diaspora of evacuees. Vaucresson’s sausage plant lay under six feet of water; his equipment was ruined and his supply of meat spoiled. Worst of all, he discovered that his insurance didn’t cover flood damage.  

Even if he could have gotten his operation running again quickly, there was almost no one in the wrecked city to buy anything, so Vaucresson, his pregnant wife and young child went to New Iberia, La., near Lafayette. There they shared a three-bedroom house with 15 people while waiting – on a list of 150 other displaced storm victims – for better housing. 

Eventually, they got a mobile home. But after giving birth to their baby, Vaucresson’s wife became ill and needed multiple surgeries. With her, a newborn and a three-year-old to care for, Vaucresson couldn’t think of trying to move back to devastated New Orleans, he said. And then the worst blow fell: His cousin, who has been his right hand in the sausage business, became so depressed by the hurricane disaster that she committed suicide – and took her children with her. 

Vaucresson had a hard time without her. Even with all his other problems, he had been hoping to sell sausage po’ boys at the jazz festival the following spring, but with no plant and no help, it wasn’t going to be possible. He needed a proper place to make the crawfish sausage, turkey andouille and hot “chorice” sausage that are the Vaucresson’s Sausage Company specialties.   

So with the festival as his goal, Vaucresson put his creativity to work in a new way: He went to a man with a plant in Metairie, La., that was still functioning, a man who had been his competitor. Vaucresson asked him if he would help.

“He was a good Christian man and said, ‘Well, sure,’ ” Vaucresson recalled. “It really showed me a different side of people . He had every right to tell me no.”

But he didn’t. Not only did Vaucresson make his sausages, but he also made a close friend who eventually turned into a partner. It taught him, he said, that ”when you pool together resources, you can weather the storm.”

Having the festival to work toward got Vaucresson going again. His company’s online sales have been steadily rising and at the Jazz & Heritage Festival and the French Quarter Festival - for both of which Vaucresson’s is the only remaining original food vendor – his sausages keep wowing customers as they once did New York Times Food Critic Mimi Sheraton, who named Sonny’s hot-sausage po’boy the “Best Food at Fest” in 1976.  

“We take years and years of recipes and food influences and make products that are very distinctive to the culture” of New Orleans, Vance Vaucresson said.

As its title suggest, the jazz festival is all about New Orleans culture, music and pride. But for Vaucresson, it has an even deeper significance.

“When you’re with the same group of people for so long, even if only for seven days (a year), you really get to know them” like family, Vaucresson said.

 To have the festival continue after Katrina, when the city and its citizens were still desolated, kept the bonds among the festival folk strong. “We could come together,” he said. “It was showing we can come back and rebuild this thing – we can make this happen. I can see it.

“It gave us hope and it reassured us that we were going to be all right,” Vaucresson said. Then he laughed. Without the festival, he added, “I don’t know what I would do with my last weekend in April and my first weekend in May.”

                 NewBirth Brass Band, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 2003