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KOTO’s DJ Jimmy Jazz, Jim Berkowitz, interviewed Ben Jaffe, creative director and tuba player with the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band before the band’s appearance at Telluride’s 2021 Jazz Festival. 

Preservation Hall is a vaunted jazz venue in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and Jaffe is one of dozens of musical artists, a list including Trombone Shorty, Etta James, Mavis Staples, and so on, who’ve performed at both the New Orleans Jazz Fest and at Telluride’s.

“The music for me and for many people in Telluride is very relatable,” reflects Steve Gumble, producer of Telluride Jazz Fest and Telluride Blues and Brews. 

“Brass bands, funk, The Meters coming to Jazz [Festival], all that stuff – it all comes back to music and New Orleans Jazz Festival is probably the longest, oldest running festival and, you know, that’s where we went: we went to New Orleans for Jazz Fest and that music resonates with me and it seems to resonate with people in Telluride,” Gumble continues. 

A love of festivals and an appreciation for music in the jazz tradition are just one of many cultural touchstones shared between the sprawling bayou city of New Orleans and our tiny town of Telluride.

In observance of Mardi Gras, I began asking a handful of Telluridians with a New Orleans connection what they made of our town’s affinity for the ‘Big Easy.’ Could New Orleans be a sort of Sister City? 

“Scrape through the beer soaked floors and beads and hurricanes and, you know,” says Gumble, “I think there’s a cultural connection, a culinary connection, and definitely a music connection.”

MarK Izard is a long-time Telluride resident, who’s been to 31 New Orleans Jazz Fests with his wife Janet, and he’s the DJ behind KOTO’s ‘New Orleans Road Trip.’ He points out many Telluride restaurantuers came up in New Orleans. Then there’s a shared value for historic preservation. But, says Izard, it really comes down to a means of self expression: 

“You can be whoever you want to be,” says Izard. “You can wear whatever costume you want to wear. We like to dress up in Telluride and we like to dress up in New Orleans; and it’s not just dressing up, it’s [the fact that] if you choose to act a certain way or look a certain way or have certain values, you’re open to express those.”

Izard continues, “It’s really more about just experiencing life; just trying to take everything to the max.”

Katherine Bonnaeu, a wedding planner and a creative entrepreneur who lives in Telluride grew up visiting New Orleans and worked for over a decade on the production team at the New Orleans Jazz Fest. She started there in 2006.  “And it was a wild year to be joining their production team because of Katrina,” says Bonnaeu.

She recalls the city devastated, rebuilding slowly, painfully and still gathering for their beloved Jazz Fest. “It was such an amazing experience to be at the festival because of the fact that it even happened! Bruce Springsteen put together this amazing band and I swear during that set, it was so powerful and emotional that I don’t think there was a dry face in the audience,” Bonneau recalls. 

Reflecting on her frequent visits, Bonneau does point to differences. “We live in a bubble here in Telluride,” Bonnaeu says, “and so I see that as a huge difference. New Orleans is where I seek to go at least once or twice a year, just so I can get my culture fix, whether that’s food, just being around different groups of people. And I have so many friends and family there. So that keeps me going back.” 

Camilla Choa moved to Telluride shortly after graduating from Tulane, and she recalls being enchanted by the city when she first enrolled at the University. 

“The culture of it,” says Choa — “it really is a melting pot. And when you get to New Orleans, you can feel the energy, this ancient, haunting energy. I felt like I was in a city that was so much older and wiser and bigger than me. That was really humbling.”

For Choa, a standout difference between the two communities? 

“Honestly, the wealth disparity between Telluride and New Orleans is very apparent,” she says.

Izard noted this as well. As Telluride’s wealth has increased its culture has shifted away from the open-hearted expressiveness of the ‘Big Easy’ lifestyle. 

“As money has come in,” he observes, “you don’t have quite as many of the unique and interesting characters that we used to have…but it’s still there.”

On that note, Choa reflects, Telluride could perhaps learn from New Orleans, and, she says —“adopt some more forms of celebration. And community events that include everybody, whatever their tax bracket.” 

But for all the ways that Telluride can feel like a changing, difficult, and unsustainable place to live, Steve Gumble says there’s still an undercurrent of New Orleans. 

“If you look beyond the myopic short-term stresses of living in a small mountain community and the politics, and the lack of housing, and all those things that create tension…you get through all that and there’s still really a common denominator of, you know, the big easy vibe,” he says.