Quint Davis: The Man Behind Jazz Fest

The Man Behind Jazz Fest

Every spring, somewhere around four hundred thousand people descend on the New Orleans Fair Grounds for the Jazz and Heritage Festival — one of the largest and most important music festivals on the planet. They come for the music, for the food, for the crawfish bread and the Gospel Tent and the feeling of standing in a field in New Orleans while the best musicians in the world play for you. And for more than fifty years, one man has been running the whole thing: Quint Davis.

Born in New Orleans in 1947, Davis comes from a family that built the city — literally. His father, the architect Arthur Quentin Davis, designed the Superdome and the New Orleans Arena. But Quint wasn't interested in buildings. He was interested in music.

He studied drama and ethnomusicology at Tulane, and while still a student, he met George Wein, the legendary festival producer who was looking for a local partner to create a new festival in New Orleans. Davis left college to help produce the first Jazz Fest in 1970, held at Congo Square in Louis Armstrong Park. It drew a few hundred people. Today it draws hundreds of thousands.

Davis built Jazz Fest into what it is through a simple philosophy: musicianship above everything. Whatever you do, you have to be great. That principle turned Jazz Fest into more than a music festival — it became the definitive celebration of New Orleans culture, incorporating the city's food, crafts, and traditions alongside the music.

Along the way, Davis managed Professor Longhair, road-managed Duke Ellington and B.B. King, produced the Essence Music Festival, and won a Grammy for producing Longhair's album Houseparty New Orleans Style. But the life's work is Jazz Fest. It's the thing he built, nurtured, and grew for more than half a century.

If New Orleans is a music city — and it is, more than any other city on Earth — then Jazz Fest is its annual proof. And Quint Davis is the man who made it happen, year after year, rain or shine, for longer than most people have been alive.