Festivals near New Orleans

Birthplace of jazz, New Orleans doesn't celebrate music so much as breathe it. No American city raises the festival to such an art of living, from the brass bands rolling through the French Quarter to the second-line parades that turn every Faubourg Marigny sidewalk into a dance floor. It all peaks each spring at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival — the legendary Jazz Fest at the Fair Grounds Race Course, with two weekends, a dozen stages and a simmering gumbo of jazz, blues, gospel, zydeco and Cajun sounds. A few weeks earlier, the French Quarter Festival lines its free stages along the Mississippi, from Jackson Square to the Esplanade riverfront.

The city's sound reaches far beyond jazz. The funk born on these riverbanks still powers Nola Funk Fest, while the Essence Music Festival takes over the Caesars Superdome every summer for the country's biggest celebration of Black culture — soul, R&B and hip-hop under the stadium lights. Purists, meanwhile, keep their dates for the Big Easy Blues Festival and its Delta-bred slide guitars. To navigate all that energy, FestT calculates your FestiScore — how closely a lineup matches your favorite artists — and keeps dates, headliners and ticketing up to date, from Mardi Gras to the steamy nights of October.