New Orleans Jazz Museum
Located at the foot of Esplanade Avenue, the New Orleans Jazz Museum, located in the Old U.S. Mint, is a national historic landmark that is part of the Louisiana State Museum system.
The New Orleans Jazz Museum is strategically located at the intersection of the city’s French Quarter and the Frenchmen Street live music corridor. The Museum celebrates the history of jazz, in all its forms, through dynamic interactive exhibits, multigenerational educational programming, research facilities, and engaging musical performances. For further details, visit NOLAjazzmuseum.org.
You can hear great music from some of New Orleans’ best contemporary artists in the state-of-the-art performance venue on the New Orleans Jazz Museum’s third floor. The Museum uses the space for evening programs, solo and small group concerts and special events while the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park offers daily live music programs for local residents and visitors to the Museum. Learn more and find a calendar of events at MusicAtTheMint.org
Upcoming Shows
10:30am-4:30pm | The Japan Society of New Orleans and the New Orleans Jazz Museum present the first annual Lafcadio Fest! A daylong festival honoring the life and legacy of author Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904).
Born on the Greek island of Lefkada, the writer Lafcadio Hearn led a cosmopolitan life thatranged across a number of continents, languages, and cultures. Most well-known in New Orleans
for his recording of local folklore and his curation of one of the earliest Creole cookbooks, La Cuisine Creole (1885), he is beloved around in the world in all the places that he explored and
wrote about with curiosity and affection. His lifelong wanderings took him from his native Greece to Ireland, France, the United States, Martinique, and finally to Japan, where he initially settled and taught in the town of Matsue, now New Orleans’s sister-city. Through it all, his writing retained its focus on the strange, the unusual, the ghostly, and the exotic.
10:30am: Introductory Remarks / Lafcadio Hearn 101
11am: Scholars' Panel
- Cheyenne Symonette – Michigan State University “Wood Pulp and Witchcraft: Hearn’s Laveau Obituaries and the Decadent Femme Fatale”
- Bill Hardwig – University of Tennessee “Muse of the Odd: Lafcadio Hearn’s Social Media Posts”
- Peter A.A. Bailey – University of the Bahamas “The Convent, the Harem, and Harper’s Bazaar: Lafcadio Hearn’s Gendered and Racialized Narratives of Creole Decadence”
- Justin Rogers – Tarleton State University “Art and the Past in Lafcadio Hearn’s Supernatural Retellings”
12:15-1:15pm: (Lunch Pop-up: Greta's Sushi)
1:15pm: Keynote: Steve Kemme - Hearn biographer, author of The Outsider: The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn: The Man Who Introduced Voodoo, Creole Cooking, and Japanese Ghosts to the World (Tuttle, 2023)
2:30-2:45pm: Break
2:45pm: Community Panel, moderated by Doug Tassin of the Krewe of Japan Podcast
- Samantha Perez (co-editor of Cross-Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Japan and Matsue-New Orleans exchange participant)
- Lauren Bertolino (Matsue-New Orleans exchange participant, designer of Japan Culture Series for the Orleans and Jefferson Parish libraries)
- Caroline Thomas (designer of the Krewe of Rex Mardi Gras floats for the 2024 parade theme "The Two Worlds of Lafcadio Hearn")
- John Kelly, founder of the Krewe of Lafadio
3:45pm: Virtual visits from Mayor Akihito Uesada of Matsue, Japan, Shoko Koizumi, and Lafcadio Hearn's Great-Grandson Bon Koizumi (Director of the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum)
4pm: Sake toast for Hearn's upcoming 176th birthday
4:15-5:15pm: Kanako Brooks & Detroit Brooks
More information at https://www.japansocietyofneworleans.org/Lafcadio-Fest
Free & Open to the Public
