Frenchy rolled into New Orleans on January 25, 1997 with a cardboard box, a basket of clothes and 20 paintings. By the end of that April he had painted nearly every local band in town, and that spring he painted his first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Live For Live Music sat down with him as he heads toward his 30th Jazz Fest in 2027.
The numbers tell the story: more than 500 paintings made at the Fair Grounds, the official 2015 Jazz Fest poster featuring Big Chief Bo Dollis, and 2026 Jazz Fest shirts and dresses designed with BayouWear. The interview also goes back to where it started, a commission from the Heavy Metal Horns at a small Orlando club in the early 1990s, and to the lean first year, when he ran out of canvas and stretched burlap sacks over stretcher bars instead.
One painting from that first Jazz Fest, the Radiators, still hangs with him, and he won't sell it. At the 2026 festival he painted Goose, Kings of Leon, Widespread Panic, Trombone Shorty, Cowboy Mouth, Sunpie, Leftover Salmon and The Meters. He also painted the Meters' reunion shows, the second one with Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Warren Haynes and Oteil Burbridge sitting in.
“As soon as I put brush to canvas, to that live music...it was love at first sight.”
Frenchy, in Live For Live Music
