Red Hot Chili Peppers will be headlining the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on Sunday (May 1), and their set will serve as a celebration of late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins.
Foo Fighters were initially booked to headline Jazz Fest on May 1, but the band canceled all of their performances for 2022 following Hawkins’ sudden death on March 25.
Drummer Chad Smith told Billboard about the Chili Peppers’ upcoming set, “We’re taking Alison, his wife, with us and it’s going to be a celebration. That’s what she wants. She doesn’t want it to be anything other than, ‘Let’s celebrate music, let’s celebrate our friends, let’s celebrate Taylor. This is what he would want and he would be very happy that you guys are playing and he would want it be nothing but a positive experience.’”
Smith continued, “So we’re going to do all that and she’s going to be part of that and I’m very honored that we can do that with her. … We’re going to play our hearts out…His essence of his creative energy is out in another universe somewhere and he was able to express that here in his short life.”
Smith concluded, “Wherever he is, I feel strongly and believe that he is doing his Taylor Hawkins as only he can. He’s doing that somewhere else and giving that love and life to everybody wherever he is now that he did here. So that gives me a little bit of comfort, but I miss the f— out of him.”
