On a Friday evening in late October, the sound that drifts across North Boulevard Town Square will be familiar to generations of Baton Rouge music fans: a sousaphone laying down a bassline, a trumpet answering it, and a band that has been doing this since the 1990s. The Michael Foster Project headlines Live After Five on Friday, Oct. 23, 2026, from 5 to 8 p.m. at Galvez Plaza in downtown Baton Rouge. Admission is free.
The billing is a natural fit. Live After Five describes itself as Baton Rouge's largest and longest-running free concert series, run by a volunteer board. The Michael Foster Project is, by the organizers' own description, the city's longest-running brass band, with roots in the late 1990s. Two institutions built on longevity, sharing a Friday night.
The band's story starts with its namesake. Michael Foster moved to Baton Rouge from Dallas in 1985, drawn by his family's roots in Pointe Coupee Parish and by a music scholarship offered by Southern University's late band director, Isaac Greggs, according to a 2026 Advocate profile by John Wirt. Foster's band originally formed in 1992, according to 225 Baton Rouge. He plays sousaphone, and by his own account he is a bandleader who prefers to let his bandmates shine.
That generosity has been a defining feature of the group. In a 225 Baton Rouge feature on the band's Red Beans and Rice Mondays at the Roux House, a writer described Foster tapping his foot and blowing on his sousaphone while trumpeter John Gray came in over the top, the crowd frozen mid-dance for fear of missing a note before the rest of the band kicked in and the room turned into a party. Foster created Red Beans and Rice Mondays in 2014 as a weekly dose of Louisiana culture: free red beans cooked each week by a different local restaurant, free live Louisiana music, ideally a different artist every Monday. "This is for the city of Baton Rouge to be able to enjoy something promoting Louisiana culture every week at the same time," he told 225.
The band's reach has long since outgrown the Monday-night residency. 225 Baton Rouge notes that the Michael Foster Project has performed at festivals around the world, from China to the Sundance Film Festival. Locally, its popularity at M's Fine and Mellow Café in 1998 helped the group land its New Orleans debut, according to the Advocate. And the group's repertoire is broader than the brass-band label might suggest: the organizers of Live After Five bill the band as covering traditional jazz, Latin, pop and hip-hop, while the Advocate's reporting on the group's Juneteenth sets describes a New Orleans-style brass band working through standards like "Little Liza Jane," "I'll Fly Away" and "A Closer Walk with Thee" alongside songs by Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino and Allen Toussaint.
For Foster, that Juneteenth repertoire carries particular weight. "I take myself back in time," he told the Advocate. "I think about the music that was played when they got that news. That must have been some amazing music. I'm sure they played like they'd never played before." It is the same instinct that animates the band's ordinary gigs: play for the room, and play like it matters.
Live After Five has its own history worth knowing. WAFB has described it as the longest-running outdoor concert series in Baton Rouge's history, with an estimated 100,000 people attending each year, and the series marked its 20th anniversary season in 2018. It has been produced by the Downtown Business Association, with WAFB as a longtime sponsor, and it now operates as its own nonprofit, Live After Five, Inc., governed by a volunteer board whose members come from local media, real estate, law, the arts council and the downtown development district.
Practical details are straightforward. The concert runs 5 to 8 p.m. at Galvez Plaza in North Boulevard Town Square, in the heart of downtown. It is free and open to the public. Lawn chairs and blankets are welcome; tents, umbrellas and other structures that block sightlines are not. Outside food and drink are not allowed, and attendees are asked to support the food, beverage and maker vendors on site, which is how the series stays free. Dogs are not permitted at city gatherings on city property. Organizers recommend the River Center garages or the Third Street Garage, both a short walk from the stage, with street parking also available.
For anyone who has never seen the band, the appeal is simple. A sousaphone, a trumpet, a saxophone and a drum kit moving as one instrument, in a plaza built for exactly this, on a Friday night that costs nothing to attend. The Michael Foster Project has been making that case in Baton Rouge for decades. On Oct. 23, it makes it again.