Under a hot Delta sun, 10 stages are being built in New Orleans for 400 bands in a music lineup you would normally need a ticket to the Grammys to see:

Fats Domino, Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band, Jimmy Buffett, the Dave Matthews Band, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Lionel Richie, Keith Urban, Herbie Hancock, Allen Toussaint, Elvis Costello, Etta James, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Pete Fountain, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Eddie Palmieri are among them.

The bands will be performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, April 28-30 and May 5-7.

But will tourists be there to see them?

In this city, still critically wounded by Hurricane Katrina, nervous city officials are waiting to see who shows up. Last year, a half-million visitors bought tickets for the festival and brought in $200 million to $300 million to the city.

New Orleans could sure use the money now.

"It's impossible to predict," said Angele Davis, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. "The festival is not scaled down like Mardi Gras was. It's one of the best lineups we've seen in years, and it's the most important ever. It's symbolic of the rebirth of our state."

If she could get a bullhorn and shout to the rest of the country to visit New Orleans, she would. Her message is different from the usual tourism pitch: "Come to New Orleans and help our city recover," is her plea.

She spent the days after Hurricane Katrina taking desperate cellphone calls and text messages from citizens trapped in their houses and on their roofs by floods, and she helped residents escape the city and the battered Convention Center that had served as emergency shelter for so many.

"The one thing I will never forget is helping an elderly lady and two of her friends waiting to be airlifted. She didn't want to leave; it was all she had, she had never been away from the city. I promised her she would be able to come back, and I think about that quite often. Will she be able to come back? Will it ever be the same? Her name was Mrs. Hayes."

Davis was born and raised in Baton Rouge; she plays the trumpet, accordion and piano and loves the jazz festival, especially the blues bands from Baton Rouge and zydeco from the bayous. She's still trying to help her city.

First things first: Get people to come to the jazz festival.

"When you talk about a $9.9 billion tourism industry that employs 120,000 people, 85,000 in New Orleans, you see how important it is for our recovery," Davis says. "Every day we don't have visitors is catastrophic. We projected we lost about $2 billion in 2005."

The challenges are monumental, including finding housing for hotel, restaurant and festival workers who are living in damaged houses, are crowded into the few rentals in the city or are commuting long distances from inland cities.

But the highest hurdle is the world's perception of New Orleans as a tragic city devastated by a natural disaster televised live to the world.

The tourist sector of the city, the French Quarter -- 78 square blocks, the oldest and highest part of New Orleans -- is largely up and running: 30,000 of the 38,000 pre-Katrina hotel rooms are back, airline flights are at pre-hurricane numbers, and most of the old city's restaurants and museums, and the festival grounds are repaired and open -- all waiting for visitors, who are slow to return.

Matthew Goldman, advertising director for the festival, isn't telling how many tickets have been sold, probably because that isn't a reliable indication of how many people will come.

"There is no reserved seating at the festival. Most people show up at the gate and get a ticket, and the festival never sells out," he said. "But the momentum is unbelievable. There's a tremendous amount of interest."

City and festival officials are battling two misconceptions about New Orleans: "They think we're back to normal or we're still under water, and neither is right," Goldman said. "But the structure is there. There are usually conventions that block out the hotels during the festival, and we don't have the conventions, so the hotel rooms are definitely available. The festival will be great, and it will be an emotional time for everybody."

Davis, too, said the images after Katrina still are vivid, and when people think of New Orleans, they think of Katrina.

"The devastation is there, it's real, but the major things that make New Orleans such a unique tourist destination are our culture, our art, our architecture, our history, our cuisine, our music, and they still exist," she said.

"It's miraculous that our tourism assets are still in place, because tourism is the second-largest industry [after health care] in the state. We have the ability to help recovery if we're able to get the message out that New Orleans is still a wonderful, and true, experience for visitors."