New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival After moving to
New Orleans in 1968, Miner began a career as a music manager, archivist and festival promoter. When
George Wein, the founder of the
Newport Jazz Festival and
Newport Folk Festival, asked the
Tulane University Jazz archive's then-director Richard (Dick) Allen to recommend people who could help him launch a New Orleans music festival in
Congo Square, he suggested his employee Miner. Later, Miner and
Quint Davis began rounding up interested musicians. The first festival had so few attendees that the staff ended up giving tickets away at a nearby school. The festival grew into the
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Miner helped run the festival for its first five years. She is primarily credited with the co-founding of both the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation and primary founder of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archives. The Archive contains recordings from musicians interviewed at the festival and other culturally relevant documents, photographs, and ephemera related to the festival and the foundation's holdings, including samples of on-air recordings of
WWOZ 90.7-FM. When the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival could not hold an ‘in person’ event, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archives provided many hours of prior recordings that the station was able to use in broadcast during the COVID19 pandemic shutdown in a financally successful “Festing In Place” campaign that was repeated multiple times by the station to raise funds. In 2019, The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archives were the key source material used for the
Smithsonian Folkways recordings 50th anniversary box set of live festival recordings.
Music manager and producer Miner went on to guide the career of
Professor Longhair, aka Henry Roeland Byrd, from the mid-1970s until his death in 1980. During those years, he toured overseas, produced popular recordings and gained critical acclaim. Her husband at the time,
Andrew Kaslow, led Professor Longhair's back-up band. "Her devotion to Professor Longhair gave him the best years of his life", George Wein was quoted as saying in Miner's obituary that ran in
The Times-Picayune. Miner and Kaslow moved to
Cleveland in the mid-1980s, where she produced a Cajun and zydeco radio show at
Case Western Reserve University on
WRUW 91.1, led the
National Folk Festival at the
Cuyahoga Valley National Park and was development director at the Cleveland Music School Settlement. ==Death and legacy==