[Dixielandjazz] The blues over last night's 'Blues.'

[TCASHWIGG at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/1/03 11:31:37 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
jbeebe at centurytel.net writes:

> 
> Again , I couldn't watch all of this show and had to shift to dial 
> twiddling.
> 
> Where is Ken Burns when we need him?  Or even Wynton Marsalis and his 
> cronies who mucked up Ken Burns' Jazz series.  Certainly any of them could do a 
> better job with this Blues' presentation.
> 
> How many minutes did the camera guy linger on the fat woman shaking her 
> behind.? That was excruciating.
> 
> This Blues series is in serious need of an expert editor...and writer.
> 
> On the plus side there were good sections on BB King. Interesting history 
> and interviews with him.  Plus performance shots.  This is the way the whole 
> show should be.
> 
> Curmudgeonly yours,
> 
> Jim Beebe

Have to agree pretty much with you again Jim:

Blues has always been treated like the ugly sister or stepchild, and not 
given real professional attention like Ken Burns did with his documentary on Jazz.

Some of it no doubt is due to the poor materials and archives available on 
Blues which was back burnered when Jazz took hold way back when.

I was particularly appalled by the story with B.B. King and Oscar Brown 
telling how the city fathers just elected to tear down Beale Street all together 
rather than restore the old neighborhood and all its history.  With the 
exception of B.B. Kings' club there simply is not much there and when I visited there, 
it only had an average local band playing.

Today Beale Street looks like a shopping mall, and there is almost no 
atmosphere in the neighborhood at all.  The Beale Street Blues Hall of Fame is a bad 
joke as I remember it from a visit a few years back.  I was totally 
disappointed.

The city of Oakland did the same thing twenty years ago and destroyed the 
entire nightlife scene in downtown, then we got them to preserve a section of Old 
Oakland and got some developers on the project and started to rebuild and 
renovate about five square blocks with plans to put in restaurants nightclubs and 
compatible businesses to revitalize the downtown section.  The city kept 
stalling the developers and did so into bankruptcy, then pulled the plug on the 
development and gave it to a Canadian firm that wanted to build high rise office 
buildings three blocks away.

To date they have spent no money on the Old Oakland development project and 
much of it is still vacant and with no businesses coming in the foreseeable 
future.  The city shifted their interest to developing Jack London Square with 
airport and Port of Oakland money, but after total renovation much of it also is 
sitting empty or being used temporarily for local artists displays of 
sculpture and paintings from the local school kids.

I tried to get them to develop the largest building in the Square into a 
major nightclub restaurant, but they elected to lease it to Barnes and Noble for 
what looks like the World's largest book store in a city that can't even teach 
their kids how to read.  It has to be the biggest tax shelter on the books for 
Barnes and Noble.  There is almost never anybody there.  Or the City is 
paying them to stay in business with a sweetheart deal like they made for Yoshi's 
Japanese Sushi restaurant, with a 350 seat Jazz room next door.

Meanwhile there is NO nightlife or restaurants downtown to attract anyone in 
the evenings, it is Ghost town after five o'clock.

Redevelopment is more the cause for the decline in Live music than anything 
else the way I see it, like poor people live music has just been displaced in 
the name of progress and modernization, but at a terrific loss to the people 
and lifestyles of Americans.

Sadly,

Tom Wiggins