[Dixielandjazz] Re: Promoting ourselves (was Dixieland in the garden)

[Judy Eames]

Steve suggested ........ a weekend event harking
> back to the days of F Scott Fitzgerald? Or 1920/30 English society's
> love of jazz?

Tony Davis and I are there already.  In November we have a gig at Coleton
Fisheacre, a National Trust property in Devon which was built for the
D'Oyley Carte family and completed in 1926.  We shall be calling the evening
"Savoy Connection" as the family owned the Savoy Hotel where the "syncopated
music" was played by top bands of the day.  Now all we have to do is trawl
through our "Melody Makers" (the journal first published in 1926 for
professioanl musicians)   and find some suitable tunes and anecdotes.

Further promotion... for UK residents and anyone thinking of visiting the
Oxford area in September.  Our Jazz Weekend at Bablock Hythe (we don't JUST
do gigs at places with strange names!) takes  place on 24th to 26th Sept.
Line-up:  Dave Moorwood's new Big Bear Stompers,  Jon Penn's Hot 5,  Our own
Kaminsky Connection,  Sporting House Strings with Spats Langham and Gerry
Brown's Mission Hall Band.  There's limited accommodation at the hotel or
within walking distance and lots within a twenty minute's drive. Camper vans
and tents are welcome on the facility free field beside  a beautiful, quiet
stretch of the Thames and there's a five star campsite three miles away.
This is a new venture for us, but we were offered the 200 plus capacity
venue for nothing, so we decided to make some work for our friends and
ourselves.

Friday 6th Aug we have Les Muscutt, and  Chris Burke from New Orleans
playing in our Village Hall with a band selected for the occasion, including
Perry lock (pno) Paul Munnery (tbn) and ourselves.  This will be our third
transatlantic gig in the village hall,  it's not really viable for a whole
visiting band but we're always happy to hear of good soloists and duos who
might be trying to fill a gap in their gig schedule.

Finally if any UK members would be willing to print off a poster to help us
to advertise our weekend, we'd be very grateful and would happily
reciprocate.

If you've got this far......... apologies for the verbosity:-)

Cheers Jude






Judy Eames
Kaminsky Connection
Aston, Oxfordshire
UK
www.judyeames.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From
>
>
> List mates & Pat Ladd
>
> Say, here's an idea for Pat Ladd. Hey Pat, how about some Dixieland
> concerts in the gardens at your country place? :-) VBG. Especially since
> "fantasy" seems to be the current rage? Perhaps a weekend event harking
> back to the days of F Scott Fitzgerald? Or 1920/30 English society's
> love of jazz?
>
> Or even Shakespeare? "If Music Be The Food Of Love, Play On." (Twelfth
> Night opener)
>
> Cheers,
> Steve
>
> August 1, 2004 - NY Times
>
>
>     'Götterdämmerung' in the Garden
>
> By MICHAEL WHITE
>
> LONDON
>
> IN Britain, these days, opera in the garden is all the rage. If you own
> a country house with grounds, you turn everything upside down in July
> and August to stage a home-grown "Götterdämmerung" (or for the
> fainter-hearted, "Barber of Seville"). And patrons, ideally in evening
> dress, picnic grandly on your lawns during intermissions.
>
> The phenomenon feeds on fantasy. Audience members pretend they're in
> Italy or someplace warm, willfully ignoring the dampness and downpours
> of an English summer as they pick the meat from their lobster thermidor
> with shivering hands. And the proprietors imagine they've traveled back
> in time, as 18th-century princelings with private courts and orchestras
> at their disposal, while they reinvent the Arcadian dream. Not that they
> readily admit it.
>
> "Dear me, no," says Leonard Ingrams, the engagingly eccentric banker who
> owns Garsington Manor, near Oxford. Once famous as a country escape for
> the Bloomsbury set, Garsington is now one of the most celebrated summer
> opera haunts in the country. But Mr. Ingrams insists he has no illusions
> about recreating an 18th-century court.
>
> "My neighbors might have something to say about that," he says. "And it
> wouldn't be very practical. The four-week season we run here turns over
> a modest profit that requires careful management. This is no business
> for fantasists."
>
> But there must be some good reason for the owners to want to do it, for
> they also have to submit to invasion of their privacy, governmental
> regulations and the daily traumas inevitable to any artistic enterprise.
>
> For some, like Marilyn Abbot, the exuberant chatelaine of West Green
> House in Hampshire, opera complements the beauty of gardens that are
> open to the public anyway. "This is a fine 18th-century estate," she
> says, "and to stage Mozart here adds an appropriate dimension to the
> experience of it all."
>
> For John Hignett, who owns the idyllic Iford Manor, near Bath, and
> stages operas in a Renaissance cloister at the bottom of his gardens,
> it's all part of "a spirit of place which I feel profoundly and believe
> it's my responsibility as a custodian to cultivate," he says.
>
> But other owners seem motivated simply by a passion for music, which
> they can afford to indulge. Monika Saunders, whose garden, Woodhouse
> Copse in Surrey, presents opera on a minute but charming scale, has
> virtually no staff support. But music is the driving force in her life,
> she says, "so I give all I have to make it happen."
>
> Sometimes the drive is focused toward specific repertory. Garsington
> acquired critical credibility (and some relief from the complaint that,
> like all country-house opera, it was nothing more than a diversion for
> the rich) by staging the British premieres of forgotten Haydn operas and
> taking up lesser-known works by Rossini and Richard Strauss. At
> Longborough, an estate in the Cotswolds, Martin Graham puts on reduced
> "Ring" cycles, with the soaring ambition, he says, that one day he will
> do them complete "and the world will talk about the Longborough Ring in
> the way it talks about Bayreuth."
>
> But almost every country opera entrepreneur is guided by a strong sense
> of what will work on his or her particular patch.
>
> "I do exercise a sort of personal censorship about the kind of work we
> stage here," says Mr. Hignett of Iford Manor. "And although this sounds
> a bit mad, it often comes down to how people die in a piece. I think of
> Iford as a place with positive energies, and frankly, I'd rather not
> have operas where anyone dies at all. But as that would be limiting, I
> have a sort of rule that says death by natural causes is O.K.  we do
> `Bohème'  but not death by violence. We did `Tosca' once, but it felt
> wrong, so we won't go there again."
>
> Country opera standards vary hugely, from the sophisticated and
> remarkable to the simple and poor. Some sites offer permanent
> bricks-and-mortar theaters. Some have high-tech temporary structures.
> And some merely erect a stage against the house and hope that it doesn't
> rain.
>
> About the only thing they share is a veneration for the mother of all
> country opera ventures, Glyndebourne. Long established and stately, it
> is the institution from which all others take their cue.
>
> A Jacobean-cum-Victorian mansion with a theater joined umbilically to
> one side, Glyndebourne nestles in the folds of gentle Sussex pastureland
> spotted with bleating sheep and strangely clean cows: a paradigm of
> picture-book England. It is the ancestral seat of the Christie family,
> one of whom, John Christie, married a soprano in 1930 and resolved to
> build her an opera house in the garden.
>
> With time, Glyndebourne became a fixture on the British social scene.
> Special trains conveyed the audience from London in their evening
> dresses and tiaras. The intermission picnics were a gift to news
> photographers. And more seriously, artistic standards steadily improved,
> so that Glyndebourne now ranks among the finest opera theaters in the
world.
>
> "We really don't think of ourselves as country-house opera anymore,"
> says David Pickard, Glyndebourne's general director. "O.K., there's
> still the champagne-drinking audience, but it's peripheral to what we're
> about. We've lost the old sense of being an exquisite cottage industry.
> We're not so exclusive."
>
> But the abandonment of the cottage-industry aspect was not welcomed by
> all Glyndebourne patrons, many of whom enjoyed the exclusiveness. So
> they have decamped for Garsington, which, they say, is the way
> Glyndebourne used to be: more intimate; less slick; and  with 500 seats
> and a 20-evening season  the sort of event at which audience members
> can congratulate themselves on the mere achievement of being there.
>
> A performance night feels like a private party; and Mr. Ingrams's
> proprietorship is decidedly hands-on. After a day of shifting money in
> international banking markets, he will happily tune harpsichords, check
> lavatories, deal with singers' temper tantrums and deliver a standard
> preperformance homily to the audience on the importance of not driving
> through the village on the way home.
>
> The homily is a relic of problems he encountered with his neighbors from
> the moment Garsington began its opera seasons, 15 years ago. When
> villagers discovered they were going to have opera on their doorstep 
> with rehearsals, noise and a nightly motorcade of visitors  they took
> action, through the courts and then (more practically) through sabotage.
> In one extraordinary attack, organized like a wartime mission,
> Garsington's opening night was overwhelmed by the noise of car alarms,
> hedge trimmers and light aircraft buzzing the stage. The show was saved
> only by cease-fire negotiations at intermission.
>
> Zoning restrictions will keep Mr. Ingrams from ever having a permanent
> theater. The most he can do is construct a temporary auditorium of wood
> and canvas. And although it is technologically up to date, with a full
> orchestra pit, heat and surprisingly good acoustics, it has no backstage
> or flies.
>
> At Longborough, by comparison, Mr. Graham throws up buildings with a
> vengeance. He has turned a pastoral site into a sort of toy-town opera
> village, with pavilions and towers surrounding the actual theater. It
> helps that he is a property developer  driven, he says, by two
> obsessions: "I love Wagner, and I love to build. Put those together and
> you get an opera house."
>
> The Longborough opera house is actually a cow barn, surreally converted
> with a mock-Palladian foyer, chandeliers and red plush seats that once
> belonged to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
>
> Yet however much creativity may go into the construction of
> country-house operas, it doesn't always surface in the shows themselves.
> The larger presenters generate their own productions, but the smaller
> ones bring in touring packages.
>
> Iford buys the services of Opera Project: one of the best small-scale
> touring companies in Britain, with an ingenious ability to fit
> substantial-looking productions of "Falstaff," "Le Nozze di Figaro" and
> "La Bohème" into tiny spaces like the Iford Cloisters. Opera Project
> also has a knack for finding excellent young singers. And this has been
> a great spinoff from the country opera boom: an uncoordinated but useful
> platform for emerging talent, which functions like a nationwide academy,
> at arm's length from the glare of London.
>
> Musical culture in Britain has historically homed in on London, without
> the decentralized network of provincial opera houses to be found in
> Germany and other European countries. So country opera represents a sort
> of catching up and, it is tempting to add, an opening out  except that
> critics of its social exclusivity would dismiss the suggestion as
> nonsense. If opera is to have a future, they would say, it must rid
> itself of the champagne-and-candelabra image that country opera
encourages.
>
> They may be right. The black-tie picnics on the lawns at Glyndebourne
> are anachronistic, not to say impractical and, usually, uncomfortable.
> But George Christie, who inherited the enterprise in 1956 and has just
> handed it on to his son Gus, in true dynastic succession, doesn't think
> they're outmoded.
>
> "There's never been a rule about black-tie here," Sir George says, "but
> it's customary because it's what people appear to want. And if people
> want to dress up and make their operagoing an event, is that so awful?"
>
> Michael White is a columnist for BBC Music Magazine and writes for The
> Sunday Telegraph in London.
>
>
>
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