Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Listening to Dead Musicians

[DWSI at aol.com]

Steve:

Your post on the past greats and not making money on OKOM were most 
interesting. But if you took another look at all of music today, wouldn't you feel a 
bit more positive about OKOM's future? I'm referring to the fragmentation of all 
music to all audiences everywhere thanks to all the electronic media. The 
kids (teens or preteens) seem to create the market for pop music today but there 
are plenty of other, smaller markets going strong. No one has suggested we 
shut down the Metropolitan Opera or Carnegie Hall lately for lack of interest 
yet, have they? Ragtime and Dixie records still sell. The message is we got to 
start packaging it differently to the audience that wants to hear it. One of my 
favorite examples is Max Morath. His running ragtime performances still draw a 
good audience; his most recent, Ragtime and Beyond, opens at the York Theater 
in New York this month. Maybe our problem is we're trying to create the same 
OKOM music in the same way and it's the venue that's out of date, not the 
music. For example, when I was a college kid, I used to love to got to the 
Eleven-Eleven Club in Chicago (the 50s) to hear George Brunis and the forever 
mystical Hey, Hey Humphrey but that kind of staged performance is not where it's at 
for college kids today.Sometimes the complaints remind me of an old silent 
movie director who laments there's no money to be made in movies today. Try a new 
approach, old buddy. I'd love to hear you play any way I can. 


Dan (piano fingers) Spink