[Dixielandjazz] Re: Dixieland Jazz a re-hash?

[Stephen Barbone]

> From: Dan Augustine <ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu>
>
> Steve (c: DJML)--
>     I disagree completely with what you say below about the Watters/Murphy style being a 'rehashment' of older styles.

I dig it. Different opinions are what makes horse racing succeed. ;-)

> Watters and Murphy expanded the style and brought new life and new ideas to it, and similar bands up to the present continue to do so.  Condon's style TO ME is really the old-fashioned and unimportant one (but i like it, just not as much).

I dig that too. But then, consider that Watters-Scobey-Murphy et al are described musically as "West Coast Revival". The Condon Groups et al were never described as "Revivalist", probably because they were not reviving anything. What new musical ideas do any of us hear in "Revivalist Dixieland'? Following is a quote on the style from an eminent Dixieland
scholar about the beginning of the revival.

"Watters and his colleagues had been listening to small-band recordings of the 1920s. Particularly the New Orleans style 78s of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. Hearing an approach to music that was hardly to be found at all any more; in instrumentation employing two beat rhythm, banjo and tuba, all musical devices not employed by swing
musicians; and some worthwhile tunes that had been totally forgotten, they decided to get together after hours and REVIVE (emphasis mine) this instrumentation and repertoire."

YBJB did choose to go for power. It was brassy and loud and totally devoid of dynamics. That is perhaps, the real difference between YBJB and the bands of today who emulate it. Today's groups in that style go for dynamics, which brings them squarely back to what King Oliver was doing in the 1920s.

> Of course, it has never mattered what i think, nor what you think, nor what any of us think.  What matters is what the audience likes,

100% agree.

> and from what i've seen and heard at festivals (on the left coast, to be sure) audiences of all ages love the West Coast style.

Maybe so, but what audience????????? The size of the average festival audience on the left coast pales in comparison to what bands like mine generate here in the East playing evolutionary Dixieland. Plus the age differential between the two audiences is huge. Barbone Street routinely played for single set concert audiences of 500; occasionally before audiences
exceeding 1000 and sometimes before as many as 5000 in 2003. That's more audience than most OKOM "Festivals" draw on the left coast, or even in the USA.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

> >Original From: Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net> (snipped)
>
> >For all of the wonderful things Turk Murphy did, we might wish to put
> >into perspective the fact that Eddie Condon often referred to him and
> >the other West Coast Bands as "archeologists". Because they were going
> >far back into the past to dig up musical ideas. Condon felt that he
> >alone was looking ahead and playing "modern" Dixieland. Those West Coast
> >Bands, in his eyes were just looking backwards and doing the same old
> >thing in the same old way.
> >
> >>From a historical approach to jazz, there really is not much to say
> >about most "Dixieland" musicians from 1945 on except that they were re
> >hashing the same musical problems that their musical fore bearers had
> >already solved a decade or two before them. That is the main reason why
> >there are not a lot of "Dixieland" articles or reviews in the media
> >today. They also attach little importance of today's Dixieland as far as
> >Jazz is concerned.
> >
> >As older folks, we love the music of Turk, Lu, and all the contemporary
> >Dixieland bands. However in the grand scheme of Jazz, they are neither
> >very important, nor listened to by many people other than us.
> >
> >Hate to say it, but that's the way it is.
> >
> >Battening down the hatches, but remember, I'm only the messenger.