[Dixielandjazz] JAM BANDS NIGHT

[Stephen Barbone]

Check out this huge musical genre. A parallel music world to "Jazz"
where "jam bands" also reside.  Note too, the re-defining of "New
Orleans Bands".  Don't we just love the first paragraph?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

March 18, 2004 - NY TIMES - March 18

A Night to Honor Bands That Jam

By JON PARELES

   Imagine current pop turned inside out. Playing concerts would be a
living rather than a promotional tool, bands would take musical chances
nightly, wardrobe would be an afterthought, a group could release a
dozen live albums a year, and gray hair and wrinkles would garner
respect. Fans would bypass radio and television and get information from
other fans (via the Internet), and music's past would be a foundation
rather than a scrap heap.

That is the realm of jam bands, who had their annual reckoning with the
fourth Jammy Awards on Tuesday night at the Theater at Madison Square
Garden, with dancers on their feet and marijuana smoke in the air. Jam
bands bring music's ancient business model — the roving troubadour — to
the interconnected modern world. While selling pop music on expensively
produced and promoted CD's is a paradigm under siege, jam bands have
flourished as concert mainstays and as an alternative to canned music.

Presentations of the awards, chosen by 50,000 online voters, whiled away
set changes as the concert celebrated the cooperative, genre-hopping
spirit of jam bands. No group stayed insular for long. The Harlem Gospel
Choir sang "Higher and Higher" to start the concert, then joined the
funk band Soulive. Slick Rick rapped with the Disco Biscuits, whose jams
use mix funk and pulsating dance-floor electronica.

Reggae met New Orleans rhythm-and-blues as the Jamaican songwriter Toots
Hibbert (minus the Maytals) sang with Dr. John on keyboards, George
Porter Jr. of the Meters on bass and a New Orleans band. Perry Farrell
of Jane's Addiction sang with the String Cheese Incident, which brings
Celtic touches to its Grateful Dead emulation.

The scene is full of paradoxes. Dedicated to improvisation, jam bands
have also become preservationists for older styles. And fans drawn by
the present-tense concert experience are equally determined to record
and tabulate them.

The audience holds on to a 1960's-flavored sense of community. An award
was given to Justin Baker, whose nonprofit Conscious Alliance collected
20 tons of food for the hungry at jam-band shows last year. "We just
rent the trucks; you guys fill 'em up," he said. Drugs were not
disowned; Alan Grey, who won an award for the album cover of the String
Cheese Incident's "Untying the Not", said, "I'd like to thank God and
LSD and all the psychedelics for the beautiful visions of our infinite
being."

But the winner of the new groove (for new bands) award, Psychedelic
Breakfast, recently changed its name to the Breakfast. Phish's summer
tour was named Tour of the Year, and Moe's "Wormwood" won the studio
album award.

Fans continue to cherish the legacy of the Grateful Dead — whose album
"The Closing of Winterland: Dec. 31, 1978," won the award for Archival
Live Album — and of the Allman Brothers Band, whose past and present
members dominated the program.

The Allmans' bassist, Oteil Burbridge, played fleet melodies (sometimes
scat-singing along) over percussive, thumb-popping riffs from Victor
Wooten, the Flecktones' bassist. Dickey Betts, a founder of the Allmans
who was fired from the band, played guitar and sang his Allmans hits
with Reid Genauer and the Assembly of Dust, along with Edie Brickell.
Later he jammed with bands led by his replacements, Derek Trucks and
Warren Haynes.

The Derek Trucks Band was taken over by the venerable soul singer
Solomon Burke, who traded vocal lines with Mr. Trucks's stinging
slide-guitar leads and preached an election-year mini-sermon: "Come
November, we need to make the change," he exhorted.

Mr. Haynes also leads Gov't Mule. He collected multiple awards: as
songwriter for the Allmans' "Old Before My Time" and for live
performance and live album with Gov't Mule on "The Deepest End," a New
Orleans concert. He accepted the award for DVD for the Dave Matthews
Band's "Central Park Concert," where he sat in.

Gov't Mule performed its brawny, doleful Southern rock, and Chris
Robinson, formerly of the Black Crowes, shared the vocals on Neil
Young's "Southern Man." Then the rest of the Black Crowes reunited
alongside Gov't Mule to perform "Sometime Salvation."

Mr. Haynes, Mr. Betts, the guitarist Robert Randolph, the jazz
saxophonist James Carter and the fiddler Michael Kang from the String
Cheese Incident also sat in with Steve Winwood, who won a lifetime
achievement award. The night before Mr. Winwood was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for albums with Traffic, Blind Faith and his
own bands. "It's wonderful to know that I've been jamming for
the past 40 years," he said.