[Dixielandjazz] Spreading the word.

[tcashwigg at aol.com]

Hi Folks:

There is a very good reason this situation unfortunately exists in this 
genre of music:

As an admittedly "Johnny Come lately" to this genre of music I had 
never heard of Jim Cullum, Jim Beebe, Charlie Hooks, Kenny Davern, Ed 
Polcer, Johnny Varro, Jim Kash, Vince Giardono, Tom Saunders, Duke 
Heiteger,  and countless others,  why?  Because they were hidden from 
the Public Eye and ear if indeed they were ever there in the first 
place, outside their hometowns or Trad. Jazz Society gigs.   I had 
heard of Turk Murphy and Lu Watters, and had seen something about the 
So. Frisco Jazz Band a few times, and rediscovered Jim Maihack's name 
scrounging thru an old record shop in S.F. one day looking at some Turk 
Murphy records.   I had seen and heard Jim with Turk a few times and 
since the music appeared to be dying out at that time in S.F. and 
Murphy was going broke again with the club, I just went off into a 
different direction of music to make a living.     I actually thought 
for many years that the DIXIELAND MUSIC BUSINESS was only
Pete Fountain, Al Hirt, Louis Armstrong, and Preservation Hall Jazz 
band.    I actually only heard my first N.O. Brass Band in 1990 which 
was Milt Batiste and Harold Dejan's Olympia Brass Band.    That is what 
got me into this music, so I built myself a band that I thought would 
be actually better and set out to promote it, approaching the music 
with a more modern sound to try and appeal to a younger sustainable 
audience.   It appears to be working and I have no intentions of 
changing it to try and sound like some old scratchy recordings of 
yesteryear, because as I have stated before, I have never believed that 
many of those bands actually sounded like that live at all, and if they 
did they would not have lasted very long.

Why do so many apparently good players insist upon trying to sound so 
BAD? :))   That is the primary reason in my personal observation that 
this music has degenerated and continued on a downward spiral since the 
1960's.   Put some excitement back into the music and the audience is 
out there and they will respond accordingly.  Some of us saw it in 
Israel earlier this year, are we any better players than many of the 
revered heros, NO, but we did come together and deliver a Dynamite High 
Energy Modern Show that knocked the socks off of 3000 + audience 
members each show.   It is in the delivery guys and image that we 
present LIve music in ,  It is Called LIVE MUSIC for a REASON.  I 
guarantee you Jim, Charlie, Kenny, and maybe even Louis would have been 
Proud to be on those stages those nights seeing and feeling the power 
of this great music and what it used to do to people when presented 
properly.

Little or NO publicity and Promotion about those revered ARTISTS, TO 
THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
How good a player is or how good their tone is, is simply not very 
relevant if they are not being promoted and advertised properly to draw 
an audience outside of the pretty much private social club scenes of 
most Traditional Jazz Societies and the Good ole boys circuit.


Secondly, I have been to see a few of these players and could not have 
been less impressed?"  why ?  because the situation in which they were 
presented and conditions or lack thereof of the venues they appeared 
in, did NOTHING to the ambiance or audible quality that they may or may 
not have been capable of delivering.   Let's face it folks, many OKOM 
events are simply organized and presented in less than musically 
suitable venues just because they are cheap to rent.  Or they seem to 
be the only places the artists even try to book themselves into.

In my day I have played far too many juke joints and toilets with Bar 
stools to know that many places have no business whatsoever having a 
live music of any kind, Fortunately I took my career out of that scene 
many years ago and have no desire to go back to it.  That scene in 
itself cheapens ( in my opinion) the often Good players who keep 
playing in less than suitable situations.

This is where we get the old saying about GIGS from Hell,  in today's 
market for OKOM it seems those are the places that the music has
more or less been relegated to,  Folks just Gave up on Promoting and 
putting on Class events on a regular basis, and many have just dwindled 
down to a once a year Festival that once used to be an every night 
event.   Many musicians decided to quit hustling for good gigs and 
settled for chump change gigs and got day jobs to earn a living and 
allowed their once thriving marketplace to shrivel up and go away.


Does anyone remember the Great New Orleans room at the Fairmont Hotel 
in S.F.?  once a High class thriving spot for OKOM,  it is still 
sitting vacant, why?  because musicians who got gigs there just sat on 
their butts and did not promote themselves and continue to attract  new 
customers and as their audience kept moving out of the city to the 
suburbs and such the Hotel management just kept raising the prices to 
extract more money from fewer and fewer people until they priced it out 
of range for any local audience at all.   They were then dependent 
totally upon the tourist market who the Hotel did little or nothing to 
keep in the Hotel and spending their money in their own establishment 
rather than taking it all over town to everyone else.

( I never said the Hotel was operated intelligently in this matter 
either,) as is the case in most of them even today, their emphasis and 
interest is primarily upon how many butts are upstairs in the beds and 
the other businesses in the hotel are really not important sources of
revenue for them, if not enough people go into them and spend money 
they simply turn them into other use.  They view them as real estate 
and Square footage rather than actual clubs or restaurants that should 
compete and thrive on their own merit.


They are almost always under the direction of the FOOD and Beverage 
manager, who is trained primarily as a banquet manager and has no clue 
about advertising and or promotion or running an operation correctly 
other than a private party where you just serve rubber chicken to 
everyone and cheap champaign and hand them a Big Bill that the 
corporation will pay without even looking at it.

Couple this with the fact that most musicians  and or their UNION never 
paid any attention to this side of the business, nor even understood it 
or how or why it functioned and you have at least one of the major 
answers as to the decline of the class rooms to play in
major metropolitan cities, and it is plain and simple that the Ball was 
dropped by everyone when the going got tough, and nobody fought
hard enough to get the Ball and run with it again.

It is very important to stay on top of the promotion and Publicity of 
your MUSIC BUSINESS and treat it like a business or you will soon be 
out of Business.  Yes I know many musicians simply shrug and say well 
some have better marketing skills than others, You bet they do and 
those are the ones like ole Woody that are getting the gigs where folks 
pay $35.00 and up to see and hear them, no matter how good their
tone is, 95% OF THE WORLD does not even know or care.  They do not 
think like MUSICIANS,  WHEN WE ALL LEARN THAT, WE CAN ALL BECOME MORE 
SUCCESSFUL IF THAT IS YOUR GOAL.   On the other hand if you are more 
inclined to play for your own self abusement than don't bitch about it.

If and when you run into an Entertainment buyer that is an idiot 
recognize it and educate them so they will perhaps buy some better 
music the next time.   Eventually they all get what they pay for, or 
NOT !

Cheers,


Tom Wiggins






Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Spreading the word.

    billsharp <sharp-b at clearwire.net> wrote (polite snip)

> If we really
> wanted to support OKOM, we on the West coast would be spreading the
> news about where guys like Bob Schulz, Clint Baker, et. al., ad
> infinitum and all the other great players with very good tone are
> performing.

Amen Bill, and that goes for folks all over the USA. We should be 
spreading
the word, and also actually GOING out to see these players while they 
are
still alive.

Last time I saw Kenny Davern in action at a concert, there were 120 or 
so
people in attendance. This in a metro area of some 5 million people. 
That's
appalling, especially since the admission charges ranged from $10 to a
maximum of $20.

On this list of 600 people, I wonder how many of us, especially in the 
USA,
saw Kenny play during the past 2 years? How many OKOM festivals, 
especially
those on the West Coast near his retirement pad in New Mexico, actually
booked him to play since his move there? How many Davern CDs do we 
have? I
could be wrong, but I have to think far to few.


Yet it seems with his passing, and all the obit praise, and praise from 
both
critics and fans, that this man was arguably the best of the best
clarinetists around for, at least, the past 40 years. Like former list 
mates
Jim Beebe and Charlie Hooks, he was also among those in the third 
generation
of OKOM players since the beginning. In the not too distant future all 
in
that generation will be gone.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


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