[Dixielandjazz] The Death of OKOM

[Dan Augustine]

DJML and others--
	Well, reports of the death of OKOM in Austin have been 
greatly exaggerated.
	I went to two concerts last night in Austin.  One looked 
back, and the other looked into the future.  Both were fine examples 
of the music we like but that we can't define, so we call it OKOM 
(Our Kind Of Music).  It includes everything from ragtime to swing, 
but allows stopovers at blues, dixieland, New Orleans jazz, popular 
songs of the 1920s and 1930s, novelty songs, and more.  Both concerts 
were very enjoyable, but in different ways.
	The first concert was at the Elephant Room, a small jazz bar 
half a mile from the Texas capitol, and featured Tommy Griffiths' The 
New Orleans Jazz Band of Austin, a name that leaves no doubt about 
what kind of music it plays or where it is from.  The players in it 
are, shall we say, of a certain age and have been playing traditional 
jazz for decades, but instead of implying a declining staleness to 
the flavor of the music, that term refers to a ripening and deeping 
of the musical taste, better notes rather than more notes, 
superfluous notes left out, knowing how best to present each song and 
doing so with experienced freshness.  The audience mirrored the band 
in age and loudly appreciated the songs they had known for decades, 
done well.
	The second concert was held half a mile from the center of 
the University of Texas campus at the Hole in the Wall, for 30 years 
a bar and delightfully seedy club for new bands.  It featured Li'l 
Alice and Her Monkey Butlers performing jazz and blues from the 1920s 
and 1930s (http://www.alicespencer.com/monkey.htm).  Like some other 
new bands in Austin (the Giant City Sextet, the White Ghost Shivers, 
Aunt Ruby's Sweet Jazz Babies), most of the players are young (well, 
under 40 qualifies as young now to me) and like to perform acoustic 
jazz from an era that created songs with memorable melodies, 
intriguing harmonies, and understandable and meaningful lyrics. 
(This kind of band has been popping up in Austin ever since the 
Asylum Street Spankers used to play between sets of my Wurst Band at 
Scholz's Bier Garten back in the early 1990s.) One of the best 
features of the band (for me) was its tuba-player Mark Rubin 
(http://www.markrubin.com/home.html), who was playing great stuff on 
an 1890 Cerveny helicon (which the banjo-player 'Pops' Bayless 
renamed as a 'blatophone').
	The leader of the group, Alice Spencer, is as good a singer 
as i have heard in Austin in the last 30 years, and also writes her 
own songs.  She's so much better than ANY of the singers who competed 
in American Idol (which i have not watched) that it just confirms the 
suspicion that the media in general and corporate recording-companies 
in particular know as much about music as your average edible snail 
(itself an oxymoron to my mind). She sang a good song ("First-Hand 
Witness"), written by Mr. Bayless, that is not only intricate 
harmonically and very difficult to sing, but strongly reminds one of 
a Billie Holiday vehicle, and Alice sung it very well.  (You can hear 
her and the band at a live recording on KUT's Eklektikos via a link 
on her webpage.)
	Yeah, yeah, so what's my point?  The point, dear reader, is 
that the music we love is not in fact forgotten and dying away, but 
is being rediscovered and transmogrified into shapes and sizes that 
young musicians and young audiences like.  And, i guar-an-tee, it 
ain't happenin' only in Austin, but in some small bars and 
coffee-houses in your own town.  However, nobody but the young 
(mostly) know about it.  Things come around again in time, not as 
circles, but as spirals with different aspects, sprouting organically 
in each age's changing soil.  We're looking for bands in the old 
mold, but new bands playing OKOM are out there playing right now, 
except in places we don't go.

     Dan
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**  Dan Augustine  --  Austin, Texas  --  ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu
**     "Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through
**      their feet instead of their brains." -- Louis Armstrong
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