[Dixielandjazz] Eliminate the Middleman? Nah!

[Dan Augustine]

Steve and DJML--
     Actually, Austin bills itself as the "live music capital" because 
of all the bands and venues in town, but i've always thought that was 
a bit of a stretch (perhaps it is per capita, but surely New York, 
Chicago, LA, and other big cities have more total bands performing on 
any given night than Austin does).
     Yes, there are 1,400+ bands, and that's just the official SXSW 
bands.  There are plenty of others at non-official venues playing.
     Loosely speaking, there might be some OKOM-related bands playing. 
In the Jazz category, there are 19 bands listed 
(http://2006.sxsw.com/music/showcases/genre/Jazz.html):

The Lynne Arriale Trio		Lutz FL
John Boutte			New Orleans LA
The Crack Pipes			Austin TX
Dirty Dozen Brass Band		New Orleans LA
The Drift				San Francisco CA
Drop Trio				Houston TX
Golden Arm Trio			Austin TX
Katahdin's Edge			Providence RI
The New Mastersounds		Leeds UK
Nieminen & Litmanen		Helsinki FINLAND
Robin Nolan Trio			Amsterdam THE NETHERLANDS
Ephraim Owens Quintet		Austin TX
Pe'z				Tokyo JAPAN
Brandi Shearer			San Francisco CA
Suzi Stern			Austin TX
Tres				Austin TX
The Chris Vestre Group		Austin TX
White Ghost Shivers		Austin TX
Stephane Wrembel with David Grisman	Brooklyn NY

     The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is SomePersons' KOM, but i haven't 
heard any of the other bands, even the ones from Austin.  (Apparently 
the OKOM-related bands from Austin that i have heard didn't get 
invited to SXSW.)
     However, we of the Austin Traditional Jazz Society have a concert 
on Sunday (non-SXSW) by the Jim Cullum Jazz Band 
(http://www.atjs.org/HEADS/52.htm), and we've been advertising it for 
two weeks now, but the number of tickets sold is not very high.  Pity.

     Dan
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>Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:45:35 -0500
>From: Steve barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
>Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Eliminate the Middleman? Nah!
>
>Austin Texas is often called the music capital of the USA. Below is one
>reason why. A 1400 band weekend.
>
>Dan A., any OKOM there?
>
>And for those of us that think there is no music middleman, check out the
>last paragraph.
>
>Cheers,
>Steve
>
>
>A Texas Festival Recalls Ye Olde Club-Hopping Days
>
>NY TIMES - By KELEFA SANNEH - March 17, 2006
>
>AUSTIN, Tex., March 16 - What moves faster: a song or an airplane?
>
>On Tuesday night, a fully lovable and partly Swedish band called Envelopes
>made its American debut for a small crowd at Mercury Lounge, in New York's
>Lower East Side: less than an hour of cute, obnoxious indie-pop. The music
>was loud and catchy and willfully ramshackle; the instruments sounded out of
>tune even when they weren't.
>
>If you had dragged yourself to the airport the next morning, you could have
>made it to Austin just in time to see Envelopes play their second American
>concert, less than 24 hours later. The show, in the upstairs part of a club
>called the Parish, was part of the 20th annual South by Southwest Music and
>Media Conference, known as SXSW. Every year, it invades Austin while the
>locals - which is to say, the college students - are away on their spring
>break.
>
>The biggest names (this year's schedule includes Morrissey and the Beastie
>Boys) are doing their listeners a favor. And the smaller names (about 1,400
>bands are scheduled to play) are hoping listeners can do them a favor. So
>fans and professionals traipse from club to club, sometimes discussing the
>merits of venturing to an off-site show. (Sometime after 2 on Thursday
>morning, a message arrived from the Back Room, where the Houston rapper
>Chamillionaire was performing: the show was over and cabs were scarce. Was
>anybody driving?)
>
>There is something slightly old-fashioned about all this traipsing. Although
>South by Southwest has evolved over the years to include podcasts, video
>broadcasts and even text-message updates, the event is built on the idea
>that the best way to discover new music is face to face. For many of the
>savvy listeners (even, perhaps especially, the amateur ones) in town, this
>week might be the only time all year they're likely to see a band live
>without first having visited the site and downloaded an MP3. For a few days,
>an ancient tradition - checking out a band simply because a friend says it's
>good - comes back to life.
>
>Of course for most of us, it's not that simple. For every person who
>stumbles into an Envelopes showcase and wonders why the band is playing
>something loud and fizzy while the singer delivers absurd lyrics like a
>little kid, "If I were you, I would watch out for that guy over there/He is,
>he is, he is, he is not that fair!" - for every person like that, there is
>surely one who has already fallen in love with "Demon" (Brille), the band's
>irresistible debut CD.
>
>Or with one of the MP3's from it. In that sense, airplanes seem slow: no
>flight could ever move faster than a digital file. (Especially not a flight
>with a three-hour layover in Atlanta. But that's another story.) And
>sometimes, the logic gets reversed: a good SXSW showcase might prompt
>listeners to check out a band's Web site, instead of the other way around.
>
>But in another sense, SXSW provides a useful corrective to the world of MP3
>blogs. When those songs get beamed around the Internet, it's seductive to
>think that bands and listeners have eliminated the middlemen: music goes
>straight from the recording studio to your laptop. This conference is a
>reminder of how many professionals it takes to turn an amateur band into a
>popular MP3. Here, "behind the scenes" is the scene: the place is packed
>with publicists (right now, Envelopes should be thanking theirs) and
>managers and booking agents and marketing teams and even a few old-fashioned
>radio D.J.'s. This is a big part of what makes SXSW tick: middlemen as far
>as the eye can see.

-- 
**--------------------------------------------------------------------**
**  Dan Augustine  --  Austin, Texas  --  ds.augustine at mail.utexas.edu
**     "Son, you have to guard against speaking more clearly
**      than you think."  --  Howard Baker's father
**--------------------------------------------------------------------**