[Dixielandjazz] Musicians In Search Of Discovery

[Steve barbone]

Here is a write-up on the Austin, TX Music showcase. 1400 bands. While not
much OKOM, it seems, the quote that got me is: "Music from New Orleans also
had a strong presence; many of that city's well-known musicians ended up in
Texas."

Question for Dan A. Did you go? If so, any real OKOM or "New Orleans" music?

Also, it looks like these bands play for free. Question for Tom W. Why don't
you and I promote a similar showcase for Dixieland? Say in Parumph NV or the
Bunny Ranch in Reno? Or somewhere in between?  :-) VBG.

Cheers,
Steve  

Musicians in Search of Discovery
NY TIMES - By JON PARELES - March 20, 2006

AUSTIN, Tex., March 19 ‹ Why would musicians travel halfway across the
country, or halfway across the world, to play a 40-minute set through a
mediocre sound system for a few dozen people glancing at their cellphones?

Because, at the 20th annual South by Southwest Music event, (SXSW) there was
a chance that among those people were the right ones: a booking agent, a
manager, a band wanting tourmates, a music supervisor for a video game. The
hope was that the right connection was somewhere among the 10,000
conventiongoers and the 4,000 people who bought wristbands to go
club-hopping for the festival, which began on Wednesday.

What started in 1987 as a cozy showcase for regional and independent music,
with 700 people, has turned into the largest music-business convention in
the United States. There was music of all vintages, from the 1950's
rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson to Neil Young to Echo and the Bunnymen to the
New Pornographers. And there were newer bands well worth discovering: among
them the Noisettes from England, Tapes 'n Tapes from Minneapolis, My
Brightest Diamond from Brooklyn, SSM from Detroit, the Brunettes from New
Zealand, Nine Black Alps from England, Band of Horses from Seattle and the
Duke Spirit from England. About 1,400 bands played official showcase sets
and many more could be heard at parties, in hotel lobbies and on street
corners.

The festival is still a place where record-label scouts see bands and make
deals. But it is also, for many more performers, a hub for operating outside
the recording business. A success here doesn't have to be ‹ and probably
won't be ‹ a seven-figure advance. It could be finding a European
distributor for a self-released album or the offer of a Midwestern college
tour instead.

As the major-label recording business struggles with ungovernable
competition online, many musicians have decided that the way to make a
career is in the mode of troubadours from time immemorial: performing live
and hitting the road. But where troubadours depended on word of mouth, now
musicians can spread their own reputations online; at SXSW, as the event is
known, many seek the next link. Although it includes a little of everything,
SXSW has concentrated on rock while being tentative about the most
commercially successful do-it-yourself music of the last 20 years: hip-hop.
This year, when hip-hop from Houston has reigned nationally, there were
nightly showcases for Texas hip-hop, but they were in East Austin, far from
the main strip.

With its emphasis on live showcases, SXSW reveals the gap between the
narrowly defined, studio-fabricated realm of radio and MTV hits and the less
glamorous but far larger territory of van tours and club dates. That
difference showed in the music. Many of the most impressive bands made a
mighty clamor: a grand, amorphous guitar squall that galvanizes a club, but
is difficult to translate to a recording and nearly impossible to sell on
commercial radio. One of the convention's keynote speakers, Neil Young,
talked about wanting to make "this massive distorted crunchy hideous noise";
he wasn't the only one who feels that way.

SXSW serves a dizzying assortment of ambitions. Established musicians (like
the Pretenders, Rosanne Cash, Morrissey, Norah Jones and Lyle Lovett) play
to remind listeners that they're still around, and perhaps to gain a little
of the mysterious (and laughable) quality known as "indie cred." Past
visitors return for victory laps, among them Arctic Monkeys, the English
band that played a modestly attended SXSW showcase last year and returned in
triumph, having given away all their songs online before releasing them on a
debut album that zoomed to No. 1 in Britain. Bands that had dissolved, like
the English drone-punk minimalists Th' Faith Healers and the pioneering
Mexican rockers Botellita de Jerez, reunited like apparitions. Bands from
abroad, many subsidized by their governments, arrived to test themselves
against American audiences and Texas margaritas.

One of the best sets of the festival was by Lenine, a Brazilian songwriter
who transformed his smart, shapely songs into wah-wah-pumping funk merged
with the northeastern Brazilian rhythm of maracatu. Music from New Orleans
also had a strong presence; many of that city's well-known musicians ended
up in Texas. 

At times, SXSW can be like a musical museum ‹ a good one. One ambitious
program brought together a full night of minimalists who had a direct impact
on rock, including Tony Conrad and Rhys Chatham, whose group included
Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. Another, organized by the musical archivists
beyond the Ponderosa Stomp, included Barbara Lynn from Beaumont, Tex. She
sang her R&B hits from the 1960's with soulful authority while plucking
fierce, twangy leads on her left-handed electric guitar. Austin's beloved
Roky Erickson, who led that city's top 1960's psychedelic band the 13th
Floor Elevators, was back after years of being known as an acid casualty. He
performed all around town with a strong voice, a steady hand on the rhythm
guitar, a vociferous band and songs that still stomp their old blend of
blues-rock and free association.

Yet the festival can also be a museum of styles, filled with younger
musicians who settle for revivalism: there were interchangeable punk bands
and cutesy electro acts. What may have been the youngest revivalists ‹ the
Flairz from Australia ‹ was a trio of 12- and 13-year-olds playing feisty
garage-rock. Still, the classic 60's garage-psychedelic drone ‹ stoked with
reverb and guitar distortion ‹ was alive and seething with the Duke Spirit,
whose singer, Leila Moss, scowled and vamped as she sang about desire, and
with Sarah Hepburn, a singer living in Copenhagen who could also switch into
upbeat 60's pop.

The strongest version of the drone I heard was by Th' Faith Healers,
reunited from the early 1990's, who pounded it into a dire incantation.
Meanwhile, garage-rock got thoroughly twisted by SSM, a three-piece band
that laced 1960's-style riffs and snarls with haywire tempo shifts and
anachronisms like a drum machine and wiggling synthesizer lines. Nine Black
Alps bridged garage-rock, punk and grunge in songs that wrapped existential
distress in clear-cut but raucous melodies. Yet another English band,
Editors, reached back to the Smiths and U2, setting long-lined melodies and
troubled thoughts over guitars that churned until the pressure grew
mesmerizing.

Not everyone roared. There were enigmatic songs from My Brightest Diamond;
its leader, Shara Worden, sang with velvety richness as she dispensed stark
riffs and elusive memories; and from Band of Horses, which mixed grandeur
and fragility. The Brunettes played lighthearted, upbeat pop with toy
instruments and a wry boy-girl interplay. Alejandro Escovedo, a Texan
songwriter who nearly died of hepatitis C, led a rock band merged with
cellos and violin in songs that stared down mortality with somber intensity
and a rocker's stubborness.

Two of the most extraordinary bands defied categories and tore apart
verse-chorus-verse forms. Tapes 'n Tapes were rhapsodic, with songs that
metamorphosed from reticence to frenzy and back. And the Noisettes were
exhilarating and explosive, jumping from era to era ‹ punk-funk to
vaudeville swing to blues-rock ‹ as their singer and bass player, Shingai
Shoniwa, belted questions like "What's wrong with the human condition?"

Onstage at the convention, Morrissey said, "I think there's maybe too many
people making music." By the fourth night of SXSW, it was easy to think he
might be right; not every band with songs on a Myspace Web page has even a
remote chance of being heard or making a career. But then there would be one
more startling club set, and the musical overload of SXSW turned to pleasure
again.