[Dixielandjazz] Jazz Renaissance?

[Steve barbone]

For those of us actively working outside of the OKOM "Festival" scene, the
below article hits home. We see a jazz renaissance that is not limited to
Brooklyn. Barbone Street now competes with several newly formed Dixieland
Bands in the Philadelphia metro marketplace as the total Dixieland gig count
keeps expanding.

If we look around us on the outside, we find that there is indeed a jazz
renaissance that includes OKOM. You can find it, low priced, in the Cafes,
as well as higher priced with other venues and private parties. All you have
to do is look around and seize the moment.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone  

Brooklyn Jazz Renaissance: High-Quality Music in Casual Cafés

NY TIMES - By NATE CHINEN - May 26, 2006

ON almost any given Sunday, the trumpeter John McNeil walks out of his
apartment and down a few tree-lined blocks to Night and Day, a bistro on
Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. Since February, Mr. McNeil has held a weekly gig
in a rear annex of the restaurant with a quartet he formed with the tenor
saxophonist Bill McHenry. A hangout for neighborhood residents and a magnet
for musicians, the engagement has become a fixture of Brooklyn's rich and
booming jazz scene.

The rise of that scene ‹ which, like its borough, is an assemblage of
enclaves ‹ has been one of the most significant developments for jazz in New
York in recent years. (Every bit as significant as the Brooklyn rock
explosion of a few years ago, with which it shouldn't be confused.) Through
a growing network of low-rent spaces mostly booked by enterprising
musicians, Brooklyn has assumed a vital role in the city's larger jazz
culture. And the music has been a boon for listeners of all kinds, including
those who have to cross the East River to hear it.

To his great delight, Mr. McNeil barely has to cross the street. "I've lived
here since the early 1970's," he said one Sunday, between sets at Night and
Day. For a long time he was one of many Brooklyn jazz citizens who had to
travel to Manhattan for staples of employment and entertainment. Many
musicians still make that commute, occasionally to perform at marquee clubs
like the Blue Note and the Village Vanguard, but more often to hold court in
small rooms like the 55 Bar, Fat Cat and the Cornelia Street Café, which is
owned by Robin Hirsch, one of two partners behind Night and Day.

In a sense Brooklyn's jazz clubs operate on the same plane as those West
Village bars. (It's not uncommon for a group to play one night at the 55 Bar
and the next at a spot in Brooklyn.) The difference between the two scenes,
in terms of audience, is outlined succinctly by Mr. Hirsch, based on
firsthand expertise: "The Village will draw an international crowd, while
Park Slope is strictly local."

Certainly the crowd is overwhelmingly local at Tea Lounge on Union Street in
Park Slope. Walk into the cavernous coffeehouse on a Thursday or Friday
night, and you'll probably spot a few strollers nestled among the couches,
along with laptop computers and stylish casual attire. You'll also see
adventurous young jazz musicians playing for tips, since Tea Lounge doesn't
have a cover charge.

That policy attracts an audience more random and robust than the musicians
might otherwise hope to reach, especially in Manhattan. This winter the alto
saxophonist Andrew D'Angelo played one show to more than 100 people, a large
crowd for an avant-garde jazz show. Some of the listeners paid a suggested
donation; others merely paid attention. Oren Arnon, who books the room,
recently pegged its vibe: "a combination of quality jazz and something
social, which doesn't happen often enough in this city."

A similar ethos prevails at Barbès, universally acknowledged as the vanguard
(Village Vanguard, even) of the new Brooklyn jazz scene. "We tried to build
a no-pressure environment for audiences and musicians," said Olivier Conan,
who owns the bar with a fellow French expatriate and musician, Vincent
Douglas. The club's success confirms the wisdom of that premise.

Barbès may be the place most responsible for the perception of a Brooklyn
jazz renaissance. Its cozy dimensions suit small audiences and rapt
attention. And its booking describes a rough bouquet of sounds: from French
musette to Brazilian forró, as well as multiple strains of jazz, from Gypsy
swing to collective free improvisation.

Long-term residencies, hardly a staple in Manhattan, are a prominent feature
of the programming at Barbès. The violinist Jenny Scheinman usually plays on
Tuesday nights, seasoning her music with flecks of jazz, classical and
rustic folk. Wednesdays are devoted to an avant-garde series organized by
the saxophonist Michaël Attias. (He isn't the only musician maintaining a
series in the area; six blocks south, the keyboardist James Carney books
Sunday nights at Bar 4, a red-lighted dive.)

Last month the clarinetist and saxophonist Chris Speed started Skirl, an
independent record label with the express purpose of documenting some of the
experimental artists in the regular Barbès orbit. The label's next release
party is scheduled for Thursday at the club.

Experimentation and eclecticism are hardly limited to Park Slope. In
Williamsburg they converge at Rose Live Music, a stylish lounge on Grand
Street that opened just a few months ago. They come together even more
explicitly during the Williamsburg Jazz Festival, which will have its fourth
season in September.

But nothing beats the neighborhood's leading spot, Zebulon Café Concert,
which combines the flea-market chic of Barbès (the owners, Guillaume Blestel
and Jef and Jocelyn Soubiran, are French) with the no-cover rule of Tea
Lounge (but with one significant distinction: every artist receives a
guarantee). Zebulon's programming has lately leaned markedly toward world
music, but the free-jazz violinist Billy Bang has made notable appearances,
as has the composer and conductor Butch Morris.

Mr. Morris also helped inaugurate a more extreme outpost, the nonprofit
Issue Project Room, when it relocated last June from the East Village into a
silo on the Gowanus Canal. "The industrial environment tends to inspire a
rugged sort of experimentation," said Suzanne Fiol, the organization's
director, hours before a recent premiere by the Japanese composer Shoko
Nagai. 

Rugged experimentation of a different sort was one hallmark of the jazz
scene in Brooklyn during its original heyday, from the late 1950's through
the 60's. Throughout those years a cluster of African-American
establishments thrived around Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue.

One of them, the Blue Coronet, served as a laboratory for youngbloods like
the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.
Another was immortalized by Mr. Hubbard with a 1965 Blue Note album called
"The Night of the Cookers: Live at Club La Marchal," on which he locked
horns with Lee Morgan in a casual but heated exchange.

"Going back to 1960, there was something loosely called a Brooklyn sound,"
said Robert Myers, referring in part to that album. "And it started with the
venues, which gave the musicians license to explore new avenues onstage and
not be confined by management." Until the close of 2004 Mr. Myers operated
Up Over Jazz Café, a bar on Flatbush Avenue that fulfilled a similar
function for the latest generation of post-bop strivers, like the tenor
saxophonist Marcus Strickland and the pianist Robert Glasper.

Mr. Glasper provides an illustrative example of the current
Brooklyn-Manhattan jazz symbiosis. He arrived in the city at the tail end of
the 1990's, settling in Brooklyn but matriculating at the New School
University in Manhattan. He quickly plugged into a circuit of jam sessions
stretching from Freddy's Backroom, on Dean Street in Park Slope, to Smalls,
a crucible of young talent in Greenwich Village.

At Up Over Jazz he found steady work and a space to hone his craft. But
after he earned the imprimatur of a Blue Note Records contract, his next
career move was clear: a week at the Village Vanguard. (He concludes his
second engagement there this weekend with his trio.)

Mr. Glasper's example also illustrates the existence of a parallel Brooklyn
jazz movement among African-Americans in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort Greene and
Clinton Hill. Self-consciously styled as a revival of Brooklyn's golden era,
this scene includes institutions like Jazz 966, a series held for the last
16 years at the Fort Greene Senior Citizens Council; 651 Arts, a nonprofit
concert presenting organization; and the Concord Baptist Church, which holds
occasional jazz services. In April a consortium of these and other groups
mounted the seventh annual Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival, with "Jazz: A
Music of the Spirit" as its theme.

The author of that theme, the trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah, was a visible
presence during the festival, especially at Sista's Place, a communally
owned coffeehouse and salon in Bedford-Stuyvesant. "African-Americans have
rarely owned the music's means of production," he said in a phone
conversation. "The music has to be in our community if it's going to grow.
We've got to have an alternative to mainstream institutions."

The crowd that packed Sista's Place one rainy Saturday for a festival
performance by the trumpeter Charles Tolliver made it look as if Mr.
Abdullah's objective was being fulfilled. Less expectedly, his words seemed
nearly as pertinent to a performance held on the same night at the Center
for Improvisational Music, or CIM, a nonprofit educational effort run by the
trumpeter Ralph Alessi near the northern stretch of the Gowanus Canal.

It featured the alto saxophonist Tim Berne, one of the early homesteaders of
the newly ascendant Brooklyn jazz community. Mr. Berne long ago claimed
ownership of his music's means of production with a self-sustaining record
label based in a brownstone near Flatbush Avenue. And he has spent most of
his career on the alternative fringe of jazz culture, though his audience at
CIM included a couple of industry veterans like Jeff Levenson, who has a
working affiliation with the Blue Note, one of New York's most obvious
mainstream jazz institutions.

"Brooklyn is essentially an incubator, where a lot of things get messed with
and hybridized," Mr. Levenson said later, speaking as an almost 30-year
resident of the borough. "I think an audience approaches that experience
differently than the audience that comes to the Blue Note. There's a
different agenda, a different motivation. We're talking works in progress,
which moderates the expectation levels."

A good many Brooklyn musicians would agree with that characterization, which
casts the borough's jazz scene almost in the role of a loose-and-limber
Triple-A baseball team. (Higher in the pecking order than the Class A
Brooklyn Cyclones, anyway.) But the idea probably wouldn't sit well with Mr.
Abdullah, who sees community-based creative action as a goal in itself.

Nor for different reasons would it agree with the percussionist Matt Moran,
who leads Slavic Soul Party, an improviser-stocked Balkan brass band that
performs on Tuesdays at Barbès, after Ms. Scheinman. "Maybe this started out
as a place where people workshop things," Mr. Moran said outside the club
recently, between sets. "But it's on the radar now, and you need to step up
and present your work in the best possible light."

"It has really arrived as a scene," he continued, gathering steam. "People
are saying, 'I'm not going to step into the shininess of Manhattan, I'm
going to do it in my own earthy way.' And rather than struggling in
obscurity, they're finding that now it's a celebrated thing."