[Dixielandjazz] CMJ Showcase Redux

[Steve Barbone]

CAVEAT - NOT OKOM
Below are excerpts form the 5 day CMJ Showcase in New York City. Interesting
if you read between the lines and see what is happening to the lesser known
bands on the general music scene. Perhaps if we ever get some aggressive
young bands on the OKOM scene, they will adapt their presentations towards
what the lesser known Indie bands are doing? Things like touring, using
Myspace.com., and creatively seeking their niche.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 

The CMJ Big Break? Not Such a Big Deal

NY TIMES - By JON PARELES - November 6, 2006

Bands aren¹t waiting for their big break anymore. Or if they are, they¹re
keeping mighty busy in the meantime. That was the gist of this year¹s CMJ
Music Marathon, the showcase for independent music that expanded to five
days this year, presenting music day and night from last Tuesday through
Saturday. 

Since 1981 CMJ¹s gatherings have been offering a dual message. (CMJ
originally stood for College Media Journal; it¹s still a trade magazine that
monitors college radio.) The marathons encourage the small-scale,
do-it-yourself approach . . .  At the same time they tease with the prospect
that being chosen to perform on a club bill assembled by CMJ ‹ which
winnowed 1,000 bands from 4,500 applicants ‹ and being heard by the people
who come to New York for the convention could lead to anything from a shared
tour to a recording contract. This year the mass market seemed further away,
while the Indie circuit was bustling.

The lineup, as always, was overwhelming. There weren¹t many large shows with
bands that have escaped the club circuit . . . The dance-rock band the
Rapture played CMJ¹s opening-night party with a set of pure funk that showed
how years of touring can make a band trade arty indulgences for muscle. . .

Recording contracts aren¹t as glamorous as they used to be, not with major
labels floundering. MTV and commercial broadcast radio haven¹t helped by
narrowing their offerings to a few nearly incompatible genres: self-pitying
emo rock, bump-and-grind rhythm-and-blues and catchphrase hip-hop. . .

Most of the performers I heard ‹ which were of course only a small fraction
of the showcases ‹ were making their way without Top 40 expectations.

The do-it-yourself circuit was once a patchwork of live shows and sporadic
college-radio exposure, but the Internet has changed that. Now, the most
obscure band can put up a page on myspace.com and have its music streamed on
any Internet connection, any time. So a showcase at CMJ or its springtime
counterpart, South by Southwest, is no longer such a make-or-break moment.

But a live performance, something more tangible, hi-fi and sloppy than a
faceless MP3 file, can still make a band vivid. . .

And it takes a live performance, pulsating in a room full of head-bobbing
listeners, to appreciate 120 Days, a Norwegian band that takes the throbbing
repetition of rave music and German synthesizer rock and adds some fervent
vocals. 

As big-time commercial pop rushes headlong into just a few niches, that
leaves just about everything else for independents. They can try revivalism
or avant-gardism, hugely ambitious concepts or cagey shtick, painstaking
sincerity or elaborate artifice, verse-chorus-verse pop or amorphous noise.
Styles discarded by the pop mainstream survive in the indie sphere.
Underground hip-hop, which has pretty much settled for the college crowd and
. . . exploited in meta-style by Girl Talk, the one-man laptop band, who
mashed up samples from hits ‹ dispensing a new hook every 10 seconds ‹ for a
knowing but still dancing crowd. . .

But indie rock knows better than to settle into its own stereotypes. Across
CMJ were bands sprouting extra instruments ‹ cellos, accordions, trombones,
glockenspiels ‹ and coming up with songs that weren¹t content to stay within
one style or half a dozen.