[Dixielandjazz] Myth Busters - Black audiences for Dixieland?

[Stephen G Barbone]

Sometimes we wonder why there are no, or very small black audiences,  
at OKOM jazz festivals. And if asked why, we tend to say that blacks  
don't listen to OKOM. Maybe, maybe not.

Perhaps it is tied to the lack of black players on Dixieland bands?   
Again, sometimes we say there aren't any.

In my experience, lack of black audiences and black players of OKOM  
are myths. Barbone Street has 2 blacks as regulars, and another black  
as first call sub on trombone.  And in several venues every year we  
play to mostly black audiences who love the music.

The below article captures the essence of  making the music or the  
play "relevant" to the audience.  If we do that, we will find an  
audience whether it be young, black, or whatever.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


March 20, 2008 - NY Times - by Campbell Robertson
A Black "Cat," Catching an Elusive Audiences

At a recent Wednesday night performance of the all-black Broadway  
production of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Ramona  
Scott, 52, ran into a couple she’d worked for as a baby sitter almost  
40 years ago. She saw another couple who had been friends of hers  
during the 1970s. “Cat” was where everybody seemed to be.

“A lot of my friends and family don’t go out to plays,” said Ms.  
Scott, a frequent theatergoer herself. “But when they hear of one that  
has a large black audience, they want to go and see it.”

“Cat,” which stars James Earl Jones, Terrence Howard and Anika Noni  
Rose, has a large audience, all right; last week it sold nearly  
$700,000 in tickets, an outstanding number for a nonmusical. Stephen  
C. Byrd, the rookie producer of “Cat,” estimates the audience to be  
between 70 percent and 80 percent African-American.

Mr. Byrd now has plans for a multiracial version of “A Streetcar Named  
Desire”; a stage adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1956 novel, “Giovanni’s  
Room”; and a new production of “Death of a Salesman.” He has even had  
informal talks with Je’Caryous Johnson, a young playwright who works  
on the increasingly sophisticated urban play circuit — derisively  
called the chitlin circuit — about bringing Mr. Johnson’s original  
work to Broadway.

The agenda is ambitious considering that just five years ago there  
were questions about whether black audiences would come to a Broadway  
show in significant numbers. But now, said Marcia Pendleton, the  
founder of Walk Tall Girl Productions, a marketing and group-sales  
company that reaches out to nontraditional theatergoers, “we have hard  
facts that this is a viable audience that can sustain a production.”

(Remainder snipped)