[Dixielandjazz] Not jazz

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

The English singer, pianist, guitarist etc. Earl Okin can he heard somewhere online talking about his supposedly having occasioned a riot at a jazz festival on the European continent.  I gather he just wants to be a singer, accompanying himself and performing instrumental interludes not necessarily but if appropriate demonstrating mastery of more than minimal rudiments of jazz. 
The idiot organisers of the festival booked him for something like a ten minute spot in a show featuring a succession of performers -- and since he has what's required and given that it was supposedly a jazz festival he exercised himself in areas kept warm by among others Marty Grosz and Slim Gaillard, and the audience, who'd been wanting jazz, got jazz.  
Then he had to go off to make room for people who didn't even have the option of trying to make mediocre half-jazz, and the audience responded with appropriate disenthusiasm. He had no idea why he'd not been booked for the entire set, and remembered apologising that he really had to go off to let the audience, well, choose not to hear non-jazz.  The audience also chose to be heard, and quite right too!

and then there was the occasion I've mentioned before, when a worthy Austrian who can do the mainstream tenor bit hadn't read the festival programme and was doing it and people were smiling politely and puzzling at the printed references to Dodds and Noone. Which he also did, and actually did even better. Ach, the curse of versatility.