[Dixielandjazz] The Jazz Evangelism of Woody Allen - PART 2

[Stephen G Barbone]

"Of course he undersold himself to you—I hate that he always does  
that!" exclaims Eddy Davis a week later. The band is moments from  
taking the Café Carlyle stage, but Davis is resolute on defending his  
friend from himself. "He thinks he shouldn't in his own mind put  
himself with the musicians he's loved in the past. Trouble is, the  
musicians he's loved in the past never made two cents."

In many ways, Davis is the antithesis of Woody Allen: At 69, he is  
booming and friendly, with a gregarious stream of opinions no tape  
recorder can fully contain. Though Allen demonstrates a confident,  
easy delivery on his antique Albert System clarinet that night, he  
positions himself meekly onstage, with rare glances into the audience  
and a practiced, stoic demeanor; Davis, meanwhile, seems to smile more  
often than he breathes, a broad beam of delighted musicianship. And  
just as readily as Allen discounts his influence on the music he has  
devoted his life to—"It's a very specialized thing in the United  
States, like Gregorian chants or something; it just doesn't interest  
people very much, and why should it?"—Davis disputes his bandmate's  
impact with zeal.

"The only reason younger audiences get to see this music anymore is  
because of the celebrity of Woody Allen," Davis says. "In the past 40  
years, celebrity has been the only thing that people go to. Now  
they're driven by what's on the TV and what they're told to like."

Their ensemble's dynamic is unusual: Unlike other bands with musical  
directors (in this case, Davis), leadership here is shared. Davis  
guides the musicians and decides who will be featured on each tune,  
but Allen alone chooses the repertoire. The ensemble never uses a set  
list or sheet music, and must know all the approximately 1,500 tunes  
in Allen's arsenal: On their two-week March tour through Europe, the  
band played upward of 30 tunes each night with few repeats, culled  
primarily from New Orleans jazz's heyday, with some '30s and '40s  
standards and spirituals sprinkled in. The band's Carlyle dates are  
sold out months in advance; their current residency runs through June  
7 and is entirely booked.

British-born pianist Conal Fowkes, at 42, falls on the youngest side  
of the band's spectrum and, not surprisingly, is the most fervent  
about why future generations should hear the music they play. "New  
York City is considered around the world as the home of jazz," he  
says. "Yet if you come here as a visitor, you will have to look far  
and wide to find traditional jazz, and it's amazing to me that it's  
not available or supported. The great thing is, once people come see  
us, nine times out of 10, they're really pleasantly surprised. They  
ask where they can find more music like this."

At one particular Carlyle gig in April, there's a perceptible moment  
when the attention shifts from Allen to the music itself. The concert  
begins amid the diners' social din and blinding camera flashes, but  
the starry-eyed thrall steadily softens, over the first hour or so,  
into sincere attention toward the performers and their nimble  
renditions of "Mecca Flat Blues," "Doctor Jazz," and "Into Each Life  
Some Rain Must Fall." By the set's coda, with the ensemble reduced to  
a more intimate quartet of Allen, Davis, Fowkes, and drummer John  
Gill, the room is dramatically hushed; when a woman in a satin dress  
brays a tipsy insight to her companion, her neighbors turn on her  
sternly. They've finally begun to hear the talented Woody Allen and  
the Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band.

Further proof: Before the concert begins, a pair of twentysomething  
French tourists at the bar express no interest in Allen's music: "Just  
his movies . . . he is so funny with face!" But afterward, following  
Woody's brief, ritual autograph session in the Carlyle lobby (during  
which he is remote with his fans, though that ladykiller streak still  
exists: "If I were younger and single . . ." he tells me deftly,  
midway through our first face-to-face conversation), they find me  
outside the club and rave about, yes, the music. "It's wonderful music— 
so interesting!" they exclaim and, true to Fowkes's claim, ask where  
they might hear more jazz during their vacation in New York.

Too bad that answer ain't what it used to be.

"If God plays the baddest saxophone solo ever played in the woods, and  
nobody hears it, did He make a sound?" asks Jazz at Lincoln Center  
curator Phil Schaap, Charlie Parker audible in the background. Host of  
the so-themed "Bird Flight" hour on Columbia University's WKCR radio— 
and, owing to both its unbroken 29-year weekday run and his  
inexhaustible scholarship of all jazz, the subject of a lengthy New  
Yorker profile in 2008—Schaap is a stern critic of the jazz  
community's short-sighted direction of its resources. The Juilliard  
professor maintains that what scant funding remains is being funneled  
into performance studies while ignoring the substantial problem of how  
to fill the seats offstage, which is "fool's gold at best."

"There's no audience development—none—in the jazz-education system,  
yet they're turning out would-be professionals in the low four figures  
annually, and it can't work," says Schaap, 59. "It's a train wreck.  
The jazz community is a shrinking one, and part of this that is most  
glaring is with the young. If something isn't done, then the music  
will be further marginalized to the point where I'm not quite sure how  
it will survive."

Indeed, jazz audiences are skewing much older and scarcer than before.  
A National Endowment for the Arts survey showed that the median age  
for American adults who attended a jazz concert in 1982 was 29. In  
2008, that median age had risen to 46. More alarmingly, the Recording  
Industry Association of America reported jazz sales to make up just  
1.1 percent of all music sales in 2008 (the most current available  
stats), a precipitous drop from the decade high of 3.4 percent in 2001.

The overarching implication: Jazz is showing a dangerous lack of  
renewability with future generations, and what is not heard is not  
preserved. New York, while still a slightly stronger jazz microcosm  
than the country at large, exhibits the same warning signs: a  
shrinking number of venues, a lack of mainstream exposure to entice  
new audiences, and a splintered community of performers fighting  
stylistically among themselves. Clearly, the jazz community here is  
worried; many participants have a fatalistic spin Woody Allen could  
appreciate.

"I think jazz in general is about to die off," says Spike Wilner,  
owner of Small's jazz club in the West Village and himself a  
traditional-leaning stride pianist. "The most important thing is: You  
don't have, at all, the venues you used to have. . . . Young audiences  
aren't exposed to jazz early on anymore when there's no place for them  
to discover it. Where are they gonna discover jazz? It's not taught in  
their schools; you're not able to find it on the radio. They're not  
gonna stumble upon it."

In the 1930s, 52nd Street in Midtown was dubbed "Swing Street USA" for  
all the jazz clubs within its radius, including legendary halls such  
as Club Carousel and Eddie Condon's, along with the first incarnation  
of the Blue Note. But today, among the low-double-digit number of jazz  
clubs remaining, most are concentrated in the West Village and Harlem,  
with a more scattered scene in Brooklyn. (Larger, uptown institutions,  
such as Carnegie Hall and the Wynton Marsalis–led Jazz at Lincoln  
Center, are often criticized for institutionalizing jazz, but remain  
active in educational programs.) Trad-leaning clubs have fared  
especially poorly; Eddy Davis has wanted to open a club for years, but  
finds the finances too daunting. And while contemporary and brass-band  
jazz have enjoyed a modest resurgence lately, thanks to mass-media  
outlets such as the HBO show Treme, this hasn't affected traditional  
New Orleans jazz at all.

"Overall, the traditional jazz outcropping in New York is down well  
over 95 percent from my high school years," says Schaap, recalling his  
'60s upbringing. "However, jazz is down 95 percent from my high school  
years, so it's a lock-step diminishment."

Lorraine Gordon, owner of the Village Vanguard, the most venerated  
jazz hall in the world, recently feted her club's 75th anniversary;  
for more than a decade, she booked Dr. Michael White's traditional New  
Orleans band for New Year's Eve, but has since stopped. "There is no  
audience, quite honestly, to sustain traditional jazz constantly," she  
explains. "You have to fill your room to pay the musicians—you can't  
do it because 24 people are here because they like traditional jazz. I  
want to be part of that audience—I am, in my heart and mind—but I  
cannot use it in the club because it does not exist here. . . . Jazz  
is alive, but you have to move with it or you're a dead duck."

And if jazz isn't as inviting as it might be for the young, some blame  
the music and its practitioners. "One of the things with jazz now is  
that it's just not fun—people hear it, and it's either aggressive or  
very in-your-face, or very obscure harmonically or melodically," says  
Wilner. "It's so splintered, the factions. Extremely avant-garde  
improvising musicians play in a style that has nothing to do with  
traditional jazz, and they're basically hostile to anyone who plays  
traditional. And subsequently, you have traditionalists becoming more  
and more wrapped up in the bubble of what they wanted to play and not  
allowing any modern influences to come in. It's lent itself to a very  
divided art."

So why is Woody Allen the one man everyone can agree on?