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

[Harry Callaghan]

Don't remember particularly enjoying "The Jazz Evangelism of Woody Allen
Part One".......I didn't care for anything beyond the first "Lethal Weapon"
either......Maybe after all these years, I'm truly becoming a Texan

However, I must say that Eddy Davis hit the nail right on the head with his
remark about people being driven by what's on TV and what they're TOLD TO
LIKE..

HC.


On 8/4/10, Stephen G Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> "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?
> _______________________________________________
> To unsubscribe or change your e-mail preferences for the Dixieland Jazz
> Mailing list, or to find the online archives, please visit:
>
> http://ml.islandnet.com/mailman/listinfo/dixielandjazz
>
>
>
> Dixielandjazz mailing list
> Dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
>



-- 
Some men see things as they are and say why....I dream things that never
were and say why not            -
                        -George Bernard Shaw