[Dixielandjazz] Jazz Entrepreneurs

[Stephen G Barbone]

Anyone who has spent nights in New York City going to jazz clubs, or  
who has a subscription to Jazz Inside Magazine, which highlights the  
jazz happenings in the MYC metro area, realizes that there is a  
resurgence of jazz venues, jazz nightclubs and concerts. OKOM has a  
small presence there, but "Jazz" is IMO, coming on stronger than at  
any time since Ken Burns's PBS Jazz Show 10 years ago.

Now it appears if similar things are happening in Chicago. See the  
below article.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

January 10, 2010 - NY Times - By Neil Tessler

Chicago’s Jazz Scene Grows With Do-It-Yourself Trend


Surveying the chaos at 1540 West North Avenue, it is hard to believe  
this former sports bar will soon be a sleek new jazz club.

Up front sits a half-built stage. Piles of new and old wood, along  
with pipes and conduits tagged for disposal, litter the dust-scuffed  
floor. In back are strewn five big-screen plasma TVs and various  
kitchen devices.

“You can’t believe how much progress we’ve made in just two weeks,”  
Greg Pasenko, the 60-year-old co-proprietor, said a few days into the  
new year.

The club, named Club Blujazz for the record label owned by Mr. Pasenko  
and his wife, Diane Delin, will expand the recent do-it-yourself trend  
characterizing Chicago’s multifaceted jazz scene, which is second only  
to New York’s.

Despite the recession, this trend has little to do with musicians  
seeking income to supplement their performance fees. It is more to  
establish control over their performance venues — or at least to  
ensure they do not disappear.

In the case of Club Blujazz, the owners want a home for their music  
that is not subject to the whims of other presenters. Mr. Pasenko, a  
guitarist-vocalist, and Ms. Delin, a violinist, will each have a  
regular weekly showcase at the club, alongside local, national and  
European artists.

Chicago has precedents for the concept. In the 1950s, the pianist  
Ahmad Jamal ran his own club, the Alhambra, and in the 1960s the  
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians produced  
concerts when its avant-garde offerings baffled club owners. But at no  
time in recent memory have as many jazz musicians been actively  
involved as presenters, curators and entrepreneurs.

Club Blujazz will be the second musician-owned jazz club in the city,  
joining the Velvet Lounge, which the 80-year-old saxophone legend Fred  
Anderson established east of Chinatown in 1982. The scene also boasts  
at least three major weekly series programmed by acclaimed younger  
musicians. One of them, the sax player Dave Rempis, presents new-jazz  
concerts in a cozy space called Elastic, at 2830 North Milwaukee Avenue.

“In my tenure here, there are now probably as many spaces to play as  
ever, many of them qualitatively better than those of the past,” said  
Mr. Rempis, who has lived in Chicago since 1993. “But most of the  
places I play are owned or run by musicians, which makes a big  
difference in expectations. They’re primarily interested in the music,  
instead of just filling a jazz night on their calendar.”

Mr. Rempis’s shows are on Thursdays, following a tradition that began  
in the late 1990s with Ken Vandermark, a 1999 MacArthur Fellow and  
world-renowned reedman.

Mr. Vandermark hosted a Thursday-night series at various clubs  
starting in 1998 because many local venues were unwilling to present  
the postmodern free jazz played by his bands and artists from New York  
and Europe. When he stopped in 2002, Mr. Rempis took up the slack,  
encouraged by a group of college friends who had set up a funky  
performance space on Cermak Avenue.

“For my generation, the idea of making a living as a jazz musician  
isn’t really possible — especially playing creative music,” said Mr.  
Rempis, using a common term for noncommercial jazz. “We needed to come  
up with our own environments, basically. Most club owners want to sell  
drinks and want to present music that people can talk over.”

Mr. Rempis is also a principal in Umbrella Music, a loose  
confederation of presenters that emerged from a crisis in performance  
venues in 2005. At the Hungry Brain, 2319 West Belmont Avenue, limited  
capacity was hindering the growth of the Sunday night Transmission  
Series run by the cornetist Josh Berman and the drummer Mike Reed. At  
the same time, Elastic lost its space because of licensing problems,  
and the Velvet Lounge was being forced out of its previous location,  
with its resurrection plans still hazy.

“Our playing landscape was disappearing,” Mr. Reed said.

Out of this came Umbrella Music, whose members produce and cross- 
promote the shows at Elastic, the Hungry Brain and The Hideout, hidden  
away at 1354 West Wabansia Avenue. (Mr. Reed’s experience as a  
promoter extends beyond jazz: he co-produces the nationally known  
indie-rock Pitchfork Festival, which last year drew 55,000 fans over  
three days.)

Like the owners of Club Blujazz, Mr. Reed was partly motivated by the  
musicians’ equivalent of estate planning.

“At the end of my 20s, I was still bartending to earn a living, and I  
was wondering what my 40s would be like,” he said. “I was never going  
to make real money, retirement money, as a musician. So basically, I  
needed a job.”

After working on other live-music events, Mr. Reed said he decided  
that “if those chuckleheads can do this, then so can I.”

“But it’s also a matter of holding on to Chicago’s unique cultural  
capital,” he said. “New York and L.A. have pulled all the capital from  
other, smaller cities. We need to make sure that we have something  
that stays here. And if the resources don’t exist, you have to do it  
yourself.”

Neil Tesser has written about jazz and hosted Chicago jazz radio  
programs for more than 35 years.