[Dixielandjazz] Jazz Lives in NYC.

[Stephen G Barbone]

Why can't we do this for OKOM? Jazz in 5 clubs within a 2 block radius  
that draws 3700 people on a weekend, paying $25 each? In the top 25  
cities (population wise) in the USA?  That's an average audience of  
370 fans per club, per night. It proves that jazz is neither dead nor  
dying.

Certainly sounds like fun . . . like the good old days before we old  
fart OKOMers insisted that what we were playing was Art Music and  
folks should shut up, listen, and clap on 2 and 4 instead of 1 and 3,  
etc., etc.,  rather than drink, talk, chase the opposite sex and  
generally have a ball.

I don't know about other bands, but mine prefers the energy of a party  
scene like the one described below.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


January 11, 2010 - NY Times - By Ben Ratliff
Catching Late-Night Zzzs: Jazz and Buzz


NYC Winter Jazzfest occupied the center of Greenwich Village on Friday  
and Saturday nights, holding down five clubs in a two-block radius,  
imposing its thoughtful ruckus on the normal Bleecker Street weekend:  
Long Island girls in microminis, corner dope dealers, 40-year-old boys  
taking in the Jets-Bengals game at a sports bar and then communing  
with Skynyrd covers over at the Back Fence.

Now in its sixth year, the festival served several ends. It showed off  
55 bands for the attendees of the convention of the Association of  
Performing Arts Presenters, those who book festivals and concerts  
around the world. It gave the rest of us, for a $25 all-clubs, all- 
night ticket, a deep index of new jazz. And the attendance — 1,200 on  
Friday night, 2,500 on Saturday — created a mob. A mob breeds rumor;  
rumor off-gasses buzz.

And jazz needs buzz. There are always music-school students whose  
lives are being overturned by some saxophonist they saw somewhere;  
given the chance they’ll tell you about it. So will club owners,  
promoters, spry neighborhood sages and the odd obsessive-compulsive or  
critic. But jazz, frustratingly, is still not quite right for MySpace  
and MP3 listening — it’s too performance-oriented and makes teenagers  
gag — so on-the-street buzz remains in short supply. Sometimes, given  
the economy and the shortage of middlemen, you have to find out about  
musicians from the musicians themselves, which makes jazz feel kind of  
17th century, pre-movable type.

Not here. On Saturday especially you were in a jazz equivalent of  
South by Southwest, surrounded by tales of not getting in or of  
hearing something killer.

Le Poisson Rouge was the festival’s flagship hall this year — the  
biggest space with the best sound, and consequently the most overrun.  
The pianist Vijay Iyer’s trio, with Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus  
Gilmore on drums, played to roars on Saturday night; last year the  
group made this audience’s consensus-favorite album, “Historicity,”  
and its performance showed new confidence through the intricate  
gnashing of the rhythm section. (The trio played its jolting,  
stuttering cover of M.I.A.’s “Galang” for the first time live.) There  
were roars on the same night for Jenny Scheinman and Jason Moran’s  
duets, sweet gospel-folk-classical tunes empowered with some cool  
dirt: catarrhal bowing from Ms. Scheinman’s violin, a single violent  
bang from Mr. Moran’s piano keyboard.

Just as musicians like Ms. Scheinman, Mr. Crump and the drummer John  
Hollenbeck ran among clubs to play very different sets with very  
different bands, there was hybridization in the music itself. In  
Rudder, a quintet that included the imposing drummer Keith Carlock,  
jazz turned toward smart jam-band funk; in Nicholas Payton’s SeXXXtet  
(yeah, I know), toward slinky R&B; in Eric Lewis’s bombast-and- 
bloodthirst solo piano performance, toward classic rock (the guys at  
the Back Fence would have dug his cover of “Sweet Home Alabama”); and  
in Bitches Brew Revisited, a septet led by the coronetist Graham  
Haynes, powered by the drummer Cindy Blackman and colored by the  
guitarist James Blood Ulmer, jazz became whatever it was Miles Davis  
intended in 1969: spacious, black-magic stealth funk.

In a startling set at Kenny’s Castaways late on Saturday the  
saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Indo-Pak Coalition — a trio with the  
guitarist Rez Abbasi and the drummer Dan Weiss — played hard, bright  
crisscrossings of South Asian music and jazz. Mr. Weiss was the  
music’s visual explanation. He sat low behind his tablas, his right  
leg bent up to access the foot pedal for a bass drum; gracefully  
shifting a limb or picking up a stick, he drifted between tala and  
swing, between hand drums and the basics of a trap set.

But what about jazz as jazz, the music’s marrow and main stem? There  
was a lot of that too. I definitely heard it in the quartet of the  
alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw on Friday, in its elegant, diamond-cut  
theme lines, its sleek, fabulous rhythm section (Aaron Goldberg,  
Fender Rhodes electric piano; Ben Williams, bass; Johnathan Blake,  
drums) and its control over dynamics in a chatty room. I heard it in  
the trio of the tenor saxophonist J. D. Allen, compressing the sprawl  
of late Coltrane into energy bars, and in the trumpeter Ambrose  
Akinmusire’s quintet — controlled, ambitious and ready to find a  
broader audience, with a group sound not far from Terence Blanchard’s.  
It was there in Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things, a Chicago quartet  
who’d never before played in New York, making freed-up hard-bop with  
scrappy, scholarly intensity. And even in the guitarist Mary  
Halvorson’s trio, with its nervous-driver lurches, tempo shifts and  
furious strumming: there was an elegant, flexible, Monk-like  
vocabulary in all that fracture.

Over the two nights I saw 18 bands. I heard good things about the  
music and crowds at the Bobby Previte, Elliott Sharp and Dr. Lonnie  
Smith gigs but missed them. At 10 on Saturday I walked over to the  
Bitter End to see Mr. Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet, a band I know and  
like. But the house, all standing, was packed — for a John Hollenbeck  
show! — and no one else was admitted. I watched through the window for  
a cold 30 seconds but couldn’t see or hear much through the mob. I’m  
happy to say I have nothing to report.