[Dixielandjazz] Jazz is dead? NAH
Stephen G Barbone
barbonestreet at earthlink.net
Sun Jan 9 07:03:44 PST 2011
Perhaps what we musicians and club/bar owners might do in the USA, is
make jazz fests at the club level, an event such as this one. Winter
jazz fest in NYC has grown some big time audience numbers, in two
years, in spite of a limited amount of clubs participating. 1000
people last Friday night, to see live jazz at 3 clubs? That's more
than many OKOM jazz festivals draw on a weekend these days. I suspect
Saturday's numbers with 5 clubs were quite a bit higher. Better yet,
the audience is YOUNG and buys drinks at these clubs.
If there is a lesson here, it is that: "If you present it properly,
people will come." (No nay-sayers need apply)
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband
A Lot of Jazz. Many More People.
NY Times - By BEN RATLIFF - Jan 8, 2011
I was at Winter Jazzfest Friday night. I’m returning tonight. Got to
prepare myself for that. I had some good stretches, but spent a lot of
time spent obstructed.
Since 2009, the festival has run along three contingent blocks in
Greenwich Village, in various clubs: this year, three clubs on Friday,
five on Saturday. (Previously, going back to 2005, it was held in one
building, at the old Knitting Factory in Tribeca.) The one-night
passes were sold out by 8:15 last night. That’s pretty early, and
every time I circled around past Le Poisson Rouge, where the box
office was, I saw a squad of the turned-away, cycling through the
Kubler-Ross stages of grief — shock, denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, acceptance, pizza.
They were ready to spend $25, knowing that they might see ten or
fifteen bands before it was all over — a spectacular deal. The problem
is, last night proved that a lot of people are curious about New York
Winter Jazzfest. More than were planned for. It’s time for the
organizers to run some new numbers. Usually I’m the last to complain
about this kind of thing. I love the effect of a full, pressurized
room on any live music, anywhere.
And there’s a long trail of jazz entrepreneurs who are too ambitious,
shoot too high, imagine an audience that isn’t there, and go down in
flames: it’s a bad look. But there is an audience for this. And we
want to get in.
The largest of the three clubs on Friday closed early, after Chico
Hamilton’s 9:15 set. This meant that for a pretty good stretch of the
night, more than 1,000 people were trying to get into the Zinc Bar and
Kenny’s Castaways, two not-very-big clubs with long and skinny
dimensions.
Winter Jazzfest is also a networking hive, for those in town over the
weekend to attend the Association of Performing Arts Presenters
conference. Last night, I wished I were an arts presenter. Because
then I could just catch up with people I knew — on the street, in the
back of a club, at the little place where I ate the worst falafel of
my life at around midnight.
What did I hear? At Kenny’s I heard From Bacteria to Boys, led by the
drummer Mike Pride, a quartet that jams juddering, provocative asides
into semi-legit, semi-straight-ahead jazz. I heard The Music Band, led
by the trumpeter Shane Endsley, an excellent new quartet that will
have its first album out next month. The band played through irregular
grooves beautifully—Pete Rende on Fender Rhodes, Matt Brewer on bass,
Ted Poor on drums—and Mr. Endsley constructed clean, logical solos,
just on the wet side of dry. They were strong and controlled, and so
was Bigmouth, led by the bassist Chris Lightcap, a group with two
tenor saxophone players — a favorite format of Mr. Lightcap, and one
that’s not done enough.
I heard Jen Shyu, playing her two-string Vietnamese moon lute,
storytelling and emoting—she is someone you call a vocalist, not a
singer—with her killer band Jade Tongue, including the saxophonist
David Binney, bassist John Hebert, and drummer Dan Weiss. I’ve heard
Hebert-Weiss rhythm sections before and I want to hear more: wow, did
they get into it.
At Le Poisson Rouge, Butch Morris [conducted an eleven-piece band of
improvisers, VISIONFUGITIVE!, with the saxophonist J.D. Allen and his
regular trio at the center, playing on-the-spot improvisations and
some of Mr. Allen’s own written music. And in that wide, packed room,
it worked beautifully, rolling through strange compound melodies made
according to Mr. Morris’s instructions.
He gave a little tutorial on those instructions — not the standard
conductor’s vocabulary, but his own system, which he’s been using for
25 years or so. With the band’s cooperation, he demonstrated the
signals for sustain, repeat (“a musician can put in anything he wants,
but when he gets to the end, he has to repeat”), memory (“so, dig,
while he’s playing this, I designated it ‘memory one’”), develop,
panorama.
The drummer Dafnis Prieto brought his Proverb Trio to Zinc Bar, with
the keyboardist Jason Lindner and the rapper Kokayi; it took all kinds
of impulsive side-roads, with drums and keyboards bouncing off each
other, Kokayi musing on electronic media and spoofing an auctioneer.
But when it was really firing hot, it grew rapid and funky with
machinelike syncopated rapping against the drums — sort of after the
model of “Jigga What, Jigga Who” on Jay-Z’s old “Unplugged” record.
Later, at the same club, Matana Roberts played a short, unaccompanied
tenor saxophone set, followed by a long wait for Aaron Goldberg’s
trio. The band’s drummer, Eric Harland, had just worked two sets with
Dave Holland’s Overtone Quartet uptown at Birdland, and came rushing
out of a cab, down the steps, and into the long, crowded chute, still
taking off his coat as Mr. Goldberg started the first number.
Amazingly, he sounded fresh, clamping right into it, making his beat
change in almost every measure.
Saturday night, more clubs to absorb the throng, and the biggest of
them, Le Poisson Rouge, stays open till 3 or so. Nowhere to go but up.
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