[Dixielandjazz] Jazz is dead? NAH

[Stephen G Barbone]

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.