[Dixielandjazz] It's bigger than you think

[Stephen G Barbone]

Check out the first sentence of the second paragraph of the below  
article. If that's true, just what the hell are we OKOMeres doing  
wrong? Check out the entire paragraph. 2000 people show up on a cold  
winter night to hear jazz at 5 nightclubs in Greenwich village? Wow,  
that's more than many, if not most OKOM jazz festivals in the USA draw  
over a weekend. What's up with that?

BTW, the article mentions the Zinc Bar. For those of us who remember  
Dixieland in the 1950s and 60s, in NYC, the bar now called Zinc is the  
old Cinderella Club where Jack Fine, Kenny Davern, Roswell Rudd, Steve  
Lacy and others who played Dixieland back then, held court. And oh  
yeah, I played there numerous times with Jack, Kenny and Roswell.

That's where I introduced Kenny to my wife to be circa 1961. She said  
to me, "Steve I don't know how to tell you this but Kenny plays better  
than your do." Kenny and I laughed as I agreed and he said; "Steve,  
marry this girl, she is honest."

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Jammed Sessions Abound at a Village Jazz Festival

NY TIMES - Jan 10, 2010 By BEN RATLIFF


I saw a lot of the following at the 2011 New York Winter Jazzfest,  
held in five clubs within a three-block radius in Greenwich Village on  
Friday and Saturday nights: Female musicians. Hyperarticulate trumpet  
players. Music from foreign lands — Iraq, India, Cuba and the lost  
continent of prog-rock. Bands with a Fender Rhodes keyboard. A  
fascinating range of drummers, very fine to clunky-passing-as-cool.  
And other people’s backs.

There is an audience for jazz, you know. Off the books, it’s bigger  
than you think. Sometimes the culture around it feels spread out and  
invisible, like pollen in the air. But the right big event will  
solidify it so that you can have a packed and primed room not for one  
of the few names in jazz who do heavy business, but, say, for Butch  
Morris, the enduringly original conductor of improvisers, as he  
whipped up an 11-piece collective swirl around the tenor saxophonist  
J. D. Allen. Or Orrin Evans, the pianist from Philadelphia, with his  
aggressive and swinging Captain Black Big Band. Or Jen Shyu’s Jade  
Tongue, a band that set up a killingly contemporary New York jazz trio  
— the saxophonist David Binney, the bassist John Hébert, the drummer  
Dan Weiss — behind Ms. Shyu as she sang and talked and waved her arms  
through long melodic narratives and sometimes played a two-stringed  
Vietnamese lute.

New York Winter Jazzfest is something to get behind: a late-night live- 
music stimulation overdose — 6 p.m. to past 3 a.m. each night —  
organized by the promoters Boom Collective. It had no educational  
component, no panel discussions, only the thing itself. Around 1,000  
people showed up the first night, more than twice that the second.  
Musicians turn out, even those who aren’t playing. But a lot were  
playing: nearly 70 bands in two nights.

It’s good but quite hard-core, all the standing and waiting and  
pushing. It has grown more hectic since it moved to this format in  
this neighborhood in 2009. (It began life in 2005, at the old Knitting  
Factory in TriBeCa.) We wanted this growth. But I worry that if the  
Jazzfest’s logistics aren’t rethought a little, or maybe even a lot,  
the event will be something to dread rather than something to look  
forward to. It felt like a trade show this year, so much so that it  
even felt a little strange reviewing it as a series of performances.

Let me introduce you to the Wall of Backs. At the Zinc Bar, even if  
you were 6 feet 2, there were many times when you could see almost  
nothing: the top inch of the drummer’s head, the pianist’s right ear.  
(You could hear a small portion of whatever carefully conceived group  
you were there to experience: usually some bass and cymbal, with  
conversation and bar sounds high in the mix.) If you were there to  
hang out and drink and talk shop — with other musicians, or those  
who’d been attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters  
conference, which continues around town until Tuesday — you were all  
set. If you were there for the music, you struggled.

Too bad that the Zinc Bar scene was the worst of all, because it  
sounded the best. Early on Saturday, before the deluge, I heard Jacky  
Terrasson’s trio play a quiet and fantastically focused set there —  
similar to others I’ve seen in recent years, including versions of the  
standards “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Smile” retailored around his  
own original vamps, but still startling and clarifying. Much later  
that night, after midnight, the drummer Sameer Gupta played through  
his arrangements of Bollywood soundtrack songs with sitar, cello and  
viola appended to a jazz trio. The crowd roared its applause. Nothing  
wrong with that. Would have loved to have seen it, especially since I  
was there.

Other clubs absorbed the size and flow of the crowd better. At Kenny’s  
Castaways there’s a balcony, promising more sightlines, but there’s  
also a Fender Rhodes keyboard instead of a piano, which became a cool  
nuisance: it made so many bands sound similar. The ones I liked most  
didn’t use the Rhodes, bands like the trumpeter Kirk Knuffke’s  
quartet, which played a kind of early ’60s New York knockabout  
postbop, with thorough arrangements, brainy and amiable polyphony,  
scrabbly free improvisation. And it had a frontline partnership I’d  
like to hear more of, between the leader and the trombonist Brian  
Drye. I marveled at what little I saw of Agogic, led by the  
saxophonist Andrew D’Angelo: rattling and physical, with Luke  
Bergman’s electric bass and Evan Woodle’s drumming, and the trumpeter  
Cuong Vu playing with fine, narrowed intensity.

At the Bitter End, Sullivan Hall and Le Poisson Rouge, you could walk  
in an arc around the stage, hearing the music from different angles,  
escaping pockets of nonsense as you desired. Steve Coleman’s Five  
Elements didn’t whomp us quite the way they did last summer at Undead  
Jazzfest, a festival built around the same club circuit, with the same  
bookers and promoters. Then, they were a bigger band in a more  
intimate room. This time, at Le Poisson Rouge, the intricate rhythmic  
shapes of the music sounded trickier and thinner.

But what preceded them was a set that could contend with Mr. Morris’s  
for performance-as-experience: the guitarist Nels Cline and the Los  
Angeles painter Norton Wisdom, in an improvised duet. Mr. Cline set up  
digital loops of electric guitar — edgeless and sludgy chords, spiky  
and screaming single notes — and Mr. Wisdom worked with brushes and  
paint on a large back-lighted screen. He made shock-headed monsters  
holding naked women, babies and animals, oil rigs and waves, mutating  
the images by wiping the screen with a sponge or making one figure  
grow out of another.

It was obvious why the collaboration worked: the applications and  
wiping, the running colors, the constant development — that was what  
Mr. Cline was doing too. Sound equaled paint. I’m not sure it had  
anything to do with jazz, and it’s not the best performance I’ve ever  
seen Mr. Cline do, but it was stoner gold. It was also the kind of  
thing worth braving serious crowd nuisances for: an actual collective  
ah.