[Dixielandjazz] [Tradjazz] It's bigger than you think

[Rick]

On 1/10/2011 8:38 AM, Stephen G Barbone wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
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>
>
It's too bad so many are using Fender Rhodes 
Pianos.   That's sort of a Ray Charles sound.

My son -- Tim Zahn (Colorado Springs) has a big 
88-key Roland that really sounds like a piano.  
Heavy as hell, in a big hard roller case that he 
can hardly lift.

It doesn't sound like a Steinway, or even like a 
good old upright, but it doesn't sound electronic.

Thanks for the note on the festival.  Good to know 
if I'm ever stuck up east in January.

Rick Jolley