[Dixielandjazz] It's bigger than you think / Jack Fine

[Bert Brandsma]

The trouble is that OKOM doesn't get the right publicity, or publicity in general.It is not hip. Often seen as old peoples music and thus regarded as not interesting.The funny thing is, that it was popular after WW1 and after WW2. But I definetly hope we need something else than a war to get it popular again.I'm sure it is possible, since with the right selling tactics it is even possible to get Vienna Waltzes popular, see Andre Rieu, but it has to be done very professional, with a lot of aspects taken care of. Not only good music, but good stage manners and the right clothes as well. In general, you need a good show, look at Louis, look at Duke.

About Jack Fine, my wife Selena and I played with him in 2004 in New Orleans.He was so nice, told the audience through the microphone : "Man, I've played with Jack Teagarden and J.C. Higginbottom, but this girl knows how to play the trombone!"
Kind regards,
Bert Brandsma




> From: barbonestreet at earthlink.net
> Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:38:16 -0500
> Subject: [Dixielandjazz] It's bigger than you think
> CC: dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
> To: mister_bertje at hotmail.com
> 
> 
> 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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