[Dixielandjazz] Kevin Eubanks on "Jazz"

[Stephen G Barbone]

One of the benefits to getting Jazz Inside as a freebie on line is the  
information you get from non-OKOMers about the world of jazz. That  
plus you get an appreciation for the "business" of music. Here is just  
a short excerpt from an interview with Kevin Eubanks (ex-guitarist/ 
bandleader of the Tonight Show) It is in the current issue.

One question asked was why folks in the USA don't buy jazz records.

KE: "People will buy anything but they won't buy jazz because we’ve  
ignored them and more than anything, people do not like being ignored  
and by and large, that’s what we’ve done."

The next question was about how he introduced new audiences to jazz  
via what the band, comprised of jazz musicians, played on the show.

KE: "It was jazz musicians, so therefore everybody just started saying  
it was jazz but it wasn’t. We played Kool and the Gang, we played  
Earth, Wind and Fire, we played Grand Funk Railroad, we played Rolling  
Stones, we played Sly and the Family Stone, we played with all the  
artists that came on the show. We played very little jazz. We played  
Chicago songs when Chicago came on, Stevie Wonder songs when Stevie  
Wonder came. When Paul McCartney came on, we played all Beatles songs.  
Every blue moon we’d play a jazz song. It was just not what the show  
needed. I had no conflict of interest in that I was doing the job the  
best way I could contribute to the show."

"But the show brought people to my gigs around the country that I had  
never seen - these are new people to the fold. They didn’t hear any  
jazz music when I played with the band on the show but when I did gigs  
they all showed up and then they got turned on to it. That’s great  
because the audience grew and that’s reflected in the fact that Zen  
Food (Ed. Note:his most recent jazz album) is selling really well  
because those people didn’t know that that kind of music existed. They  
never heard it before but when they came to see me and the band in a  
live concert, they saw the emotion, the commitment and the excitement  
involved. They walked away thinking that those cats worked! I wasn’t  
exposing the country to jazz through the Tonight Show. I knew that  
that was a mistake to look at it that way. That was not what was going  
to happen. It was the wrong venue for it. I had sense enough to know  
it and to respect that."

Jazz Inside is a 50+ page monthly magazine mostly about the scene in  
New York City. I get it on line as a freebie every month and love it.  
Not much info about OKOM, but much info about jazz, much of which is  
relevant to OKOM.
It also lists all the jazz venues and jazz gigs in NYC. (hundreds)

More info about it at www.jazzinsidemagazine.com

BTW, I have no financial interest or relationship to the publishers.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband