[Dixielandjazz] The Grove Street Stompers 50th Anniversary

[Stephen G Barbone]

 From The Wall Street Journal today. Apr 17. Pity the gig doesn't pay  
more.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


If It’s Monday, This Jazz Band Plays On


For the past half-century, as every aspect of pop culture has shifted  
around them, the same Dixieland-style jazz band has held down the  
same  weekly slot at the same Manhattan nightclub.

It’s a 50-year feat of endurance and consistency virtually unmatched  
in the city’s musical history, and for good reason: few venues or  
bands remain viable over that length of time. But the Grove Street  
Stompers have kept it going for five decades, and Arthur’s Tavern in  
the West Village has kept the group on its calendar every Monday night  
since 1962.

Only one band member, 84-year-old pianist Bill Dunham, has been there  
since the beginning. Pressed for any missed Mondays over that stretch,  
he allows that the band skipped one show: Nov. 25, 1963, when Arthur’s  
Tavern and much of the nation was shut down for the funeral of  
President  John F. Kennedy.

“It doesn’t count,” Mr. Dunham insisted after a recent show. That one  
cancelation is “the exception that proves the rule.”

What about Black Monday, the day in 1987 when the stock market  
crashed? Or the Monday in 1980 when John Lennon was shot and killed?

“Well,” Mr. Dunham said, “you can’t cancel it for every bad Monday.  
There are a lot of bad Mondays out there, in case you didn’t know  
that. There are snow days and rainy days and just sad days, but you  
come in, you perform and suddenly you’re nine feet tall and your  
problems just got that much smaller.”

In the New York jazz world, few acts have approached the Stompers’  
staying power. The Village Vanguard Orchestra has played on many  
Mondays for more than 40 years running at the famed venue. The late  
Bobby Short had a legendary 36-year run at the Café Carlyle, in the  
Upper East Side hotel of the same name.

Woody Allen, more famous as a filmmaker, plays clarinet with a rival  
Dixieland band with a regular Monday night gig. That group, the Eddy  
Davis New Orleans Jazz Band, has been a fixture on Mondays at the  
Carlyle Hotel since 1999, making them relative newcomers compared to  
the Stompers.

For jazz hands, the Stompers’ consistency is both a marvel and an  
inspiration. “You got to understand — two weeks in a row is a steady  
gig for a musician,” explained David Oswalt, 56 years old, a drummer  
who holds down a regular Wednesday night slot as part of Birdland’s  
Louis Armstrong Centennial Band.

“He is doing the city a service,” Mr. Oswalt said of the Stompers’  
leader. “He’s showing all these people that it really can be done for  
all these years.”

The Stompers’ run at Arthur’s Tavern — more than enough Mondays to  
fill out seven calendar years — has kept the band together, but it’s  
never been enough to sustain the members. At the end of each show  
these days, Mr. Dunham takes home $35 and hands $30 each to his  
comrades. The musicians split the tip jar.

Until recently, the band has always featured amateur players with day  
jobs: a children’s clothing manufacturer on drums, an accountant on  
bass, a writer on trombone. Professionals would join for occasional  
stretches, including the year or so in the 1970s when jazz legend Wild  
Bill Davison played with the group.

Mr. Dunham came to New York for a job on Wall Street, and today makes   
his living as a real-estate manager. He founded the Stompers with  
trumpeter Jimmy Gribbon, a graphic artist who died in 1998.

Peter Ballance, a 73-year-old banker from New Jersey plays trombone.  
“Playing requires energy to make it good. And we require each other,”  
he said. “It’s sort of a duty.”

Joe Licari, the 78-year-old on the clarinet, piped up: “If we miss  
it,” he explained, “it’s like part of us is missing until we can get  
back and fill ourselves.”

The group now relies on pros like Mr. Licari to fill out its ranks,  
ranging in ages at a recent Monday show from a 37-year-old drummer to  
Mr. Dunham, the octogenarian band leader. The audience spans the same  
intergenerational mix.

Kristian Sanford, 26, comes to Stompers shows from Brooklyn’s Bushwick  
section, and he said friends he has dragged with him have been  known  
to return with dates. “Mostly people think it’s ridiculously  
charming,” he said of the band’s freewheeling banter and energetic  
style.

Out-of-towners are a big part of the Stompers’ draw. “Unfortunately,  
this kind of music is a big yawn among New Yorkers now,” said Mr.  
Dunham. “What keeps us going is tourists.”

As it turned out, the audience at a recent Monday performance included  
Joel and Kati Boland, a retired couple from Michigan who had lived on  
Charles Street in the 1960s. They recalled seeing what had been one of  
the Stompers’ earliest performances at Arthur’s Tavern back in 1962.

“They almost never come back!” joked bassist Brian Nalepka, 54.

“Nothing’s changed, right?” asked Mr. Dunham.

“Not a thing!” replied Ms. Boland. “We all look great!”