[Dixielandjazz] The Grove Street Stompers 50th Anniversary

[Marek Boym]

Hi,
I wish to draw the listmates' attention to one paragraph in Steve's post:
"The audience spans the same intergenerational mix."  That's from 37
to 83, folks.  So, there are young fans.  Make music available and
accessible, and they will come.  They will listen to other types of
music as well, but they will come and enjoy OKOM.  They even might
save some jazz fesivals.
Cheers

On 18 April 2012 02:07, Stephen G Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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!”
>
>
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