(From Kristi:)
Ray Benson is at it again and won’t quit teasing me with
that blissful tune, “Miles and Miles of Texas”. We’ve crossed that border again from
Louisiana to Texas. Steve is snoring
softly in the reclined passenger seat as I drive, making me happy because he is
so comfortable in the safety of my skills.
I don’t ever sleep, no matter who may be driving. Since infancy I can remember this. I’ve always been keenly aware of my position
as a passenger in a car. I always feel
I’m encased in a fragile metal bullet hurtling through space in search of a
target. But a few hours later the target
was arrived at gently and we’re safely in Terrell, Texas for the night, headed
for Tacoma in a few days. Texas roads
are wide and comfortably constructed with no sharp curves, steep mountains,
narrow or shoulder-less passages, and traffic moves at a good pace.
Steve and I had precious little luck finding folks at Folk
Alliance who were from our neighborhood. The O.G.’s (current slang for old guys) we’ve known for so many years
were not to be found, but we did run into a couple of youngsters from
Tacoma. The first was Forrest Beutel, a
member of the long-standing bluegrass group, Barleywine Revue. We had the pleasure of hosting him in our
Private Guerrilla Showcase in our hotel room.
I recall the night he announced that he was quitting his day job to be a
full-time professional musician. That
was while he was performing with the band at the Swiss Tavern in Tacoma about
five years ago during one of their gigs.
He has been at it since then, playing as a single, a trio, and with the
full five-piece band, at gigs all over the Puget Sound and even for a while in
New Orleans. Forrest has toughed it out as a banjo player and singer, doing a steady stream of
gigs in bars, busking, and private parties, and just recently took a job at
Western State Hospital as a music therapist.
We felt the intimacy of his warm and robust musical presence belting out
traditional-sounding original Americana in our hotel room. Passers-by drifted in to listen to his
energetic half hour of music.
Then I happened into another young-ish Tacoma native, Jon Ramm, who
was not a participant at Folk Alliance International. He was performing with a band to a packed
house at Maison on the Monday after the Convention in the French Quarter. This was after I had begun to notice what was
seemingly a renaissance of traditional New Orleans jazz bands. I had seen two of them at the conference, and
one in front of Walgreens on Canal Street.
What surprised me is that they’re a third generation of young people playing
this music, much of which is around a hundred years old. The first of the bands I saw was backing
Maria Muldaur and she seemed as amazed at this phenomenon as was I. Maria Muldaur was among those in the second
generation, and she is far from young now.
I know of several people who came to New Orleans around fifteen years
ago to experience the legacy of jazz and found none of it. They did see plenty of good music played on
the streets, but traditional New Orleans jazz was then nowhere to be found. Jon tells me there are now about fifteen
crack professional bands playing these tunes on horns, drums and banjo, with as
much gusto and heart as they were first played in the early twentieth century. I had the pleasure of seeing five different
traditional jazz bands in varied locations; two in the hotel where the
convention was being held, one on Canal street in front of a drugstore, and two
more in bars. By the standards of
today’s popular musical lexicon these songs are by and large unknown. There is a repertoire of songs known to this
tight clique of players, which are complicated, sophisticated arrangements with
multiple parts that include stops, harmonized horn slides, and harmonic hooks more,
in between extended solo leads for each instrumentalist. And in the cases of each band I saw expertise
and passion rivaling the playing of those mostly dead guys who originated the music. There’s no big money in playing this
music. And it's not like the baton is passed down from generation to generation of native musicians from New Orleans. These young players are from all over the country. The tradition of New Orleans is
to be paid from tips for live music in bars and on the streets. So how did this new revival happen? Some speculate that it may have had
something to do with Hurricane Katrina, when musicians who were spotlighted
from a nation of sympathetic music-lovers, found themselves the center of
attention by folks who wanted to associate New Orleans with traditional
jazz. In fact, encouraged by the public
on social media, they set out to rescue and revive the remaining old guys who
were victims of the hurricane, and to get them playing their traditional jazz again. But I don’t know if that answers the question
of how exactly this renaissance happened with the latest generation. I haven’t figured it out but it’s some kind
of happy miracle as far as I can see. I
only know that what I saw was a joy to behold.
So I stayed an extra day in town and got an interview with Jon to
answer a few of my questions about his personal experience with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment