Last year a musician friend and I drove out to the Fair Grounds, parked the car and got out. A couple in full Jazz Fest regalia (you know what I mean) sort of laughed and said “Man, this is residential, two hour limit, you’re gonna get towed!” We told them that it was no problem, that we wouldn’t be more than an hour or so. “Yeah right,” they said and laughed at us again. We entered the gate, found three or four things to eat, – crawfish bread, cochon de lait, the good stuff, – dabbed the corners of our mouths with our napkins and promptly exited. We were back in the car in less than 60 minutes. One year we made the mistake of listening to a Johnny Dodds’ Dixieland Jug Blowers recording of “Rent House Rag” from 1926 before going to the Fair Grounds, and with the lingering effects of the experience still careening in our heads we decided to turn around before we even parked. The inevitable comparisons just would not be fair.
Don’t get me wrong, Jazz Fest is a great and glorious event. It’s just that, well, maybe I’m an agoraphobe, or worse yet a compulsive frotteur. Either way I have trouble spending long hours in crowds and therefore stick close to home, or actually, I just stay there. But I do celebrate the jazz heritage by listening to all of my best records by musicians who are living. To get in the mood, I attach a PVC pipe totem to my dog Buster’s back. Just in case we have to split up, it makes him easier to find. This year I’m calling my Jazz Fest listening sessions the “Sugar Shack Festival of Hot Music 2000.”
Why am I calling it the Festival of hot music and not jazz? Well, I’m taking a cue from an artist whose recordings will be featured prominently—guitarist and vocalist Marty Grosz. I was introduced to his brand of swinging, small band music a decade ago when I started working for George Buck’s record company. One of my colleagues, Gus Statiras recommended Grosz to me. The record was called Swing It! and he and his band, Destiny’s Tots, did and wonderfully. The tunes were interesting: “Skeleton in the Closet” for example, “Emaline” or “Eye Opener” and when he sang it was pleasing, honest and often, as on “Love Dropped in for Tea”(when he interpolates “she whispered darjeeling to me,”) funny. He also played a glorious acoustic rhythm guitar, featuring lots of chord soloing—a distinctive sound that is immediately recognizable. I was hooked and searched for other recordings. In the ensuing 10 years I have yet to be disappointed.
I called him recently with the good news that he would be a headliner at the SSFHM2K (after it gets established I’ll call it Shack Fest) and inquired as to a description of his music (you know, for the program I’m writing for myself). He said “ I call what I play Hot Music, it’s the term Louis Armstrong used to describe what he did in the 1936 book Swing that Music. The term ‘jazz,’ that might have done it in 1940, but doesn’t any more. The term wears so many faces that it doesn’t work anymore. Is Carla Bley ‘jazz?’ Is what they do at the Knitting Factory here in New York, is that ‘jazz?’ I don’t want to be part of that, it’s just bizarre to me. I mean, what happened to emotion and tone and message and feeling?”
Well, those qualities all happen to reside in the music of Grosz himself. So it came as no surprise when he told me his most enthusiastic responses come from people in their late teens and early twenties. “My greatest success these days is when I play at small liberal arts colleges. They absolutely love it, and it’s because they have no baggage. They are hearing it without intellectual bias. I mean, these kids come up after the show and throw their arms around me. You know, to them I’m a foxy grandpa.”
Of the dozen or so Marty Grosz recordings I have, I noticed the ones that appealed to me most featured the trumpeter/cornetist Peter Ecklund. To me, his playing is a revelation. His attack is full of surprise, sometimes lyrical, sometimes staccato, often muted and always interesting. I asked Grosz what he found attractive in Ecklund’s playing. “What appealed to me about Peter Ecklund was his tone and style. The style suggested something between Bix and Jabbo Smith and the tone, well, how do you describe music really, but I would call it a ‘lucid’ tone. So I was attracted to his playing, but equally important was that he was interested in trying different things, not the tried and true, not the standard repertoire played the standard way, but rather he was interested in going in different directions.”
Those different directions are especially apparent on recordings by the group co-led by Grosz and Ecklund that they call the Orphan Newsboys. There are interesting arrangements of songs you don’t hear too often (“Twenty Four Hours A Day,” “If We Never Meet Again,” or Wingy Manone’s “Strange Blues”) as well as interesting instrumental combinations such as the inclusion on some numbers of a Celeste.
On his own recordings, Ecklund deviates even further from the “standard repertoire played the standard way.” Two releases under his name are on the Arbors Jazz label. Strings Attached and Gigs: Reminiscing in Music are notable in that the bulk of each feature tunes written by Ecklund with whimsical titles like “All Purpose Cowboy Melody,” “Waltz of the Secret Agents” and “Untitled.” He describes the music on these discs as “Traditional jazz of the present day” (although these records will be featured prominently, the term Hot Music will remain in the title here at the Sugar Shack Festival). I consider Strings Attached a sort of eclectic masterpiece which embodies so many of those things that I’m drawn to in art—poignancy (“Try A Little Tenderness,” which I might add was recorded by Bing Crosby decades before Otis Redding put his stamp on it), humor (his own “Excessively Happy Tune,” what he calls a mix of “bumptious Western swing and manic depressive cartoon music,” which features some expert whistling by Ecklund, spirited tenor sarrusophone, and is so damned irresistible it will fairly sear itself to your brain), celebration (“Triumphal March of the Society Bandleaders,” another original) and surprise (a heated duet of “Puttin’ On The Ritz” with guitarist Frank Vignola). I have similar feelings about his Gigs CD, the tunes are sophisticated and melodic and tinged with melancholy. There is simply nothing else that I know of that sounds like what is on these records.
I can’t recommend these guys enough. Besides the aforementioned recordings, I would also guess that George Buck would not be averse to selling you Songs I Learned at My Mother’s Knee and Other Low Joints by Marty Grosz or the Orphan Newsboy’s Rhythm For Sale from his Jazzology catalog. You can then replicate the “Sugar Shack Festival of Hot Music” in your own home, which I suggest you do because this music is good for you.
Obviously, I have an immense amount of enthusiasm for the music of Marty Grosz and Peter Ecklund, but sadly, because they are based in and around New York City, I have never had the opportunity to hear them live. In featuring them at the Sugar Shack, I mean no offense to the many jazz players in New Orleans who I enjoy and who will be playing at the Fair Grounds. But I live here and am therefore blessed to be able to go see guys like Dave Boeddinghaus or Wendell Brunious or Duke Heitger or Brian O’Connell any time I want, in comfortable surroundings and with good acoustics. So I’ll give up my seat in the Economy Hall to a snow-weary visitor from Maine who has no such blessing and has been looking forward to it all year.
Gotta run, meeting with Rodrique about the commemorative poster.
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