Live Music and Dance Economies + beer

I’m afraid this isn’t a terribly well written or thought out post. Spring has struck, my sinuses are buzzing with histamines and my brain is running slow and foggy. But I wanted to join up all these issues before I forgot them.

So this is a story about liquor licensing, live music economies (financial and cultural) and dance cultures. It’s not terribly well researched or referenced, so please do go on and explore the issue rather than relying on my dodgy interpretation of events. I mean, buggered if I really know anything about liquor licensing in Australia and within Australian states.

The ABC story Live music injects $1b into economy (Lucy Carter and staff, Posted September 19, 2011 10:56:27) discusses a report on the economic value of the Australian live music scene commissioned by “industry stakeholders including the Australian Council for the Arts and the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA)”.

  • The study was limited to live music performances in pubs/bars, clubs, restaurants/cafes and nightclubs in Australia.
  • the venues included in the study were limited to those in live music venues licensed by APRA that staged live music during the 2009/10 financial year.
  • The study included only revenue generated from venue-based live music performances.

(pg 4)

The basic point here is that live music makes a significant contribution to the state and national economies, and is therefore important. This gains particular relevance in the context of ongoing battles over noise restrictions, the gentrification of urban spaces and the rezoning of areas where live music lives.
I need to note, here, that live jazz in Australia does not have broad appeal. It tends to cater to a much older demograph than most of the live music discussed in that report. But I think this is important. If live music is equated to ‘youth culture’ in popular discourse it marginalises an increasing (and increasingly influential) demograph and market: older audiences. I also think it’s important for jazz to reposition itself as a product for a more diverse audience. Bands like Virus in Melbourne did this well in the early 2000s, and New Orleans of course can pull this off because live music – of all types – is so thoroughly embedded in the mythos of the place. But live jazz is positioned as ‘art’ music rather than popular music in Sydney. Frankly, I think there should be more live jazz in everyday community spaces (like pubs), and this live jazz should be representative of the whole spectrum of ‘jazz’.

…though, personally, I want more of the hot jazz and less of the twiddlyfiddly arty stuff. Because it was designed and built as popular music and lots of fun to dance to.

My attention was caught by the fact that this was a study of venues serving alcohol and licensed by APRA because there’s been a recent discussion on Bug’s Question Of The Day FB page about paying cover charges, buying drinks and tipping at live music venues. The full question (15th September) reads:

I’ve noticed that, not only in New Orleans but every scene I’ve been to, dancers don’t want to pay a cover charge or tip the band. I’ve also heard from venue owners that dancers are notorious for not buying drinks. Why are we as a community resistant to supporting the musicians and venues? Do we not know any better? If so, how do we educate the community?

Drinking and tipping and cover charges at live music gigs are an issue for lindy hoppers because most dancers don’t drink much while dancing. Simply because it’s a demanding game, and drinking impairs your dance skills. So a venue that depends on drinking to cover the cost of live music is not going to make it, financially, if their clientele is made up entirely of lindy hoppers. The amount dancers drink really depends on the gig – the time of day, the vibe and so on. So they will drink, just not at every gig, every time. If we were to depend on live music for our entire scene, I think a reasonable standard of dancing would require spaces that focussed on dancing, rather than drinking. Ballrooms, dance halls and cabaret clubs with more physical room and a greater emphasis on dancing as well as bars and pubs where the social focus is more diverse.

I don’t think it’s a terribly good idea to promote drinking generally in a culture like Australia’s where binge drinking is a serious social issue, but I don’t want to suggest that I think drinking is wrong or bad. Basically, lindy hop events aren’t like other social events at licensed venues in Australia, and I think it’s a really good thing (and the thing I enjoy most about dance events) that young men and women (and older men and women!) can enjoy social events and dancing without getting shitfaced. I think that social and cultural practices and spaces should be centred on more than just drinking, not that social and cultural spaces should exclude drinking. Diverse cultural spaces make for diverse and vibrant communities, cross-generationally.

I don’t drink, so I don’t buy alcohol at live music gigs. I’m not a huge soft drink fan, so I don’t buy softies. I’ll buy a mineral water with lime, or some chips. But I like pubs. I like their casual drop-in culture where you can meet friends for a quick drink or a long meal. I like the way live music is an important part of pub culture. But I’ve been been struck by the differences between Melbourne pub culture (which I really like) and Sydney pub culture, which is a lot less pleasant.

There are different laws and licenses in each Australian state, and local licensing laws are often regulated by local councils – eg in Melbourne local city councils regulate licenses. A venue can lose its liquor license if it breaches noise level laws or serves under age customers. I have some problems with the way licensing works in Sydney, mostly because licenses are very expensive, and geared towards larger venues subsidised by on-site gambling (whether a TAB, Kino or pokies). Licensing in Sydney seems (at first and cursory glance) to promote pubs and licensed venues as places to get totally shitfaced, rather than places to meet friends, share a meal, listen to a band, play trivia, read, laugh, talk or get shitfaced. They’re simply more diverse community spaces in Melbourne than in Sydney. While even I’d drop into a pub in Melbourne on my own to drink or eat at the main bar, I’d feel a lot less comfortable at most Sydney pubs, because I’m not there to drop a million dollars in the pokies or the TAB or to drink a jug of beer on my own at lunch time.

This is where my knowledge really breaks down, but the way licensing works is affected by the influence of Clubs Australia, an influential interests group representing social clubs (like RSLs, Sporting clubs, etc). Pubs and clubs are different, legally and culturally, but in Sydney large corporations own a string of pubs and interests in clubs. Their main source of income from these businesses is gambling, or more specifically, pokies. Pokies are a scourge on the earth, encouraging people to sit and drop coins into a machine for hours and hours at a time. This type of gambling targets lower income earners and I think it’s promoters are ethically fail. Pokies also degrade the conviviality of a local pub – people sit in front of a machine rather than a bar, conversation is impeded by the loud noises and attention required to pull a lever. Live music and pokies are fundamentally incompatible: you can’t make good music in a room full of pokie machines. And pubs depending on pokies for revenue will devote valuable floor space (whole rooms!) to pokies rather than less profitable bands.

There’s been speculation about the effect of pokies on pub culture, and news articles like this Daily Telegraph one from earlier this year suggest that a focus on pokies has led to a neglect of drinkers. Of real, live people. I’d argue that chain pubs, run by an absent owner, are not community-oriented spaces at all. And pubs that are most culturally and socially relevant spaces are local spaces. Which is why one suburb in Melbourne can host so many small pubs – each serves a particular local clientele and offers a specific ‘experience’. Grand Final afternoon is perhaps the best example of this sort of localised specialisation, but the live music culture is just as useful an illustration of the cultural value of smaller, independently owned and operated pubs.

The federal government is currently considering revisions to the legislation affecting pokies, and Clubs Australia is spending an awful lot of money on advertising to drum up opposition to the changes. I’m curious to see how it all pans out. There are very few convincing arguments for promoting pokies, and many convincing arguments against it.

And here is where I’ll have to leave my discussion of pokies and licensing specifics, as I’m a bit histamine-crazy and generally ignorant of the facts. But I wanted to link up this news article, reference that Bugs Question, and the also something about the recent sale of the Unity Hall Hotel in Balmain to a corporate entity who owns a chain of pubs.

Unity Hall hosts one of Australia’s best jazz bands every Sunday afternoon. Musicians passing through town regularly drop in to play a few songs, so you’ll see all sorts of brilliant Australian (and visiting) musicians. For my money, this is the best dancing music in town. Dancers go there to dance, and there’s no cover charge. The bar staff charge the locals less for drinks than dancers (which is totally ok by me), but dancers who do turn up (and who pretty much count as regulars, though not necessarily locals) always buy drinks and chips and maintain a good relationship with bar staff and musicians.
While this is the best opportunity for hardcore dancing, it’s a small venue, and dancers need to share it with ‘nondancers’. Or, in other words, ‘normal folk’ who like to dance but don’t spend a million hours on dance classes. Because it is in a non dancer-run space, dancers need to engage their real social skills. Talking. Hanging out. Dealing with dickheads off the street. I think it’s a good place to learn floor craft (safety first!), to engage your social skills (conversate!) and to enjoy and support quality live music. Unity Hall isn’t as ‘good’ a pub as the best independent pubs in Melbourne – it does have a TAB taking up lots of space, and pokies, and it isn’t properly cross-generational (though it’s getting there), or multicultural (though even Melbourne pubs don’t really rock the multiculturalism). But it’s one of the better Sydney pubs, and I really hope the it doesn’t change for the worse with its new owners.

The sale of the Unity Hall hotel is indicative of how many pubs in Sydney are run: by big businesses who own a chain of pubs and treat them as warehouses for the real money makers – pokie machines. This is a bit shit when you compare it to Melbourne where there’s a strong independent pub culture, which results in brilliant food, child/family friendly pubs (which are also popular with the young and hip), live music venues and bar staff and owners who know their clientele and give a shit. Basically, venues which are owned and operated by members of the local community for the local community are more likely to give a shit about the local community and be important community spaces. Whether you’re looking for awesome food, locally sourced beers, live music, somewhere to dance, somewhere to talk, or just a quiet spot for a quick pint at lunch time.

I know my perception of Sydney pubs as community spaces is biased by my experiences in urban Melbourne (and I don’t mean to feed into the Syd/Melb rivalry), but I think state-based licensing laws are significant when we’re talking about dancers’ obligations at live music venues. Honestly, if licenses were less expensive, venues wouldn’t be so dependent on drinks’ sales and gambling to cover their costs. They could operate on a smaller profit margin, offering more specific and niche services – good food, niche music, smaller premises – and not need to rely on shit like pokies and promoting binge drinking. They could be more responsible and responsive community spaces.

[Edit: I need to read ”
A history of machine gambling in the NSW club
industry: from community benefit to
commercialisation” by Nerilee Hing]

Interesting Links

Matthew Bailes, one of the scientists who discovered that diamond planet writes about how his experiences would have been a bit different if he’d been a climate scientist in the article Diamond planets, climate change and the scientific method.

Where newspapers thrive is Judy Muller’s story about local newspapers, news values and journalism in small towns. I’m especially interested in this because I did my MA on state based newspaper coverage of gender, and then conceived my PhD project as a study of ‘local’ or community-based media. How do you tell controversial stories in a tiny community where your words will affect the lives of people you know, but also affect your life as part of that community?

Right Now It’s a Pleasure

It’s much easier to be pleased when you’re not a seething mass of anxiety. So today, I am far more easily pleased than I was last week. I’m not sure whether this moment of calm will last, but for now, I’m just going to enjoy it.

Earlier today I was pleased by Thomas McCarthy’s new film Win Win. It’s no Station Agent, but it pleased me.
Then I was pleased by a nice panini in a cafe full of middle aged Italian men enjoying a widescreen television presentation of the tennis.
Right now I’m really enjoying Abigail Washburn singing Everybody Does It Now.

Tomorrow it might be very difficult to find something that pleases me. But right now it’s a pleasure to just sit here on the couch and listen.

Country Red Rice (from Sri Lanka, Jothi brand)

…with some leftover curry.

country-red-rice-closeup, originally uploaded by dogpossum.

This rice is DELICIOUS. It’s like brown rice, if you’ve rubbed off most of the brown, and the brown is actually a rusty red.

It’s sort of a broken grain, and clumps together when you cook it, becoming fluffy and delicious. It’s so nice, it’s probably bad for me.

I just found it at the local grocer (well, one in Croydon) and decided to buy it because I haven’t seen it before. The label looks like this.

Let’s Dance! (in which I score a free CD and then brag about it)

One thing I don’t say to myself very often is “Gee, I wish I had another version of Jersey Bounce.”

I’ve really been enjoying the recent rash of smaller combos and knock-about street jazz type bands coming out of places like New Orleans and Seattle (bands like Smoking Time Jazz Club, and dancer-populated Careless Lovers.) There’s something about the DIY ethos of dancers learning to play instruments and then making the music they love dancing to. It’s exciting, as dancers move from just responding to and occupying music, to actually making it.

But I have to say, it’s a refreshing change to be presented with a big, solid band full of highly skilled, experienced musicians. And a band that’s well managed is a gem.

We’re all used to the sort of big bands that are hired to play at smaller exchanges and local events. They’re made up of a range of ring-ins and local musicians, pulled together for the night or a couple of gigs. We’ve seen all those faces before. The band leader is usually the guy who put the gig together, not the guy who drills the band each week in practice, who seeks out serious charts and arrangements, tailoring them for individual musicians. And most of these bands are less than inspiring for dancing or listening*. It’s not really surprising that dancers started getting interested in smaller, more dynamic bands.

Today, there simply isn’t enough work for more than three or four big bands (if you’re lucky) in a single (decent sized) Australian city. Even in 1920s Chicago,

the job, as South Side newspaper columnist and orchestra leader Dave Peyton insisted, created bands and held them together. Cabaret, dance hall, and vaudeville theater employment gave life to jazz groups:

The job makes the orchestra. If you lose the job and loaf a few weeks, you haven’t any band. Our field is a narrow one. Your men can’t afford to loaf long and the first bidder takes them away from you. The job is what you want to worship.

(Kenney, William Howland, Chicago Jazz: A cultural history, 1904-1930, Oxford University Press: New York, 1993, xii)

Even if your city is as large and creatively together as Sydney or Melbourne, you still see a lot of the same faces in each of the bands. And each of those guys in modern big bands is also working other projects, other musical styles, just to make a living. Jazz today is a catholic enterprise; there are lots of different styles, and 1930s/40s classic big band swing is just one of them. And you hear it in the big bands. Musicians’ styles and solos are influenced by a far wider range of music than in the original swing era, and while they might bring talent to a big band, there’s rarely the unity of style and focus in a modern big band that really makes them work as a living, breathing animal.

So Bernard Berkhout’s Orchestra’s Let’s Dance! recording is a pleasure.

I have to say, very clearly here, that I was sent a copy of this CD unsolicited. I often have reservations about reviewing bands’ CDs, especially in the swing dance world, as the pool is just too small for me to feel comfortable about reviewing things honestly. But I wasn’t asked to review the CD, I was just sent an email with the line

The CD is now out and I would like to send you a copy.

Awesome. I said “sure” and then I had a new CD. I win!

And I was bloody relieved to hear the actual music. I wasn’t going to have to make nice and fake some positive comments. This album is so fucking good. It’s a delight to hear a solid, tight big band pumping out the shit that made lindy hoppers lose their bits in the olden days. When the oldies talk about music, this is what they mean. Shit is hot. The sound quality is fabulous. The songs are all familiar, the arrangements are tight, the solos are nice, the rhythm section rocks.

I’d heard about this CD before through a thorough piece on its production and intentions on Hey Mr Jesse (ep 67), but also via the SwingDJs thread ‘Recording technique recommended for a new big band album’. I’d been interested in the community consultation that had gone into the album, and into the band. It’s an effective way of marketing a product: give people a feeling of ownership or participation, and they’re more likely to give a shit about the end product. Works with dance events, and it seems to work with CDs for dance bands. I had thought about buying the album, but having to buy a physical CD rather than downloads put me off. Buying in euros from Europe means a dodgy exchange rate and expensive shipping to Australia. So I’d put the album to the back of my mind, on my mental ‘to buy’ list for when I had a few more dollars in my DJing bank (though it’s only $AU20 including postage, which is pretty bloody decent). So a free copy was very welcome. I was curious. Also, I am a tightarse. And it’s very flattering to be sent stuff.

First off, the CD’s packaging is sweet. I don’t care much about this stuff usually (unless we’re talking Mosaic or Bear Family sets), mostly because I tend to rip the CD into my computer, then pack the physical CD away then forget about it. But this packaging is nice. It’s a cardboard case, which is great for shipping long distance. Jewel cases tend to arrive in pieces. Pieces that scratch the buggery out of the CD. And there’s a nice booklet listing all the musicians. Sweet.

To use an annoyingly overused phrase, the album does everything right. Songs are about three minutes. I’m finding dancers more and more tolerant of longer songs these days, probably because of their experience with live bands. But three minutes is a good length. Creating a good dance song in three minutes is a craft, like writing a short story. Get in, set it up, let it roll, finish it up with a bang. This shorter length means there’s less room for long, boring, wanky solos. Thank fuck. The solos in this album are concise, well-crafted and occasionally fucking GREAT. I dunno if they’re transcribed from original recordings (this whole album smacks of painstakingly accurate recreationism), and to be honest, I don’t much care. I’m here for the party, and I’ll think about the finer details later.

Most importantly for a lunk-head dancer like myself (and I am boringly lunkheaded when it comes to what I like for dancing), the band has a chunkingly solid rhythm section. It’s a machine, a power house pumping the band along. This is what a big band does right: four people shoveling the coal, stoking the boiler. A guitar, a piano, a drummer, a bass player, give or take one or two. This is what I really miss in smaller hot street-jazz type combos. I miss those four blokes laying down a good, chunky, layered rhythm.

These guys in Berkhout’s Orchestra give the rest of the band space to explore melody and solo, just getting on with their own job: holding shit together, telling even the newest dancer where the beat is. A good, solid rhythm section lets the rest of the band fuck about with fancy ways of adding/embellishing the swing, the delay that makes for excellent lindy hop.

You know how I know the rhythm section rocks? Because the sound quality is really nice. I don’t know how this was recorded, but I do know it’s nice. Good enough for me. I know it’s cool and interesting to try to recreate the exact same studio and mic set up and whatever from 1920s and 30s recordings. That’s great. Particularly if you’re listening to a CD at home on a decent sound system or good headphones. You can just sit there and soak in every echoey clunk, you can strain your ears trying to find the individual strum of the guitar or clarinetist drawing breath. Less excellent, though, is that sort of action when you’re dancing in an echoey town hall, heart pounding in your ears, trying to keep yourself and your partner safe, surrounded by two hundred people dancing in and out of time. And I’m a DJ. I’m looking for recorded music that works in shithouse conditions.

I’m usually DJing on shitty sound gear. Mishandled set ups in dirty pubs. Inadequate self-powered speakers in echoing church halls. Sure, things can be better at exchanges, but the bulk of my DJing happens in my home town in less than perfect conditions. So I need the best sound quality I can get. Because I’m then going to squeeze that brilliant sound through my shithouse laptop soundcard, down a raggedy RCA cable and into a mixer I don’t really know how to use.

To be honest, I’m completely over bands who are so into recreationism they eschew the awesomeness of modern technology. It seems kind of pointless. You think Jelly Roll Morton would have settled for dodgy sound when he could have heard himself played back in glorious stereo wonderment? If King Oliver or Genny Goodman or other band leaders of that day had had access to the sound technology we have today, you can bet your bottom dollar they’d be using it. They’d be wanting their music to sound as GOOD as possible.

I also find the recreationism that uses olden days tech so obsessively a little culturally naive. There were all sorts of politics going on in the recording industry in the swing era, and the whitest, most popular and palatable bands got access to the best technology and promotion. So those shitty recordings by black artists doing the most provocative, progressive music at the time were the result of shithouse social politics and economics. Recreating that is a bit like recreating bullshit racist dance sequences from films. You’re kind of missing the point.

Do justice to this magic. Do your best playing, and use your best technology.

Berkhout’s producers have done a pretty good job on this.

But I’m a DJ. Just because I love a song or an album, doesn’t mean this is going to be good DJing fodder. So I took this album to my most challenging gig. It’s a fortnightly dance in a large, echoey hall with a bullshitly inadequate sound system. The dancers are mostly new, even complete first-class beginners, and I usually do the first set of the night after the drop-in casual class. There are some more experienced dancers coming along, but this is a mixed crowd, and they don’t really have much time for shit DJing. If the DJ is rubbish, they walk up to Newtown’s main street full of bars and cafes. I find anything lo-fi just disappears into the high ceiling at this venue, and ends up sounding like shit. So I tend to DJ hi-fi and new bands almost exclusively there. Because I am chicken shit.

So I put this CD to the set in that setting. If it could work here, it could work anywhere.

I did my best to set it up properly. I think new music deserves that. So I started with some Big 18, a bit of Gordon Webster (current flavour of the month), some Mora’s Modern Rhythmists, and then it was time to bust out ‘Jersey Bounce’. Instant success. The floor was PACKED. Even the most jaded, heard-it-all-before experienced dancers were up and working it. Yes, we’ve all heard ‘Jersey Bounce’ a million times before, we know every note. We’ve heard every version. But this one is just fucking GREAT. WIN!

I played a few other modern bands in that set, from small to large, from New Orleans to New York. I also played ‘St Louis Blues’ from the Berkout CD, and it went down just as well. This isn’t always the most successful song with lindy hoppers. The tempo and rhythm changes often confuse new dancers. Not this night. WIN!

To be honest, if I’d thought I could have gotten away with it, I’d have played the entire CD, song after song. But there were a handful of other DJs in the room, DJs who’d pick up on that sort of stunt. And I have a rep to protect.

In future, though, this CD is going to be on my go-to list. When I need something solidly swinging and absolutely brilliant for solid lindy hop to introduce the music to beginners, this is on the short list. When I need a hi-fi recording to cope with a difficult sound set up, this is what I’m going to play. When I need a high energy, pumping song to kick a jam into gear, this is going to cut it.

I have been shamelessly pimping this album to all the DJs I know. It’s also an album I’ll recommend to new dancers or people looking for an easy entry point to classic swing.

I could conceivably get tired of this album in the near future. But not before I’ve played it so many times dancers audibly groan when they hear the first two notes of the song.

Yes, you do need another version of ‘Jersey Bounce’. Buy this CD.

* There are exceptions, plenty of them are American and well known with dancers. In Australia, the JW Swing Orchestra, for example, particularly around 2002, specialised in Benny Goodman arrangements, practiced regularly and was seriously tight. The Ozcats here in Sydney are a fully sick Bob Crosby tribute band, but they’re really not a hardcore swing era big band like Benny Goodman’s. Still, the Ozcats is made up of some of Australia’s tightest, most professional and experienced musicians. Who’ve been doing this thing for a looong time. And of course, bands like Melbourne’s Red Hot Rhythmakers are fully sick.