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Tuba Fats CD Review
Do
You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?
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Lovers of New
Orleans music mourn the untimely
passing of Anthony "Tuba Fats" Lacen on
January 11, 2004. If you've visited the Big Easy and listened
to live jazz, odds are you've heard Tuba Fats. He was a
mainstay of the city's best-known jazz venues, including
Preservation
Hall and Jackson
Square. The first time I heard him on the Square,
I knew I had found the True Source of Jazz in the city where
it was born. It was in the air, everywhere, echoing off
the cobblestones, resounding to the spires of St. Louis
Cathedral. "I don't need to be a millionaire. If I
want to play on the street, that's my business. We're not
beggars, we're not homeless," Tuba Fats said in a 2000
interview in Offbeat
Magazine. "I play in Jackson Square and I do
it because peoples love music and I love to see peoples
enjoy music. People come to New Orleans to hear the music
and they don't get it up and down Bourbon Street. It's not
there anymore." Tuba believed there was something about
New Orleans street music that would never die. Let's hope
and pray!
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Marketing
Music in the Subway
After busking in the New York subways for several years, guitarist Nick
Thompson has learned what puts money in the hat, and what does not.
He shared his street savvy with the record industry in a commentary
on NPR's
All Things Considered (013004). There are two likely performance
spots down there - the hallways (good for instantly familiar tunes like
Beatles songs) and the subway platforms (where people wait and can listen
to longer, less familiar music). "The record industry seems to
think that the whole music world functions like hallway musicians and
that deciding whether to buy something should only take three seconds
of thought," Thompson says. "So the industry promotes and
packages music in recognizable ways and easy categories: another 16-year-old
girl showing off her navel, another tough-as-nails rapper, another Rolling
Stones tour. But the universe of music buyers is incredibly wide, thoughtful
and hard to segment."
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