The Feds
Compact Disk Review:
"The Federal Jazz Commission, On Tap,
Recorded Live at Col. Brooks Tavern, Washington, D.C. 1997"
14 tracks; total time: 66:14; MSR: $15.00
Available from the band enroute to/ from the bar at breaks.
The D.C. native of refined sensibilities wearies as things decent and lovely in his world are trampled by Ostrogoths and Visigoths swarming to Zany-Brainy, 5K runs, Silver Diner and other such symptoms of barbarism and degradation. But just as he despairs, comes a sign, a reminder that this area still has the stuff that produced the likes of Duke Ellington.
Not far from Ellington's birthplace in Brookland, D.C.,at Colonel Brooks' Tavern, a holy place of prayer and meditation in this "the Catholic Ghetto," plays the Federal Jazz Commission on Tuesday nights. I can't imagine there being anything like "the Feds" in Chicago, New York, that Devil's Triangle place in North Carolina, or even in New Orleans, a band performing what is commonly known as "Dixieland" as it was belted out in the '20s, a music actually played only by an elite and never mainstream few. The Feds' renditions are, thankfully, unsullied by any be-bop or progressive touches, any nods to contemporary tastes a la those '40s movie biographies of famous jazz musicians. The brass includes a panoply of mutes. The vocalist has an array of megaphones as used by the lousy singers in the pre-Crosby era; his voice is just a little less lousy than theirs was.
Selection titles on this CD "in quo" are familiar only to codgers, dodderers and mossy turds who know what an Edison vertical groove is and who Scrappy Lambert and Irving Kaufman were. They include "Sensation Rag" first recorded by the pioneer Original Dixieland "Jass" Band in 1918, "Diga Diga Doo" cut by Ellington himself 10 years later.
Epilogue, 2004: Colonel Brooks was, in 2003, the scene of a yet-unsolved, brutal, triple, murder/robbery: 3 employees shot in the freezer before opening. Business seems to be better than ever.
Copyright © 1997, 2004 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.