Dive Bars, Dance Halls, and Coliseums
by Benjy Steinberg
The way I see things, a musician can play live for three types of crowds: a listening audience, a socializing audience, or a dancing audience.
Many of us remember our first experience as a member of a listening audience: I was five years old and with my mom at the Dave Matthews Band show in the L.A. Coliseum. A musical act performs for a listening audience. It is a spectacle. It has fans. But this type of performance also has a darker side. A listening audience arrives with expectations. They scrutinize. And the musicians are aware of this. Nerves might run high. Opportunities for egoism are rife. On one hand, the musical act and the audience might feed off each other’s energy symbiotically to create a transcendent experience. However, the pressure for something wonderful could also diffuse, or, even worse, scrutiny and anxiety could set off a chain of negative reactions. Because of these dramatic consequences, “live concerts” with listening audiences are embedded in musical lore. Something’s always on the line.
Music isn’t the primary reason why socializing audiences congregate. You go with your date to a restaurant, with your friends to a bar, or with your family to a bar- mitzvah, and there’s a quartet playing background music. For all the negative connotations of this phrase, music for a socializing audience has great merit. It provides atmosphere. People invent non sequiturs about the band. They talk a bit louder, lean in a bit closer, it’s social grease. However, the performers are more or less ignored. Who remembers the first time they heard live music? Likely not many people. Also probable that it occurred as part of a socializing audience. Presumably, the first time you noticed music was as part of a listening audience. Having played these gigs myself, I’m always charmed by the inevitable few old-timers that approach my jazz quintet, smile, and sip their cocktails nostalgically as a respite from, or in absence of (I can never really tell) social interaction. But, all self-pitying aside, musicians put themselves in these situations for the love of playing music, for marginally building their fan base, for anthropological observation. Oh, and did I forget to mention, for food and a roof over their heads? But certainly not for the spotlight.
A concert for a dancing audience forms a happy middle ground between listening-audience and socializing-audience performances. I recently had the opportunity to play live music for a dancing audience. It was magical. My jazz big band was playing a monthly swing dance in New Haven. Our audience was neither scrutinizing nor ignoring us. Rather, the band and the audience combined into a single pulsing organism. Each time I glanced up from my sheet music, the sight of bodies creating movement to our rhythms and melodies felt genuinely collaborative. There was something communal, even primal about the act. It was a ritual in which the musicians were the shaman: not only leaders, but also kin. We were as much part of the audience as the audience members themselves. True, we needed to keep the tempo, to vary the intensity and volume to optimize the dancers’ experience. But above that threshold of competency, we had free license to relax and feel appreciated. This harmonious musician-dancer relationship also extends into concert dance and musical theater, in which an actor or dancer mediates music to an audience by interacting with a musical act.
Of course, all of the above is gross oversimplification. We vary temporally and individually in our mixtures of these audience-roles during and between performances. Because of this mutability, thinking about different audience types is important not only for our intellects, but also for our consciences. So next time you hear a live musician on the street, at the club, or in Madison Square Garden, assess the role you’re playing as an audience member. Think about how you’re treating the musical act, and about how the musical act is treating you. And these audience-roles extend into every aesthetic discipline: visual art, architecture, film, theater, writing. Our roles as audiences follow us everywhere. Which begs the question: are you listening to me, socializing around me, or dancing with me?