Dancing Across The Generations

On assignment for the Greenwich Times, on Wednesday night I covered a concert by the Bob Button Orchestra in Old Greenwich, Conn. at Binney Park. For years now, the orchestra has been the premier swing band in Fairfield County.

Modeled after the classic swing bands of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, like the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the band this past Wednesday night boasted trombones, trumpets, saxophones, a percussion section, and a singer.

The audience was largely composed of seniors from the community—white, of course, was the prevailing hair color—but there were also those parents who brought their younger children. Nary a teenager was to be seen. The closet fit was three ten year-old boys tossing a baseball far behind the last beach chairs of the audience.

It’s always refreshing to find yourself alone for your age group—but it can be somewhat startling too. (I should point out that I would certainly not have attended the concert if it weren’t for my assignment to it. I had no plans to sit in casual office wear on the Binney Park lawn on a hot, muggy, mosquito-filled evening. So to be fair, I cannot claim to be that lone spectator representing the college crowd.)

But even more refreshing than my solitude was the way that people tried to pigeonhole me.

While interviewing a representative from the town’s department of parks and recreation, he pointed out the portable dance floor in front of the stage and said, “Hopefully we’ll see you dancing out on the floor.” The remark was not said without some sly sarcasm.

“I can actually dance swing…which is weird for someone my age,” I fired back at him.

Distracted by the set-up for the concert going on around him, the comment caught him off guard. “That is weird,” he told me, before wandering away from me without any parting words, as if my retort had cast me into a role too old-fashioned for my age, as if I were some impossible creature.

~

I exaggerate the man’s reaction, of course, but I am not without my point. Later on, as I interviewed one of the trombone players in the band, he explained that they band plays “a combination of pretty much everything people want to hear.”

Curious about how limiting “everything” was, I asked him if that confined the ensemble to big band music from the 30s through the 50s.

“We come up a little better than that,” he said and frowned. “It’s all the music that these people here [at the concert] want to hear.”

“I listen to some of that stuff, too!” I told him. (Which, on reflection, is somewhat of a white lie. While I’ve listened to early blues and country records, I haven’t made the journey to classic big band and jazz. But I figured that, if need be, dragging the western swing of Bob Wills into the conversation would be enough proof.)

“Good,” said the trombonist…and that was all. I moved on to the next question.

~

A few months ago, however, I had very nearly the polar opposite experience. With a couple of friends, I drove down from Hamilton College into Clinton, N.Y. and went to a Kirkland Art Center coffeehouse, featuring Ginny Hawker and Terry Schwartz.

Hawker and Schwartz are practitioners of old-time country music—from deep in Appalachia, the kind of music that has been passed down through the mountain families from generation to generation. The average age of the audience lingered somewhere in the low 50s. Five college students were more than out of place at the concert.

But we were rewarded with the venture. After the concert, Hawker herself came over to thank us for our attendance and encourage out interest in old-time music, suggesting that we attend some bluegrass festivals down south over this summer.

Even better, on our way back to the car, an older man stopped us in the parking lot. He just wanted to hear for himself that we were interested in the older music. He held a few new vinyl records of The New Lost City Ramblers in his arms (Schwartz is a sometime member of the band).

“So you like this music?” he asked us, gesturing to his vinyls and we nodded.

Astounded that someone under the age of 40 could know who the Carter Family was or even care, the man walked away from us that night with his world shaken. How could college students like old-time bluegrass? How was it possible?

Something tells me that everyone reaches that age when the world seems to stop liking the things that we like. We won’t be the young and hip any longer—the arbiters of popular culture; taste will have moved on.  But nothing is ever totally lost. However terrifying the thought may be, someday we may find a young person who likes Radiohead or Nirvana and be pleasantly surprised. How’s that possible? we will think.