by Paul Klemperer

Last week I was riding back from Houston after a gig, talking with musicians whom I hadn't seen in some time, when one of them remarked wistfully that the blues scene in Austin has changed in recent years. It used to be that everyone knew each other. Now the scene has become fragmented and there is less of a sense of community. In particular, young players are coming up with little connection to the older players.

What my friend had noticed was a change in the way musical traditions are passed between generations. Perhaps it was never an ideal picture, but Austin of the last three or four decades had a closer-knit live music scene, where people shared musical ideas, and older players naturally passed their experience on down the line to the younger players coming up the ranks. It seemed like there were more musicians per square inch than anywhere else in the country, but at the same time there was that small town familiarity between us.

With the rise of the recording industry earlier in this century, musicians could learn a musical tradition without being physically part of it. This, along with formal music education, has meant that musicians can choose which tradition and which community they want to belong to. It has become a very fluid situation, not necessarily detrimental, but also not altogether conducive to maintaining a strong sense of community. A daily, face-to-face type of community gives way to what I call an "archival" community. The danger in this is that economic forces can redefine and water down a musical tradition in the interest of a profitable fad or marketing gimmick. On the positive side, musicians have always dealt with the economic realities of popular music and have maintained some integrity. In the short term it may look like Hollywood and Nashville leeches suck the life out of local music scenes, but in the long run, local communities continue to thrive.

Austin's music community is directly affected by the pattern of the city's growth. Probably the starkest change has been the influx of corporate white-collar workers from out of state, as well as from Dallas and Houston. These folks have settled largely in the outer circle of Austin, bounded by US Highway 183 to the north, 620 to the west and william Cannon to the south. The conventional wisdom is that they bring mainstream tastes to the city, and with their consumer dollars push the music scene further towards commercial music regardless of style. Thus, the jazz scene is inclined towards smooth jazz and swing, the country scene towards "progressive" country, traditional conjunto towards modern Tejano, and so forth.

The negative side of this shift is the loss of local traditions and musical identity in favor of trends determined by the music industry on a national level. This is a very real threat to the originality of local musicians. However, there are other mediating tendencies which benefit local artists. For one thing, the growth of Austin's population means a larger potential audience base and more music venues of a greater variety. Also, people do respond to good music, and a lot of people moving to Austin are aware of and support our local music traditions.

Clearly there is no going backwards. Austin is only going to get bigger, and there will be an increasing economic impetus for local musicians to be subsumed into nationally determined musical trends. But this is all the more reason for local artists to strengthen their ties to each other, support musical activities which foster the kind of face-to-face community that the corporate music industry can never replace. Events like jam sessions, benefit shows, live radio broadcasts, workshops and school lecture/demonstrations maintain the vitality of Austin's music community.

In the Austin of the 21st century there will be an interesting mix in our music community, a melange of old-school, self-taught players, road warriors who use the city as their home base, up and coming ingenues, university trained professionals, and so on. If we can preserve the old institutions -- the venerable dives, the honored oldtimers, the weekly open mikes and jams, while at the same time adapting to the economic and technological changes which affect our music community at various levels (commercial recording studios, corporate live venues, etcetera) -- we can make Austin's musical traditions more secure and vital, rather than letting them mutate into formulaic offspring of corporate America.