Music So Little Night Music

When mixed drinks became legal in Dallas, there was some thought that we would be soon passing through the portals of a brave new world. There would be more sophisticated clubs, more sophisticated ways to spend our Friday and Saturday nights. There would be better music. We would have ways to raise ourselves from the suburban slump into which we had descended.

It is true, to some extent, that Dallas has ever-so-slowly begun to come to terms with the notion of musical entertainment in clubs and bars. The process has been piecemeal, and to seek comfort, we must remember what it was like in the Fifties when we were a miserable joke when it came to cabarets. Now it is 1975, and as Dallas continues to burgeon its way north towards Alaska, away from a past which it never really cared to remember, the new spots which are cropping up are further removed from the heart of the city. Four of them are worthy of a once over, if only because of their sincere, albeit misguided musical efforts.

For months, Oz (5429 LBJ Frwy.) appeared to Dallasites hungry for a bit of glamour much as it had appeared to Dorothy, who left her midwest black-and-white farmhouse to follow a technicolor dream down the yellow brick road. Before I went to see for myself, I had heard it described as a genuine European discothèque.

In fact, Oz is a lavish and impressive attempt at establishing a disco whose design has a heavy European accent. The result is moderately successful; still there are problems, musical and otherwise.

First, the location is troublesome. Oz is stuck out there in the loneliest of lonely suburban plots where the Toll-way dramatically embraces charming LBJ Freeway. I know all the reasons against it – the demographics, the market, the convenience – but I kept wishing they had put the place in the older part of town or (though this is too much to have hoped for) downtown itself.

The decor, like the atmosphere, is nouveau decadent moderne. You climb up and down, seeing yourself reflected in mirrors and awash in purple neon lights, drinking and moving about on any number of different levels. In keeping with the European tradition, the dance floor is small and intimate (and, so it seems, made of stainless steel). The intimacy, at the minimum, offers dancers a feeling of protection: after all, we’re in this together. And there is not much room to demonstrate one’s ability or inability to boogaloo, bop, lindy, bump or whatever it is one desperately tries to remember and reconstruct from one’s high school memories. So there is literally no room for mistakes. The crowd is a mixture of middleaged couples using the dance floor as a sort of Alka Seltzer to counteract their lavish six-course Oz dinners, and of the Beautiful People, dressed and posed for Vogue spreads. The result is a happy, self-conscious, squirming, bumping, entertaining mixture of swingles-shopping and middle-aged merrymaking.

But Oz’s split personality goes deeper than merely the gap between the various generations scuffing up the dance floor. There is also a musical incongruity. Discos are called discos because they play discs. To be pure about it, there should be no live music. And if Oz wanted to, it could survive on records alone. The sound system (put together by Angus Wynne III) is superb. The record formula, again arranged by Wynne, who understands these sorts of things, is first-rate. The diet is current black soul which is, after all, the food on which good discos must feed.

But Oz’s management has seen fit to try various brands of live entertainment in the disco. The North Texas State Lab Band performed off and on for months (and still might, though that remains uncertain). At first the news was exhilarating. The combination sounded creative and exactly right. It wasn’t. On the night I heard the band (or a band which largely consisted of members from North Texas’ band) it was the wrong time and the wrong place. They were playing Neal Hefti arrangements with-out the benefit of Hefti himself. Part of the fault was with Hefti’s charts – who can listen to his killer-diller Batman theme? – which are aimed for studio play and certainly not Oz’s stylish environs. But even more, the acoustics of a 16 or 17 man aggregation coming at you in that multi-layered room leaves you no room to breathe. You’re blasted against the mirrors; you’re drilled into the chrome.

On another night a group called Jubal sounded like a cross between the Carpenters, Peter, Paul and Mary and the New Christy Minstrels. Their music was just flat awful.

So Oz’s musical policy remains, like the place itself, an attempt to please everyone. At some point, though, Oz will have to decide whether to shelve the big band jazz and the occasional rock-tinged groups for something more or something less. Personally, I wish Oz would stick with what’s working best – the recorded music of Gladys, Marvin, Al, Curtis, the Ohio Players, the O’Jays – and stop bouncing back and forth between Vegas showroom and chic-chic disco.

In New York this winter, the cabaret singer has enjoyed a tremendous amount of press attention and nightclub play. It has been the year of Mabel Mercer. (I must say here that I am not a member of Mercer’s fan club. She has a way with song; she has wonderful taste when it comes to tunes; she has a strangely dry and lyrical style; but she has never sounded to me like a major artist. The St. Regis/Carlyle/Upper East Side sing-a-sophisticated-song syndrome strikes me as entirely too precious and elitist.) It has been the year of Sylvia Syms and Helen Humes, two aging and wonderful jazz-nightclub singers who are younger and more refreshing than ever. Led Zeppelin is forcing even marginal devotees of good jazz singing out of the closets to seek relief. Quiet romanticism is enjoying a soft boom.

In Dallas, Arthur’s, Bagatelle and the Enclave have thrown their hats into the cabaret singing ring with, I am afraid, little success.

At the bar at Bagatelle (Greenville Ave. at University), drummer Paul Guerrero leads a small group featuring a pretty singer, Jeanne Maxwell. The room itself is nothing special; another new spot on the Dallas eat-drink-and-be-merry map. The group is much the same. There is an ever-so-slight hint of jazz, a wisp of Anita O’Day and Julie London to Maxwell’s singing. It is pleasant to hear her sing such lovely songs as “Green Dolphin Street” and “Funny Valentine,” but you can’t help feeling the era evoked is properly dead and gone. It is thin, watered-down martini jazz, designed, one assumes, not to disturb the easy flow of business and courting conversation. It is not music for serious listening.

At Arthur’s (1000 Campbell Center), Barbara Kaufman has been leading a trio and playing, too, a cabaret game with the enthusiastic crowds, which most often create an atmosphere reminiscent of Texas-O.U. weekend. Her piano playing is limited; improvisation does not come easily to her. But she is actually an interesting singer with an experienced ear for the right songs. On any given weekend evening, she will sing “You Made Me Love You” or “Sleepy Time Down South” with great concern for lyric and melodic line. The instrumental numbers are endless and boring, designed presumably to bring the party-goers to the dance floor which, in Arthur’s handsome bar, is anywhere you find room around the bandstand.



At the Enclave (8325 Walnut Hill), Mark Franklin is in charge of a quartet which plays in the Enclave Club, a large bar which opens into one of the restaurant’s dining rooms. It is strange how parallel things are running musically in North Dallas these days, for Franklin is the precise male singing equivalent of Barbara Kaufman and Jeanne Maxwell. He is a discreet singer of some taste, of some knowledge of popular music. He whispers into the microphone, reminding me of his spiritual cocktail / piano / singer fathers – Matt Dennis and Bobby Troup and Roy Kral and Bobby Short (and even further back, I suppose, Nat Cole). He also brings to mind Mark Carroll, another jazzy lounge crooner who played Dallas in the Fifties at the Magic Grille, now long gone, on Lovers Lane.



In any event, like Barbara Kaufman, Franklin plays very little piano, barely enough to cover himself. And like Jeanne Maxwell, his singing is more suggestion than reality. So Mark Franklin, like the rest of them, plays for your dancing pleasure, for your post-dinner digestion, and ultimately melts into the decor and disappears. He is there as much to be looked at as listened to, and you must strain to hear his two or three thoughtful renditions during an evening which is otherwise musically bland.



Club musical entertainment inNorth Dallas still has a long way togo. Restaurant/bar owners need to getas serious about music as they areabout food. There is no reason musicalmenus cannot be upgraded by importing the fine cabaret singing talentwhich is emerging in Manhattan thisyear. Sylvia Syms and Helen Humesare not big-price-tag entertainment;they could be had at reasonable rates.It is a matter of wanting them, and amatter of conceiving of club music asmore than Muzak.