New L. A. Country Is Slowly Emerging From Shadow of Nashville

The Los Angeles country music scene hasn’t really changed so much over the last half decade. Local artists still play their own brands of old-style honky-tonk, neo-traditionalism, Western beat or country rock, and very often congregate at Ronnie Mack’s Tuesday night “Barndance” shows at the Palomino Club.

But though these free showcases at the North Hollywood venue have remained a central part of the local country movement, producer Dan Fredman says, another element in the careers of these players is still frustratingly unchanged.

“Nashville just hasn’t been interested in what was going on here, but there was still a cohesive group of bands,” he said. “Nashville doesn’t seem to acknowledge anything that happens outside their own sphere. But they’re starting to.”

If so, this slow emergence of new Los Angeles country undoubtedly owes something to the “A Town South of Bakersfield” albums, which have done much to showcase important local talents. The just-released third volume was produced by Fredman and includes such artists as the Neon Angels, Sid Griffin & the Coal Porters, Patty Booker and Harry Dean Stanton, the actor and longtime singer who makes his recording debut here.

They join some good company. In the years since the first “Bakersfield” album in 1985, a handful of participating musicians have gone on to some level of success. Dwight Yoakam, who was on the first volume, has found a solid place within the country mainstream, and locals Rosie Flores, Katy Moffatt, James Intveld, Jim Lauderdale and others have won their own audiences and proven influential to a still-newer generation.

“The ‘Bakersfield’ players are not necessarily doing this to get a record deal,” Fredman said. “They do it because they want to play. It’s a scene that’s fed by itself. Nobody’s waiting around for the newspapers and magazines to find out about it.

“You have a lot of cross-pollinations and styles. In Nashville, you get a lot of songs that are well-crafted. But here it’s more heartfelt.”

The album series’ title is a wry reference to California’s better-known Bakersfield scene, which spawned the careers of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard in the mid-1960s, when they were offering their own answer to the Nashville sound.

“The problem is that country music right now exists to feed the needs of country radio,” said Fredman, who mainly produces local acts and works as an artist and repertoire consultant to IRS Records. “And country radio has become real conservative. They don’t want to program music that’s going to cause people to change the station. They put music on that is non-offensive.

“The Neon Angels track on the record is much more aggressive than what you would hear on KZLA (93.9 FM), for instance,” he said. “But it has the energy you used to hear and feel in country music 20 years ago.

“We don’t hew to a particularly narrow vision of what country music is.”

As ever, the new “Bakersfield” collection was a low-budget effort, costing about $10,000, with 16 bands recording in 24 days. The recording studio charged a third of its normal rate, and the bands all played for nothing, although any profits would be divided evenly among them.

But the real purpose here, Fredman said, is to support the scene and win some “great exposure to help get your songs in front of other people.”

Fredman said he had actually hoped to fit about 24 bands on the disc, but Restless Records chose not to provide the larger budget needed, although some compromise was reached to increase the number of tracks from 10.

“I’m not saying these are the absolute best that was possible, but it is a good cross section of what was on the scene in 1992 in Los Angeles,” he said. The artists were chosen, he added, mainly through his own “gut reaction” to discoveries in the local clubs, along with recommendations of engineer Mike Dumas and others.

Plans for Volume 4 of the series, due for release by the winter, include breaking with tradition by compiling bands from across the country. Fredman said he will record only about five new songs for the album and will license the rest from other sources.

But Fredman said Los Angeles country owes much to others having brought the music here. “You can go back to the migrations after the dust storms in Oklahoma; a lot of people stayed here after the war; people came out of the South to work in the airplane factories,” he said. “People liked the music.”

FREE JAZZ: Tickets to shows by such artists as Branford Marsalis, Charlie Haden, Bobby Lyle, Billy Childs, Freddie Hubbard, Maynard Ferguson, David Benoit and the Turtle Island Quartet can sometimes be hard to come by. But over the last nine years, the “Jazz at the Wadsworth” series has offered free performances by these and other notable musicians.

Since the Wadsworth Theater in Westwood is limited to 1,450 seats, organizers “almost always turn people away” at the door, said Celesta Billeci, spokeswoman for the UCLA Center for the Arts.

The concerts are presented at 7 p.m. the first Sunday of every month.

Performing May 3 will be Project Iroko, an Afro-Caribbean ensemble led by percussionist Bill Summers, who’s worked with Herbie Hancock, Sting and Michael Jackson.

“It’s really mushroomed into something where we get at least 1,000 per concert,” said John Henson, adviser to the UCLA Student Committee for the Arts, which sponsors the series. “And the record labels have begun to notice it as a great location to showcase their artists. Now we’re getting a lot of name artists who are asking to become part of the series. The audience has slowly been growing.”

Henson said the series was created by the student committee and disc jockey Chuck Niles of the now-defunct jazz station KKGO-FM as a way to give local jazz artists some rare exposure. “The format has started to expand,” Henson said. “With KKGO, it was pretty much a straight jazz series. Now we’re doing jazz and jazz-influenced shows.”

The monthly performances are also taped for broadcast on KPCC (89.3 FM) at 8 p.m. the Sunday before the next scheduled concert.