Oysters, jazz and camaraderie

John Oden is a longtime Charleston musician. He's a good one. He can strum the guitar with the best of them.

He gives a heckuva oyster roast, too.

On the Sunday between Christmas and New Year's, he and his wife, Ann, invited some friends to their Summerville home off the north Ashley River for some of the tasty morsels, other delicious foods, stories, music and fellowship.

It was cold but sunny and clear in their yard. The beer was frosty and the mounds of shellfish steamy.

There are plenty of oyster roasts in the Lowcountry this time of year, but this one was special.

Not too long after I arrived, I realized that all of us there were connected to the local music scene in some sort of way. In fact, I was probably the only nonmusician there.

After devouring the oysters, chili, cheese, crackers and other goodies, we all sort of gravitated inside the house, chatting, telling stories and just having a grand old time.

What made this special was a recognition that we had a bond. That social glue at that gathering was the common thread of being involved in the burgeoning jazz scene around here.

Sure, there are the usual ups and downs, especially with the recession, but overall we're going gangbusters.

Not only are there more gigs, more venues, more fans and more movement toward mainstream acknowledgement, there is more musical and social exchange among musicians who didn't used to interact so much.

That was the general vibe at John and Ann's. There were little pockets of conversation and interaction, but we all kept coming back to accounts -- recent and past -- about jazz music.

Of course, there was music everywhere.

Earlier, I wandered into a home studio that looked to have once been a living room. There were instruments everywhere -- a trombone, drum kit, bass fiddle and guitars all over the place. An impeccable system was putting out some Chet Baker, giving a sound to the feel of the room.

Later on in the studio, after we all ended up in the house, some of the guys sat down to those instruments.

When I walked in, John Tecklenburg was wailing on the keyboards, Duda Lucena was on one of the guitars and Tony Agresta was working out on the trombone.

That energy jelled into a tune being composed in real time.

Here's Oden description of the song. He talks just like he plays guitar:

"The song that Duda and Tony wrote was based off a little bossa vamp that Duda started. Then Tony added a melody, and it started to stretch. Duda's ears could hear the changes. Tony was outlining, and before long, they had the form. Beautiful."

There were lots of laughs in the kitchen. Teck was teasing me, accusing me of sending a woman to Gennaro's the previous Thursday night to hear Mike Gennaro's band. I honestly can't remember her. But he said in mock indictment that it had to be me. The woman approached the band, he said, complimenting the musicians and saying she recognized some of them from a recent big band concert (probably the Charleston Jazz Orchestra) and they were great, too.

The ironic icing on this cake for Teck was that she became caught up in describing her recent discoveries, capping it all off by exclaiming that some people (probably the Charleston Jazz Initiative) were researching Fud Livingston, a notable swing era player-composer from Charleston.

We all burst out in chuckles when we realized by John's dramatic storytelling that she had no idea that Teck is Fud's great-nephew and that he has been working with CJI to come up with stuff on Fud.

She had unwittingly brought the good news to a source of the good news.

There was a great deal of pride in our guffaws, however. What got our attention as much as the humor of the situation was the realization that the message of the local jazz scene was getting through.

I didn't mind at all being the butt of that joke.

We felt just as much pride when we listened in to NPR to hear some of the interview with Charleston drummer Ron Free, a subject of The Jazz Loft Project, the hottest topic about the music these days. Everybody's face lit up with joy for Ron, Charleston and jazz. (I've been talking to Ron and writer-researcher Sam Stephenson about the project. More on that later.)

It had been a great day already, in part attributable to running into Tony again. It had been a while since we had seen each other. He's an older gentleman who's been around the jazz block a couple of times.

He has great stories, which he copiously inflects with wit and humor. He lives and breathes music. Even his harassing me to try the bean and pasta soup was a kick. His melodic verbal descriptions of the delight of eating the soup were hilarious, so although I had had oysters and chili already, I had to take Tony up on his urgent suggestion.

It was like being persuaded by a song.

The day's experience was the latest in a long line of great times I continue to have working in jazz.

I'm blessed to live and work in a community uch as this. I hope you like what you do as much as I do.

Jack McCray, author of "Charleston Jazz," can be reached at jackjmccray@aol.com.