Sultans of Swing On a Quiet Night in Austin

About jazz they were never wrong, the old Masters.

Dire Straits performing in October 1985, Drammenshallen, Norway. Photo by Helge Øverås via Wikimedia Commons.

Everything was slightly off last night at the Seven Grand Bar on the east side of Austin’s downtown. It was a quiet Thursday night, not a bustling weekend. The bar wasn’t on the city’s notorious “Dirty Sixth” street, the favored venue of the barely-21 drunkards of central Texas, but a quieter block uphill to the north. And most of all, the audience inside the Seven Grand wasn’t much bigger than the band. There were four people on stage, plus a sound man, and perhaps seven people listening, at least for the first set.

The jazz band—a skinny Telecaster, a Gretsch-like guitar almost as wide as it was long, a huge stand-up bass, and a fine drummer with a tiny tom-tom atop his set—played a Louisiana shuffle, then a blues, and then (I think) “In a Silent Way.” What struck me most was the extraordinary quality of the music on offer. It was played beautifully, with thoughtful energy. The bassist in particular repeatedly offered up surprising, even playful, solos. As the band played “Real Compared to What?” the crack of the billiards table behind me contributed to the beat.

It made me think of that refrain from the 1978 hit by Dire Straits, “Sultans of Swing,” in which an earnest jazz band playing on a rainy night in south London is neglected by bystanders because “it’s not what they [the audience] call rock ‘n’ roll.”

Yes, as I looked around last night, I didn’t “see too many faces,” as the song relates. For all that, it might well have been the best live music available anywhere in the country last night.