I'm not sure what's going on. Either New York slide-trumpet player and bandleader Steve Bernstein is getting better, or I'm coming around (maybe both). Bernstein, who with his band Sex Mob has been making reasonably amusing and background-filling albums for the better part of a decade, never really clicked with me. His music seemed so insubstantial, so resolutely finger-poppin' hey-daddy ironically-detached aren't-we-cool hipsterish, that I never gave it much of a chance.

In retrospect, I think that's a shame. Because behind the wide-lapel cheapo porno shtick he's peddled is a bandleader whose guiding purpose in life is to make music for people to have a good time by.

That skill of making good-time music doesn't seem to get a whole lot of respect. All the music critics swoon over Brian Wilson's brain-fractured experimentation, and ignore the sweet and fun stuff. They flip out over the far-out stylings on Smile, but what about "Surf City?" "Surf City" is a perfect song, a summer song, a song about good times and scantily clad ladies cavorting on a white sand beach. No respect for "Surf City."

All the nerds (all the world!) swoon over Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for some silly-ass reason, and while they acknowledge that the early stuff sure is some crack songwriting, the consensus seems to be that drugs and four hundred hours of studio time somehow trump, you know, attention to extraneous cruft like melody and lyrics. A song like "A Day in the Life" demands to be appreciated, like it was hanging in some museum, but there ain't a damn song in the world that sums up the innocence of young love more than "I Want To Hold Your Hand."

And, okay, yes, over the years I have spent a lot of time talking up music that's more intellectually rewarding than aesthetically pleasing, I won't deny it. How could I deny it? Y'all got Google. And yes, I haven't always cared for Sex Mob. I always thought they were more gimmicky and clever than actually good. And I stand by that assessment.

But recently, Steve Bernstein's been on a hell of a tear. He recently turned up on drummer Bobby Previte's outstanding Coalition of the Willing project, a Bitches Brew for the new millennium that cuts an atmosphere of Miles-esque darkness with generous slices of rock, thrilling improvisation, and twisty, funky soloing from Bernstein.

And now, his new project, the Millennium Territory Orchestra is a bold yet frivolous tribute to a gone and nearly forgotten era in American popular music.

In the 1920s and 1930s, 'territory' bands plied circuits all around the country. Minneapolis bands would play from Madison to Kansas City. Cleveland bands would range from Detroit to Pittsburgh to Yellow Springs, bringing that era's freewheeling proto-swing sound to dancehalls, honky tonks, and bars. Many if not most of these bands vanished without a trace, remembered only in faded photo albums and in stories swapped in nursing homes around the country. Few made recordings, and those who did released three-minute 78s to a market that was not yet national, that did not yet have any mechanism for preserving their work. Little wonder, then, that not many people remember a genre that's not quite Dixieland (tied to New Orleans, a city very good at remembering) and not quite swing (whose rise coincided with the rise of radio).