Slow fade of time

 

Blues is fading because the bulk of people with the soul of blues have left the world. Young people are either cool to a frozen degree [that is, my view of pop is it’s a kind of empty with cheap majesty ] or wildly hot [Garbage Metal]. The big beat is big. Electronic Dance Music, a Spanish World Beat Big. And rhyming. Maybe rhyming is eternal.

The idea of a fade speaks also for Jazz.  Jazz built on blues, had a couple of blues refreshes [MJQ, Les McCann …] but blues gave way to swing. Finger snapping. To me the roots of jazz are as much a commentary/statement/riff/re-imagining of American popular music from 1915 to 1955, as anything. Reflection on Bing Crosby. With swing and then just abstraction. Jazz musicians rightly held up their music as as good as classical, but in the process got academic. Intellectual. Young people are not likely to relate to any of the above. All moot points. Jazz ages - the audience is gray haired in large part. At least in this country. . If I go to see classical music everyone has gray hair. Except the students.

Both Blues and Jazz should have more bastard children - hurry sundown.

Listen to San Francisco or Boston. The noise that is in the air. In my opinion, the cars and planes and humming refrigerator truck of Metropolis rules. It is a breeding place for the youth’s music, and it is a different breeding place than the sound canvas we came up in…I know a kid growing up in Racine was more likely to end up with a marching band or school band instrument [or accordion, or piano lessons] than a guitar. Jazz is about all those instruments. But today’s music, if it’s not about guitars, is about electronic sounds, and throbbing sound of Metropolis. In the words of Bad Bunny: "No molestar por favor." - J.V.