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#510222 - 11/21/24 09:41 AM
Re: OT : Jon Baptiste’s Beethoven Blues
[Re: montunoman]
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Senior Member
Registered: 10/20/09
Posts: 3230
Loc: Dallas, Texas
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#510248 - 12/03/24 10:47 AM
Re: OT : Jon Baptiste’s Beethoven Blues
[Re: montunoman]
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Senior Member
Registered: 10/20/09
Posts: 3230
Loc: Dallas, Texas
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Since that this topic generated so much conversation, I thought I’d revisit it, LOL.
Funny, for the most part, I’ve noticed jazz / pop pianist aren’t too impressed with Jon’s efforts to infuse the blues on into Beethoven. The reaction has been much more positive among my classical pianist’s counterparts. I think the jazz guys are just hearing the same old blues licks mechanically, inserted into an old classic , while classical guys are hearing something more fresh . The reaction was overwhelming favorable among non musicians though, who thought it was a completely original and genius take on a classic. By the way, this album is now number one on the classical/crossover charts. Immediately a very niche market, but how many of us have number one albums? LOL 😂
These reactions reminded me of Bill Evan’s thoughts on the layperson vs professional level musicians ability to hear and perceive music:
I do not agree that the layman’s opinion is less of a valid judgement of music than that of the professional musician. In fact I would often rely more on the judgement of a sensitive layman than that of a professional since the professional because of his constant involvement with the mechanics of music must fight to preserve the naivety that the layman already possesses.”
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#510252 - 12/06/24 09:32 AM
Re: OT : Jon Baptiste’s Beethoven Blues
[Re: montunoman]
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Registered: 04/25/05
Posts: 14274
Loc: NW Florida
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Keeping fresh ears is always a struggle for professionals! I try as hard as I can, but lay appreciation of music has taken such a downturn in the last 20 years or so, I refuse to be swayed by modern lay acceptance.
The charts are dominated by horrible little ditties with absolutely no harmonic interest in them, anything with more than four chords is shunned, choruses sound like the verses, precious few actual bridges, and heaven help you if you use a diminished or augmented chord or even stray far from diatonic simplicity…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of good popular music, it isn’t all Bill Evan’s and Oscar Peterson for me! I like rock, reggae, punk, grunge, you name it. But today’s dumbed down pop just does little for me. It’s no coincidence that the kids still revere great bands from the 70’s and 80’s, 40-50 year old music, when we (as a generation) didn’t exactly embrace music from the 20’s and 30’s back in the era when pop WAS ‘great’!
Pop lost its doorkeepers. There’s so little real money in pop any more, social media allows any hack to promote themselves almost as well as major acts, and we have lost the ‘filters’ that sieved out the garbage back when A&R men and the cost of music production kept it a field where actual talent was needed to even stand a faint chance of being heard.
The bar just keeps getting lower. And it keeps getting easier to impress nonprofessionals with music that wouldn’t even get past the talent scouts in the 70’s.
Be honest… what artist from today is likely to still get widespread airplay in 50 year’s time? Bet you they’re still playing Zeppelin, the Police, Journey, Marley etc in another 50 years.
_________________________
An arranger is just a tool. What matters is what you build with it..!
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#510255 - 12/10/24 11:44 AM
Re: OT : Jon Baptiste’s Beethoven Blues
[Re: montunoman]
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Senior Member
Registered: 10/20/09
Posts: 3230
Loc: Dallas, Texas
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Well Diki, I guess it’s just me and you that enjoy talking about music around here, or simply we’re just the last men standing, LOL.
Well, I completely agree with you about the sad state of affairs of modern popular music, but that wasn’t really my point . . But that is an interesting topic and I will add my two cents in it little bit here..
I was trying to say, if perhaps you could hear John Baptiste’s version of Fur Elise as a non-musician., you might enjoy it a little bit more.. but who knows?
As far as your assessment of popular music, I am in complete agreement. The frustrating thing is, I don’t think we’ve ever been in a period of time where we’ve had so many great young musicians.. there’s preteen kids out there that can absolutely burn on jazz standards, the classical repertoire, or any other genre for that matter. and there’s plenty of established pop artists like Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars for example, that can can really play and sing, but my feeling is they are pressured to really dumb things down and make it sound like everything else so they can sell.
I think older musicians always have and always will be critical of current musical trends. While you and I might look back with fondest of The Beatles for example, they for sure, had their fair share of criticism from the older musicians from that time period.
I remember when I was 12 years old, I was at home and heard the breaking news of John Lennon getting shot dead. My dad and his best friend, who happened to be a very accomplished jazz drummer were in the living room, listening to Clifford, Brown, and Max Roach. I burst in the living room to tell them the tragic news, and my dad‘s friends said something really awful “ it’s about time they shot that.***** , I hope they shoot the rest of that lousy band that destroyed music “
I’m not saying that you are like my dad’s friend, Diki. But as you are very well aware, anyone over 30 that is critical of youth culture, fashion and music will come across as rather cantankerous. Now get off my lawn! LOL 😂
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#510257 - 12/10/24 04:35 PM
Re: OT : Jon Baptiste’s Beethoven Blues
[Re: montunoman]
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Registered: 04/25/05
Posts: 14274
Loc: NW Florida
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Yes, damn kids are ruining my lawn!
The thing I tried to point out though is, the music of the 60’s-80’s is still revered by youngsters today. It is sampled, quoted and imitated every day by young musicians. This is a LONG way away from most young musicians of the 60’s-80’s, who were doing their level best to sound NOTHING like the jazz and big band era, which was really only 20 years before the 60’s, let alone 50 years prior, which is how far back the 70’s are to today..!
There’s plenty of modern music that floats my boat, I don’t really think I’m analogous to jazz musicians from the 40’s and 50’s who hated rock and roll and the Beatles etc.. Snarky Puppy, Jacob Collier and many others excite me at every listen, but let’s face it, they’re not even a blip on the charts. I think much of the pushback in the 60’s from the old jazzers was from their gigs drying up as rock and roll took over the dancehalls. Money talks!
But the same thing hasn’t really happened to 60’s-80’s rock, yacht rock and pop. One of the biggest trends in today’s bar/club scene is the proliferation of ‘tribute bands’, just a fancy form of cover bands. And trust me, they’re not doing tributes of modern music! It’s all Led Zeppelin, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel, David Bowie, Queen, Journey etc. that are getting the ‘tribute’!
And that’s simply something you NEVER saw in the 70’s.
If these things are popular now with youngsters, I think it’s a tacit admission that their own generation’s pop music just doesn’t excite them as much as ours did us.
I think a generation of music made primarily in bedrooms and small studios on computers hasn’t translated into something most people want to go see live. We’ve a handful of mega-acts like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé taking huge reviews out on the road, but local venues can’t afford that, and cover bands can’t afford that kind of staging. Strip away the glitz, what’s left musically is a bit threadbare…
Maybe I’m just an old fogey, but I stand by what I said… I doubt anywhere NEAR the percentage of 60’s-80’s music still popular now will survive the next 50 years as today’s music ages..! 🎹❤️
_________________________
An arranger is just a tool. What matters is what you build with it..!
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#510258 - 12/11/24 02:34 AM
Re: OT : Jon Baptiste’s Beethoven Blues
[Re: montunoman]
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Senior Member
Registered: 07/21/05
Posts: 5390
Loc: English Riviera, UK
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They were saying that the 60s - 80s music wouldn't be remembered back in those days, however this has been proved completely wrong, therefore saying the latest music won't last is in reality a complete unknown, and only history will tell. The biggest problem is technology, which is great if you use it to enhance your music, however most modern musicians use it as a crutch with very little of the musician coming through. Consider the old days in the 70s & 80s when home organs were in their heyday, you could tell who was playing by the style they had, however these days with arranger keyboards, they don't say that is so & so playing, they just say oh that's a Yamaha, Korg etc. (Even what style is being used) so essentially Thay are just listening to the pre-recorded sounds (Styles) of the instrument. Look at the Genos 2, it has some great effects that previously only used to be available in DAWs and synths, but apart from demos you never hear anybody using them, they instead just go for the canned styles and play along with them, and when new song specific styles come out (I think the Genos 2 added 800) the internet goes wild on arranger forums, but don't get a peep in musicians forums. (The main reason I avoid Yamah arrangers (Not Electones) is that they are the song specific style king, which just leaves me cold) In the late 80s early 90s instruments came out that you could press a button, and it produced a riff for you that was in the style that you wanted, rather than creating one yourself, which for me is not musicianship, sampling other people's work is the same, it's not the musician that is creating it but a 100% copy of somebody Elses work. (Tribute and cover bands while playing the old songs, all sound a bit different as no 2 musicians play the same) For the home hobby player, it is absolutely wonderful as they can sound great with little effort, (Which let's face it is what most home hobby players want) so I am certainly not knocking them, but for me it just doesn't float my boat. (I listen to them on You Tube and at organ & keyboard shows as it is great just to see someone playing and just enjoying themselves, as in the end that's what music is about) Rant over
Bill
_________________________
English Riviera: Live entertainment, Real Ale, Great Scenery, Great Beaches, why would anyone want to live anywhere else (I�m definitely staying put).
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#510264 - 12/13/24 11:23 AM
Re: OT : Jon Baptiste’s Beethoven Blues
[Re: montunoman]
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Registered: 04/25/05
Posts: 14274
Loc: NW Florida
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Not really sure who this ‘they’ is… People have always dissed contemporary music in favor of what they grew up with, but most of it was simple lay favoritism. You like what you grew up with.
But it’s pretty obvious why most music doesn’t survive as massively popular for 50+ years. In truth, jazzers can pretend that everything from say the 30’s and 40’s was superio, but the truth is that little of what was ACTUALLY popular mass music from back then is the kind of music that jazzers remember. Most dance jazz from back then was utterly formulaic stuff, and most of the truly groundbreaking jazz was fairly esoteric stuff that few listened to, most people favoring pablum you could dance to and not ‘listen’ to.
But if you analyse each period’s music, if you listen to the top 20 from each era, there’s a sweet spot from the 60’s-80’s where songs were diverse, complex, impeccably recorded, and very different from prior generations. And I think that’s the reason they have survived the test of time. It’s amazing how many 20 something’s are completely familiar with most of the top 10 songs from 50 years ago, yet despite being a musician that grew up in the 60’s, I can say with certainty I knew next to nothing about popular music from the 1910’s and 20’s, 40-50 years earlier.
I don’t think it’s generational bias, I just think the collapse of the recording industry has removed most of the money that drove the industry to great heights of creativity, and the MTV generation started the trend towards music that LOOKS good rather than sounding good. Those two factors have resulted in a generation whose music is designed for instant consumption and instant forgetting as the next video assaults your eyes.
Corporate control and the Spotify ‘algorithm’ has ensured that music that gets ‘pushed’ to listeners is as close as possible to what they just listened to. That isn’t how you leave an indelible mark on the future. It’s how you maximize short term profit. We often discount the work of talent scouts, A&R men and talented producers, and it’s true that music executives earned a fair bit of flack in the past for predatory practices, but compared to today’s faceless music executives they look like a bunch of wild eyed dreamers!
Today’s industry is an AI driven robot powered dystopia that is designed to funnel the money to a tiny few, with no attemp to build long term sustainability. Back in the day, record companies wouldn’t expect a profit from a newly signed artist until maybe the second album. Now, if TODAY’S single doesn’t get enough streams, it’s time to move on to the next ‘artist’.
I don’t think it’s a wait and see to find out if today’s pop has legs. We can already see it doesn’t. Try to list anything from the 2010’s that is surviving the 2020’s…. In the meantime, today’s kids can reel off a dozen names of artists from the 70’s and 80’s.
Money drives an industry, and the gross of the music industry during the 70’s and 80’s has never been equaled. It’s a pyramid, you need a huge base for a tall pyramid. The collapse of the industry pretty much guarantees we will never see those heights again. The CEO of Spotify made more money than any of the artists they play. When the vast majority of an industry’s profits go to people with no creativity in the slightest, what’s the incentive to create the next ‘big’ thing? If it doesn’t sound almost identical to the current ‘big’ thing, it’s never going to get heard.
History is showing its hand. I do not think we have to wait 50 years to determine that today’s pop isn’t going to influence people 50 years from now. We can see it happening (or not happening!) today.
_________________________
An arranger is just a tool. What matters is what you build with it..!
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