posted on Apr, 7 2011 @ 09:52 AM
I have been fortunate with music. My father was a wannabe musician. He taught me to sing and forced me to practice the clarinet as a child. I got
good. Through HS and college I sat solo chair sang in all the choirs as well as becoming accomplished on several other instruments. It was through
this foundation that I realized much about life.
My father hated rock and roll. He had raised me on swing and crooners like Sinatra and sirens such as Holiday.
He also sang barbershop quartet and let me see how joyous music could be.
Now the mystique of rock was that it was the music of rebellion the music of a new breed of youth freeing itself from the bonds of the past and crying
freedom. So we thought.
When the Beachboys came out with Little Deuce Coop, I found my chance. I told my dad that these guys were harmony singers and he loved harmonies from
his barbershop singing, so he listened. He said, ok maybe he had been too restrictive in his taste and allowed me to listen to rock at home. The
second record I brought home was "Papas Gotta Brand New Bag" by James Brown. Oops , back to the drawing board for me. But I digress.
Then I learned that rock was just another phase. That music had been evolving . Dixieland and ragtime. Swing and boogie woogie. Each new phase
catching the fancy of coming of age youth.
I lived in San Francisco as a child and was swept away with the music scene there in the mid to late sixties. Acid rock and blues young people
experimenting with all kinds os musical expression. Zappa. Oh.
And Ravi Shankar blowing us all away at Monterey. Terry Riley and early computerized music from across the bay and Tower of Power. It seemed the feast
would never end. On through the years, there'd be new musicians and singers finding new and different ways of creating beauty. I soared with it all.
And through it all the Beatles, morphing before our very ears, changing and evolving like no one before or since.
But then one day I realized that not all of my friends were like me. In the early 70s I found blue grass and fell in love but my rock friends didn't.
I realized they didn't like classical either, or jazz. What was going on here?
I came to find that many or most people were like my father. They would open up to music to a degree, basically find their own coming of age music and
then stick with it. I worked for a number of years with guys that were ten years younger than me and were basically stuck musically in the mid to late
70's. They still are.
The music industry is partly to blame. In my day, we could listen to the few radio stations we had and they would play it all, rock, soul, blues,
jazz. Then as the frequencies expanded with FM, the money makers began to target the youth with telescopic sight accuracy. One station would play one
kind of music with commercials targeted at one specific demographic group. Another station would find another age group and do the same. Golden Oldies
stations catering to one decade or another would feed one type of familiar music after another to people who had become imprisoned in their own
musical vibration.
You see OP? I got back to your OP.
Music? A key to enlightenment?
Get collections of tts best of.....spend a month falling into jazz. Monk, Bird, Coltrane, Miles, Brubeck. Spend the next month in the classics,
Brahms, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Debussy, Respighi. Do a week of blue grass, the Monroe Brothers, The Watsons, the Stanleys, the Blue Sky Boys.
Get in and absorb. Soak up all the creative genius of our human artists. Record it all because where ever we all end up going, from Andromeda to the
20th Dimensional Overlay of the Eternal Time Matrix, they will all want to hear what was sung and played on that small planet. Earth, the music box of
the cosmos.