Live Music Archive

In the United Kingdom for the final 18 years at least, a whole generation has been virtually starved of live musicians for a variety of reasons. The arrival of PC’s being a standard household utility with their accompanying music production and downloadable music format devices, together with broad spread video and latterly DVD technology has kept a lot of a youngster indoors for most of their leisure time. Coupled with the rising overheads and prohibitive licence fees and conditions imposed on United Kingdom Clubs such as pubs and restaurants to house live artistes (or even play recorded music), this has had a devastating effect on professional musicians and potential artistes a like. The biggest losers are the members of our younger generations – a lot of of whom have never even heard a live musician or band.
It’s simple to see why and so, that during my live performances lately, I’m again and again faced with a young individual totally agape watching the live musician at work. They have no doubt become conditioned to accepting music as an impersonally generated medium and find it fascinating to witness the live, hands-on music creativity. Fortunately, this seems to be having an inspirational effect. Having spent most of my career working with theatre orchestras and larger musical combos, I have recently returned to working a lot of solo performances as a cocktail pianist playing a variety of music styles but again and again older standards such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, etc. The thing is, not only am I now finding I’m being booked by the youngster that 1st saw me several years ago, but they’re requesting that I play the same style of music for their marriage reception or birthday event. It seems that they have got into this sort of music through being made aware of it when I 1st played for them and they were so intrigued by it.
There’s truly little coverage on United Kingdom radio or TV of any music style other than the most recent commercial music. The sad thing is that if younger people do not get the opportunity to witness other musical styles because it is not in the mainstream broad casts and because live music is so rare,  all of us  are not giving them the opportunity to decide If the y like it or not.  all of us  have and so been creating a generation for a lot of years that is one-tracked in its musical culture, when  all of us  should have been giving our youngsters much more choice.