American Life Has Been Lost in Its Digits

It's a bit unnerving to be living at the end of an era.  When we were young, there was not doubt that the future held the promise of success.  We were not worried about the longevity of our nation, the threat of evil immigrants, or a new Cold War.  The politicians of my lifetime for the most part were caring about the substance of American life.  I was lucky enough, although I missed the Jazz Age, to live through three decades which reaped artistic benefit.  If you interview music writers, they will tell you that the 1970's were a time of unparalleled musical outpouring.  Like jazz, which remains mostly anonymous to mainstream America, this music and the music of the 1980's and 90's has yet to be studied.  The music that has been studied has been around much longer, so I surmise the music with which I am familiar and have come to appreciate will be recognized much further down the road.  Jeff Lorber, who pioneered the group The Jeff Lorber Fusion, waited forty years to receive his Grammy.  His albums of the l970's were ground breaking in both musical content and technology, and yet he saw no real recognition until last year, 2018.  Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock have been recognized for their stellar contributions to the field of music, and they are eighty years old.  True recognition of musical achievement it would seem in America is a matter of waiting.  Only pop stars reap the rewards of immediate success, and this fuels the American music industry.  Unlike in America's history music today has become a matter of immediate gratification, get rich quick, and show me the money.  This is a grave concern.  As I have aged in my career as a professional musician, performer, and composer, I have watched the institution of the American music industry die.  When the time is taken to study America's musical past it will become evident that our music industry has been in the forefront of artistic achievement.  Great strides have been made in American music, and most of them all ready are lost.  Listen to any film trailer broadcast on television, streaming, or in a preview at a movie theater and you will hear the same regurgitated "jungle drum" music cue that has been sufficing for a decade.  This same bombastic, compressed, soulless, noise brigade suffices as a musical teaser for just about any movie.  The only conclusion that can be made is that film studios spend zero money on music for their film trailers.  They have a limited library of prerecorded cues and drop one in with nary a thought for real promotion of the movie.  The same "jungle drum" cue is used over and over for different films.  There are several answers for the use of the cue, and let it become a metaphor what the film industry has become.  It also can be a metaphor for what America has become.  We are cheap, paltry, and superficial.  Japanese video games have infiltrated the film industry, and the one humanistic, intimate, and thoughtful nature of film characterizing human behavior has been replaced with violence.  It is startling if one really pays attention.  I have said it time and time again, that extremism has seeped into American society through television and film.  Who is producing this nonsense?  A step in the right direction for America is an examination of our pop culture.  I can't watch prime time television.  I can't watch movies produced in the style of a Japanese-made video game.  I can't watch senseless violence and murder.  Why would I want to?  Without expounding on the shortcomings in Hollywood, it is easier to make the example with American music.  As I played solo piano this weekend at a German restaurant in Fayettenam, my mind was assaulted with all of the possibilities.  My cocktail style of piano, which has been appropriate most of my life, didn't seem like the correct approach.  A German restaurant was not a country club.  It was not the Pinehurst Hotel.  It was not an expensive steak house.  It was a run of the mill eatery specializing in German food.  They play polka music on the stereo, but they hired me to play piano.  It was up to me to decide on the correct approach.  What should be such a simple engagement in fact was an epic lesson in the history of American music.  They had a digital piano, and it was a good one.  What are the possibilities?  It became clear to me then and there that America's pop history has been forgotten.  Being forgotten there is absolutely nothing left as a foundation for a new music industry.  Foreign interests, immigrants, and taken the reins of the American music industry, and it is a disgrace.  I thought, "I am not Billy Joel."  What a great artist this man was.  So many songs, a great singing voice, and a substantial pianist.  He was a star back in the day.  "I am not the Beatles."  What a catalog of songs which influenced America in so many ways.  Then there are blues, Broadway, Reggae, Folk, Rock, and Country.  There were so many ways to approach a simple engagement playing piano in a German restaurant.  So many different types of people.  So many age groups.  I did what I always have done.  I tried to mix it up.  Eventually my cocktail stylings prevailed.  What was most important was to be in the background providing a pleasant mood for the diners.  That meant that while "Hum and Strum" could have been appropriate, they hired a pianist.  While thinking about all of these options is when I realized that the music industry in America is now defunct.  If we want a pattern for healthy living in America free of the violence that came with the Trump administration, the first thing to do is reform America's music industry.  It is not really an industry at all anymore.  It is a distribution industry.  The new music that is being made today is a pale shadow of America's production in her heyday.  Whether it was the Roaring Twenties and Tin Pan Alley, the Jazz Age, Big Band Swing, or the moxy of Stax Records, pop music today in America is a castrated product to which youth have become addicted.  Everything it seems in American pop culture is an addiction.  Why must be become addicted?  The answer is because the quality is not there underneath the quick fix.  It is all quick fix.  It is quick fix, because what it takes to produce quality music indeed incorporates an entire industry.  There are writers in the Brill Building.  There are recording studios such as Columbia and RCA.  There are sound stages on movie lots.  There are jingle factories.  This was when real acoustic music, sounds waves created by people and things uninhibited from infrasonic pollution and noise had the power to shape lives.  It was a powerful industry, one that usurped the film industry.  What do we have today?  We watch millennials pantomime with prerecorded tracks on television.  Tracks do most of the work.  Prime time television is littered with exploitative talent shows promising dreams for middle America.  It is a charade.  It is a charade of charlatans exploiting America's youth in a much more insulting way than Stax Records.  At least the black characters in their Blaxploitation films were strong, independent, and forward thinking.  Through America's pop music, we have created a castrated, addicted, sheltered youth we are not able to cope with reality.  During Black History Month I have heard numerous black youths say they don't want to be reminded of what their people did, or your people, or our people.  Ignoring out past is the perfect solution to annihilation.  If you don't recognize and understand things that came before you, you are living in a bubble of constructed utopia, and it is far from that.  America has become a severe, violent, maelstrom of racism, classism, and nepotism.  I never have experienced anything so offensive.  When I think of jobs that were in existence during America's lifetime, plain and simple jobs that were deemed important and worthy of rewarding.  What do we have today?  What do we value?  Nothing.  We have tainted food, addictive drugs, fake art, polluted air and water, and a fascist as a president.  Inflation continues, wages are stagnant, and education is a ghost in America's closet.  Who in this country has decided this?  We are the digital age.  We are the age of the internet.  Therefore internet moguls have attained power and have devalued most of what is valuable in American society.  We are ashamed to look at slavery, blackface, and oppression, and yet these very things are what shaped the heart and soul of America.  We would not have jazz, blues, or many other artistic creations had it not been for our exact history.  Today we are hiding that history, which only is empowering the digital age.  When I heard a Hillary Hahn recording this evening on WCPE which was engineered direct-to-disc, I was overtaken with the authenticity, intent, and artistry of the music.  It was retro.  It was a sounds that I have not heard in years, an analog representation of music which was full of life.  American life has been lost in its digits.