Radio History

It amazingly is good news S.C.O.T.U.S. is doing the right thing.  P.O.T.U.S. on the other hand...  His evening news hour television ad's for his re-election ominously wreak of Big Brother.  Their tone is dark, foreboding, and a bit dictatorial.  For any millennial who has not read George Orwell's novel, "19984,"  2020 has become the year of reckoning.  We anticipated 2012, a date indigenous America cultures adopted as the end of the world, with angst, but 2012 came and went.  It took six years for the real drama to unfold.  It is here now, 2020.  Luckily and amazingly the Supreme Court of the United States is doing the right thing.  Like most republicans they probably feel like they are on a sinking ship.  Although these rulings today are important for the future of our country, what I wanted to address was the short comings of the compact disc.  As I type this word on my Querty keyboard, I wondered what was the difference between the word "disc" and disk.  Evidently a new word was coined which denotes specifically a compact disc digital recording vessel.  Physically it qualifies as a "disk," but when audio media is associated creating a vessel for the playback of audio, words or music, it becomes "disc."  Minidisc.  So be it.  In the last few evenings while I have been archiving cassette tapes I recorded while working on a doctorate in composition at OSU, I realized while enjoying the integrity of these mostly concert performances that a CD, a compact disc, isn't the best vessel for listening to recorded media.  For me having worked on cruise ships for over a decade, CD's were indispensable.  The reasons are obvious to the consumer.  First they are much smaller and less heavy than LP's.  Second the audio encoded on them should be professionally rendered.  That means low or no noise and excellent sound quality.  What we all have discovered is that in the music business it is a crap shoot.  For classical enthusiasts specific orchestras, conductors, and therefore discs constitute the most desirable music listening experiences.  For example Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra will yield a satisfying listening experience.  Let me clarify.  As I study the Ken Burns series "Jazz" I am formulating hypothesis in my mind about the origins of American music.  I have no aspiration that eventually I will be able to teach a music history class at the collegiate level.  That is not an unreasonable vocational prospectus.  I am not falling for that bait again, the possibility of finding a college teaching job.  Mildly I chased that snipe in my twenties, and I won't waste my time on it again.  What I do is for my own well being, and like many business merchants I met while living in Columbia, South Carolina I would like to be more familiar with my own nation's lineage.  It is not an easy affair just understanding America's own music history.  This is what Ken Burns attempted and accomplished with his video series.  Not only is the history of jazz deciphered, music created mostly by African-Americans, but country music has been addressed and its substantial influences on cultural America.  What is startling to me is the line of demarcation between them.  It is like the same types of civil evolution were occurring simultaneously, one in the white world and one in the black world.  Wow!  That is segregation whether it was intended to be that or not.  It just happened that way.  I have studied jazz history before and learned most of what I know from George William Knowles.  Bubba with his stubborness openly voiced his opposition to "singers" and "guitar players."  I carried his sentiment with me most of the rest of my life.  I even carried it up to Cowtown, where it influenced my responses during my General Exams.  When asked to lay out a timeline for the history of jazz in America, I excluded vocalists.  It was not until twenty-five years later I realized the importance of jazz singing and its affect upon the musical development of North America.  Everything I am learning, and there is a lot of it, is a valid metaphor for American life.  Most of it has been shelved, rendered defunct, or openly rejected as the authentic roots of American life.  Consider that jazz music is the least popular musical form in America.  There are reasons for all of it, and I am trying to get to the bottom.  Meanwhile Rahsaan Roland Kirk is playing in the background.  Here is a jazz musician as I understand it that was blind and played many instruments, notably a straight alto saxophone.  He was an eclectic performer of the Avant-garde, the most current style of jazz still unrecognized as America's most distinct art form.  I mean all of jazz, but during its century long evolution there were many chapters which easily define North America's struggle to become an upstanding nation.  The definition of "upstanding" is subjective, and America's history is pitted with cultural and racial wounds.  There is no way to quantify "upstanding" without spirituality.  As such God and religion were a crucial part of America's doctrines.  That has been lost today, and sorely we are in need of the second coming of Jesus Christ.  America has been erroneously defined in terms of monetary profits.  Who has the most wins, but in the substantial tradition of the building of America from the ground up from the toil and sweat of pioneering land workers this does not fly.  If Donald Trump was forced to create his own existence with no money to spend on products, could he succeed?  Could he build shelter, grow food, and make medicine?  That is the question that will remain no matter how much money is amassed in Grand Caymen and Swiss banks.  At some point the value of this money will dissipate.  It all ready has, because when the federal government needs money merely they print it.  What value has this paper?  The true value of American money is being able to back it with goods and services, and that is not cable television and wireless internet.  The value system of America is has become so skewed we have no idea of what is important to human life.  Take for example the compact disc.  Here is a digital product which costs pennies to manufacture, and in the long run it has proven to be worth little more.  CDs still have value, but their influence upon American culture have been limited.  Why?  The answer is because they are not a tangible human creation.  They are, but when defined in terms of a human result dropping a plastic disc into a a mechanism with a laser that reads zeros and ones...  Well that is not very human.  The ultimate reality and demise of compact discs lies in this mechanism.  In my home CD and DVDs skip.  The vibration in the air created by low-flying aircraft and rumbling freight trains makes the music and video skip.  CDs in my household have lost value as play back sources.  Instead they have become archival sitting on a shelf preserving America's important and great artistic music.  The irony has become that only now have I realized this shortcoming.  Futilely while trying to keep these discs from skipping, I have realized that a CD, a simple serial list of music to be played in a chosen order, is not natural.  Instead A and B "sides" of an album or cassette provide a better stage for the presentation of entertainment.  Always there is an Act l and Act ll.  In classical orchestral music often there are movements, sections of music, that differintiate from one another.  It is not usual to have a sequential list of music played, unless the curator is extremely skilled at how to pick a set.  Picking a set is akin to programming a list of music that has a natural ebb and flow, tension and release, and variety of content.  In most liklihood this has been lost.  The place to turn for guidance is radio, and radio in America is a shadow of its former self.  Something that was integral to the building of America now is an aging unused dinosaur replaced with the accessibility and low cost of internet streaming.  The audio quality is nowhere near the same in internet streaming.  This was the beauty of radio that both FM and AM sound quality lost nothing in its transmission.  The warmth, beauty, and sonic quality of the original music was  preserved and broadcast to the listerners just like a live performance.  Live performance is a thing of the past especially now that Covid 19 has reared its ugly head.  The absence of radio, real radio from America, leaves an unfillable hole in our cultural heritage.  It is worthy that the internet has attempted to fill this void, and I am grateful, but America's golden years of radio, television, and music are gone.  Their history is there for our own enlightenment.