Hey, I Like Jazz - It’s Really Cool Man!

You see, for decades the very mention of the word ‘Jazz’ would have me smiling at the thought of finger-clicking musicians, musically spiralling up their own - you know what’s! Hey, and I’m not talking about traditional-jazz either, as practised by the likes of Kenny Ball or Acker Bilk - no, I’m talking of jazz in the style of Miles Davis - John Coltrane and Charlie Parker and I have to say, I really enjoy it. Now then, this got me into thinking about the fact that most of us rarely stray from the musical genres of our teens and twenties, but given the chance, it maybe that we might be drawn away from our usual diet of Hard Rock, Glam Rock - Punk and Brit-Pop. Mind you dear reader, I would need a lot of persuading to involve myself in either slack-jawed Country & Western tales of woe, or thinking about it, most forms of Folk Music - what with all that finger-in-the-ear business going on. Each to his own, that’s what I say!

Nevertheless, in saying all this, it seems to me that we are going through a particularly dire time music wise at the moment. Come on, if I hear another semi-hysterical British male crooner wailing on about, well - almost anything really, I might turn to Rap or - er, er, Garage…or whatnot! To make my street credibility even less enviable I have taken a liking to certain types of classical music - as long as it doesn’t go on for too long and a soprano doesn’t join in and shriek her way through the chorus - or whatever they call it.

While I’m on the subject, I can never quite understand why friends will drive hundreds of miles to a ‘big-name’ gig, spend a fortune on tickets and be sat so far away from the stage where their idols are performing that they just watch and listen to them on the surrounding big screens - come on you could do that via the television at home couldn’t you? Much better I would think, would be to find a local venue where ‘live’ music of any description is played (there are many such places on the island) and maybe, just maybe - why not experiment with your deeply conservative musical tastes and try something different for a change? Personally, my sudden and alarming embrace of modern jazz has revitalised my interest in music and I no longer believe The Lighthouse Family to be the epitome of cool. So then, what I am clumsily trying to say is that it is quite okay for your musical tastes to change as you get older and it doesn’t mean that you are somehow being disloyal to the time when so-called boy and girlbands filled the charts and airwaves with their dreadful manufactured dross.