Carter: Music Everywhere

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“Music everywhere”

Richard Carter

DJ Marcus at the Spot Saturday

Outside of concert halls, cars and clubs, music has always seemed to be standard in places like elevators, lobbies and cafeterias. Now music in all the coffee shops, grocery stores, pawn shops, malls, bathrooms and pretty much everywhere. I’m not sure that we haven’t becoming kind of immune to “listening to” and appreciating music, and that cannot be a good thing.

I started reading a new novel last night and it opens with a young woman noticing a particular orchestral piece while sitting in the back on a cab. The storyline notes the musical implications of the particular music and its historical implications at the time it was composed as well as at the time the piece is being heard by the woman in the novel. The scene gorgeously sets up what promises to be a significant theme in the novel.

Around people who listen to a lot of music, such as record stores and music stores that I’ve worked in, it’s amazing to follow the conversations of people about a song that happens to be playing and what that song (or the music of the group performing it) invokes to them. People who love music can more often than not tell you stories about when they first heard a song or some wild story about something that happened to them while that song happened to be playing.

The point I am trying to make here is that more and more live music has become a sort of background music to people going out and partying or drinking or doing something crazy. This became obvious to me Friday night at a restaurant where a musician was playing a variety of wind instruments and then a club later on where a live area band was playing.

Surely, a musician playing music at a restaurant is performing what would be called background music. But yet I was shocked to discover after I commented to people at the table that he had not played a standard yet that no one really had noticed anything that he had been playing. But then the conversation turned to the current song that he was playing, “Girl From Ipanema,” and the brilliant 1964 “Getz Gilberto” album by Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao and Astrid Gilberto.

It was the kind of conversation that befitted the music and the importance of it to the people at the table.

Later that evening, I went to the Spot for their third birthday party. While I missed Jay Burnam who will be back in town for a while, I did get to hear Markus play a DJ set. I cannot emphasize enough all the sounds and things which people take for granted that are being done by a good DJ. While people were hanging out and sipping beer, eating pizza or talking, he was doing all sorts of slides, hitting buttons, doing scratches and going in and out of the songs on his laptop and the LP on his turntable. Watching that over his shoulder seemed to emphasize the effects on the music coming through the speaker. It actually showed the live musicianship of what was being done and how “sick” it was. It generally appeared that the crowd was hearing little more than the beats on the PA.

It wasn’t much different when the band, Dr. Philgood, came on. While I can see someone ignoring muzak in an elevator or possibly even a live musician at a fancy restaurant, it seems odd to be oblivious to a loud live band in an eatery that is playing music that’s making conversation nearly impossible.

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