‘I prefer music that sounds a bit more like music’

I quite enjoy listening to music occasionally, nothing too out of this world you understand, like rappers, heavy metal or grunge — whatever those titles are supposed to mean. I prefer music that sounds a bit more like music, though there are a few, right on the cusp of listenability who I quite admire, people like Jimi Hendrix, or U2.

I’m much more of a ballad type person myself. You know, later Beatles numbers, the Rolling Stones and Michael Buble all make music in which you can still detect a tune, whereas some of the other stuff can only be described a loud sound, with little rhythm and no melody!

You’ll gather from the previous paragraph that I am by no means an expert on music, very much like a lot of other people my age, I would guess. I know nothing at all about reading sheet music, with all its lines, crochets and quavers, etc., and I also know nothing about the processes involved in getting that music to wherever I am. I do know I am completely mind-blown whenever I see a recording studio on television for some reason, with a bloke sat in front of a large table, the surface completely covered with hundreds of small switches and levers, which he fiddles with while a group plays noisily the other side of a large plate-glass window. To me, all his fiddling seems to make no difference to the noise coming from the other room, but I suppose it must do something otherwise they wouldn’t spend all the money that table must have cost, would they?

I bought an Amazon Dot recently, on the recommendation of my daughter, who lives in England. It really is a wonderful piece of equipment, especially when placed in the hands of an ignorant old man like me. You can chat to it (yes it’s quite a good conversationalist), you can ask it questions on just about any subject under the sun, you can create shopping lists with it and you can ask it to play any one of about a billion pieces of music it has stored somewhere inside it. No, that’s wrong; all this stuff is stored in some wonderful storage container called ‘The Cloud’, though where this cloud is I have absolutely no idea.

Of course, at my age, when I started asking it to play some of my music, the stuff I requested was Dave Brubeck, Acker Bilk, Ted Heath’s Band and Louis Armstrong, to name but a few. The most amazing thing that first hit me was that the darned machine couldn’t be beaten (well almost, I did get the better of it when I asked it to play something by Harry Gold and the Pieces of Eight!). It truly does have just about every bit of music or musician you could think of stored away in its cloud, right back to the early-1900s.

But I was also struck by something else amazing (amazing to me anyway)! As I lay on the couch (which Jacqui allows me to do occasionally), listening to all the very old numbers I remembered from my youth, 70 years ago or more, it suddenly struck me I was hearing something that I had been subconsciously been missing in my music, for years and years, without even realising it. Virtually all the old pieces of music had wind instruments as the leading sound makers, Dave Brubeck with his clarinet, Acker Bilk with the saxophone, ‘Satchmo’ playing the cornet, it went on and on piece after piece, and it sounded wonderful after the years I had been listening to little more than guitars, basses and drums, especially as todays guitarists play little more than chords most of the time. (I know there are some truly great exceptions to this rule, but I’m sure you see what I mean.)

I don’t know why this has happened, except perhaps it’s because any kid can learn a few chords, but it takes a lot of skill and much learning to play a hot cornet! Today everyone wants to start at the top and then work their way up from there — it’s only the money that counts today, not the pleasure of producing good music!

Would you agree that music has changed a lot over the years? What sort of music do you enjoy listening to?

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