Just a chime....or??

[Jerry Oz]

I'm sure it's all easier said than done. Football, as with most sports is a situation where opportunity factors largely into who wins. The ball has to be at the right point on the pitch and the player has to be at the right angle to attack the goal. But the fact that some teams [[Germany, Spain) play consistently well proves that you make your own luck by preparing for those opportunities.

[westgrandboulevard]

Yes, an accurate definition of luck is a combination of preparation, and opportunity.

Add alertness and consistency, and excellence follows, in whatever field of opportunity.

[Jerry Oz]

It's too bad music doesn't play out the same way. There are so many talented musicians who cannot escape the club scene for lack of the right person listening to them. And yet, you have so many pop stars who are more accepted for their pretty faces, hard bodies, or their ability to push moral limits than they are to hold a note or sing without use of Autotune. I guess life just ain't fair...

[westgrandboulevard]

It's tricky to know one's audience, and how to reach them. I guess that comes under the heading of 'preparation'.

[144man]

It's too bad music doesn't play out the same way. There are so many talented musicians who cannot escape the club scene for lack of the right person listening to them. And yet, you have so many pop stars who are more accepted for their pretty faces, hard bodies, or their ability to push moral limits than they are to hold a note or sing without use of Autotune. I guess life just ain't fair...

Mmmmm!....pretty faces...hard bodies...pushing moral limits

[westgrandboulevard]

Put that way, it really doesn't take much to imagine a potential audience of many millions.....

[Jerry Oz]

Give 'em what they want, I guess. And I guess they really don't want what most would consider to be "good music". I'm getting old...

[westgrandboulevard]

If it were cuisine, it would represent the diifference between home cooking and/or cordon bleu, compared to frozen, and/or ready prepared.

[144man]

I wonder if the young people of today ever sit down and listen to a complete album, or whether they just play individual tracks.

[westgrandboulevard]

They probably don't buy many complete albums, either by CDs or downloads. They're most likely to cherry pick favourite tracks by download or streaming.

Then, they probably play them while they're doing something else. Whether they actually listen to them is debatable. For the majority, it is as it always was; disposable music.

[Jerry Oz]

You guys are aware that in 30 years, somebody on a message board much like this one will be lamenting the music of the age and remembering how good music was back in the 2010s, aren't you? Just like our grandparents didn't understand the music that our parents listened to. The only thing that changes is the music, not the questions of taste.

[westgrandboulevard]

It's becoming more likely that it will not happen as regularly. It doesn't follow that it can be expected, simply because it happened before with previous generations. Certain eras do have a greater following, for example the 60s, because of other events at the time. Other eras, not so.

There will always be someone who remembers music of a certain era, but the keen ones are in the minority. Most people remember scattered fragments of songs, half-remembered lyrics and titles. They're likely often to be unsure of exactly who sang what. Even if they think they have a favourite artist, they can be shown a list of their hits, and not really remember how many of them sound. A potted history of often-repeated and performed songs [[and re-recordings by more contemporary artists) will keep some of the material in the public eye [[ear?), if perhaps not exactly fresh.

[144man]

Going back to your food analogy, wgb, it seems that the young folks are snacking on the music rather than having proper meals.

[westgrandboulevard]

Yes, I would agree. They partake of music sandwiches which sustain, if not totally nourish them.

And there's more than just a pinch of salt involved in the preparation.....

[Jerry Oz]

We're a bunch of snobs. You know that, right? Anyway, it dawned on me during this discourse that I recall my grandfather being a fan of the Temptations and Marvin Gaye back in the '60s. Of course, my mom and dad were also big Motown fans [[and pretty much all soul music) back then. I'm also fond of the music. My dad couldn't stand the music of my age [[the '80s) and I'm not a fan of today's music. The music of the '60s actually is the only music that spanned three generations in my family.

Well, I also like the '40s and '50s as well, but my brother and sister don't. I wonder how often there's one decade of sound that everybody in a family can agree is "good music"?

[westgrandboulevard]

Maybe just one decade in five, on average? Most of us would be fortunate to see two in our lifetime,with any decade which coincides with our teenage and early twenties having a much greater profound effect.

[Jerry Oz]

I'm stuck on those two decades as well. I'm blessed, however, because I also love music from well before I was born. Curiously, I don't think I care for anything more than a few songs since the mid-90s and I don't honestly know why. It seems like music became too slick and over produced. I now appreciate guitar-based rock more than I did when it was a radio staple. Well, but heavy metal, so much...

[westgrandboulevard]

In general, me too. Probably it's because I'm not giving it the intense attention I did when I was young, but I can't think of a single young current star who says something to me through their music.

[Jerry Oz]

If you get the chance, Google Scott Bradlee and Postmodern Jukebox and visit their web page or look them up on YouTube. He is a truly remarkable young pianist who was not a big fan of modern music. Then he had a revelation that it's not the songs, but the production that he didn't like. He subsequently created his own versions of today's hits in the styles of bygone eras [[session jazz, '60s girl rock, torch songs, big band, etc.). I can spend hours listening to his reimagined songs because almost all of them are truly wonderful.

I'm trying to figure out who I can tell that might actually like them. Perhaps you. It's cool to listen to his versions and then listen to the original songs. For the most part, I find the redone songs to be much easier to listen to. They are somehow the most exciting thing that I've heard in years, perhaps decades, and I've nobody to share them with. If you give them a visit, let me know what you think.

[westgrandboulevard]

I will.

If you can, listen first to the originals, then try Barb Jungr's rearrangements of Talking Heads 'Once In A Lifetime', and Todd Rundgren's 'I Saw The Light'.....although Barb has recently celebrated her 60th., so is no spring chicken, but still working on the same lines as Scott Bradlee. She finds beauty where it was, at first, submerged.

It's always interesting to listen to someone else's creation, and then to refashion it. In a way, making something which was not there before.

[Jerry Oz]

I'm used to traditional cover versions, sometimes changed from rock to reggae, soul to jazz, etc. However, PMJ is something that is fresh to me. I'm buying their album on iTunes to support them. Something must be said when it sounds as if someone actually enjoys the music they are performing and that's the impression I get from Postmodern Jukebox and what I like about them. I'm going to check out Barb Jungr this afternoon and I hope that I'm similarly smitten. Thanks for the heads up.

[westgrandboulevard]

Had a quick listen to PMJ. Sound and look good. Would prefer to hear them with better sound quality than on this laptop.Will study in more detail later. Looks like they are headed this way next year....

[Jerry Oz]

I saw their tour schedule and they will be there next year. I'm going to see if I can have the organizers of our Jazz 'n Rib Fest bring them downtown next summer. It's a pretty big event, so it's probably a lot of politics involved with who gets scheduled. But I'd love to see them live.

[westgrandboulevard]

The tambourine player upstages everyone else.....

[Jerry Oz]

I love the girls singing the songs. And it's more about how they sing than the singing itself or how attractive they are. They channel the era that the music was from very well. In that regard, if you get a chance to watch "Sweet Child O' Mine" or "Living On A Prayer", they're sung by Miche Braden, who puts a ton of effort into each [[I'm thinking that she's a broadway vet).

Scott Bradlee also did a series called "Saturday Morning Slow Jams" wherein he refashioned cartoon theme songs as early '90s R&B records. It's so silly, but it still sounded fantastic. It's just nice to believe that somebody out there makes what I consider to be good music, still.

Oh, and I watched a couple of Barb Jungr videos and wanted to see more than is available on YouTube. She believes in her singing, which is most of what makes a singer great in my opinion. I love her voice. Thanks for the reference.

[westgrandboulevard]

I will need to check through the Scott Bradlee repertoire in more depth. For those old enough to remember [[like you ,me and practically everyone else on the forum) they play music which once we could hear just about any place. Not any more.

Barb J is predominantly a cabaret, intimate style performer. The intimacy is particularly effective when it's just her voice on a CD [[of which she has quite a varied series, and I'm buying them), and you listening in an otherwise quiet room. She's quirky and takes risks, like singing Springsteen's 'The River' in the first person, as a man. A tour de force is her melancholy lament which starts with some lines from 'Can't Get Used To Losing You' and, in one breath, then launches itself full belt into Neil Diamond's 'Red, Red Wine'. There aren't enough of her actual recordings on You-Tube. I should learn how to email you some favourites. If not already seen ,look on You-Tube for the interview on BBC TV Breakfast show, where she sings 'Wichita Lineman' sat next to Bill & Sian -and sings it to them, directly between the eyes. I had never heard of her until this came on one morning, and I just stood there in the kitchen, transfixed...

[Jerry Oz]

I'll pull up her channel on Pandora. She has no official videos, so what you'll find on YouTube is mainly cell phone video, which is basically bootleg. Every so often, we're blessed to "find" something that [[although it's not new, maybe even original) is at least fresh. It reminds us of the days of our youth when something came on the radio that made you stop what you were doing to actively listen. If you want to immediately find out what else this man/woman/group has recorded, then you have a great chance of being a new fan.

[westgrandboulevard]

It's not so easy becoming 'a fan' of anything when we have several decades of life behind us. The threshold of expectancy is much higher, and we're not so easily impressed.

[Jerry Oz]

And yet, every once in a great while, we hear something that is not typical of our normal, comfortable musical preference and we start to tap our feet and hum the hook... We probably have no idea why we "kind of" like the song, but if we allow ourselves to admit it, it doesn't matter.

[westgrandboulevard]

The last song I remember going round and round my head was from a few years back - Duffy's 'Mercy'. Think she had one other, and then it all went quiet.....

[Jerry Oz]

I'm a big fan of Lorde's "Royals", which I found to be all written and produced. I also heard a song called "Rude" that played last year. It was a reggae song played by a pop band, but they did a good job with it.

[144man]

For the past few days, I haven't been able to get the Killers' "Mr Brightside" out of my head. They're not a group I particularly like, I haven't heard the track recently, yet I'm suddenly thinking what a great record it is. How weird is that!

[westgrandboulevard]

That often happens to me when I have first thought of something, which then reminds me of 'A', 'B' or 'C' - or heard a brief snatch of a record, which then sows the seed in my head.

The only way to deal with it is to locate the record, and play it....

[Jerry Oz]

I scratch that itch on YouTube, where I am always amazed that somebody else listened to some of the most obscure songs of my youth and loved them as much as I did.

[westgrandboulevard]

That's exactly what I do. People feel that too much material is available on the internet for free, with no royalties paid. Much of the old material was deleted shortly after it was released, anyway...so no royalties were due, if there were no sales of actual product.

[Jerry Oz]

Exactly. I digitize a lot of my LPs, but typically it's only the ones that I cannot find on CD or digitally. I bought cut outs at a campus record shop in the '80s and 95% of those aren't available otherwise. There are other songs that I find that were released widely but are not available on the artists' collections or catalogues. YouTube is pretty good as a backup media player when I want to go down memory lane.

[westgrandboulevard]

To be honest, I don't currently spend too much time listening to albums on CD.

I tend to go more for individual tracks on You-tube, often using links on this very forum.

[Jerry Oz]

I always listened to individual tracks on wax. I always listened to the album once or twice to see what immediately caught my attention, but after that I just played my favorite tracks. My attention span is much to short to listen to what I consider to be filler material more than twice. Of course, there has been a few occasions when I'd hear a song that immediately struck me and when I looked to see who made them, I found out that I had the album for 10 years or more but in my arrogance, never really gave all of the songs a fair chance.

[westgrandboulevard]

That's interesting. I generally used to just let the music play when an LP was on the player. Too much hassle to keep switching tracks......but I did tune out for some tracks, and that happened on most LPs I had. It was rare for me to find I enjoyed a complete LP.

[Jerry Oz]

Same here. I was the king of the mix tape, though. I'd make a cassette and as soon as the needle came up on the last track, I'd run out and jump in the car so I could hear it as I drove around. Silly, I know... Somehow, those tracks sounded better in my car [[on 5-inch speakers) than they did at home on my 10-inch three ways. I also got the satisfaction of playing songs before my friends heard them somewhere else. They liked some of them, but not others. Regardless, they were in need of a ride and consequently a captive audience to DJ Oz.

[westgrandboulevard]

I bet those doors were locked, and the windows open.....

[Jerry Oz]

LOL. They weren't, but the car was either moving our too far from home for them to jump out. Besides, my taste was closely aligned with theirs except for their fondness of rap songs and Prince records.

[westgrandboulevard]

I couldn't stay anywhere listening to rap and Prince records.....

[144man]

There are some albums I always play the whole way through. The Four Tops' "Still Waters Run Deep" immediately springs to mind.

[westgrandboulevard]

Me too. To me, it's a summer album, and has a relaxed, breezy feel to it.

It might be a heinous crime to say it, but I can't play "What's Going On" all the way through. It's all very worthy, but doesn't lift my spirits at all, even though it undeniably does have its moments...

[Jerry Oz]

I play some albums all the way through, some of which would raise eyebrows around here. I don't go back as far as you guys, though. The first album that I can think of is Stevie Wonder's "Talking Book".

[westgrandboulevard]

Apart from some individual tracks, Stevie Wonder lost me after "Where I'm Coming From".....

[Jerry Oz]

In my opinion, "Talking Book" was solid from the first track to the last. "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life" and "Superstition" are the only tracks that most remember, but the record truly showed the depth of his talent as a composer, singer, and instrumentalist. I liked a lot of his other albums [[especially "Hotter Than July" from my junior year in high school), but for the most part, none of them had as many wonderful songs as "Talking Book".

Thanks, by the way. Now I have to drag out "At The Close of the Century" and listen to Stevie for the next three or four days... Although I'm not the biggest Stevie Wonder fan on these boards, his anthology [[for me) was the best Motown collection of them all.

[westgrandboulevard]

Three or four days. I hope Mrs Oz enjoys Stevie Wonder.

[144man]

"Superstition" is fine, but "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" is much too MOR for me, likewise "My Cherie Amour". I can cope with his country flavoured tracks like "Travelling Man" and "Place in the Sun" though. My favourite single by him is "I Was Made to Love Her", and that's how I like to hear him sounding. A neglected and underrated track by him is his version of "Baby Don't You Do It".