Live Music – Musicians Fascinate UK Youngsters

In the United Kingdom for the last 18 years at least, a whole generation has been virtually starved of live musicians for a variety of reasons. The appearance of Computers being a standard household utility with their accompanying music production and downloadable music format devices, together with broad spread video and latterly DVD technology has kept many a youngster indoors for most of their leisure time. Coupled with the increasing overheads and prohibitive licence fees and conditions imposed on United Kingdom Venues such as pubs and restaurants to house live artistes (or even play recorded music), this has had a devastating effect on professional musicians and potential artistes a prefer. The biggest losers are the members of our younger generations – many of whom have never even heard a live musician or band.

It’s easy to see why consequently, that during my live gigs lately, I’m generally faced with a young person totally agape watching the live artist at work. They have no doubt become conditioned to accepting music as an impersonally generated medium and find it fascinating to witness the live, hands-on music creativity. Fortunately, this seems to be having an inspirational effect. Having spent the majority of my career working with theatre orchestras and larger musical combos, I have recently returned to working a lot of solo gigs as a cocktail pianist playing a variety of music styles but generally older standards such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, etc. The thing is, not only am I now finding I’m being booked by the youngster that first saw me several years ago, but they’re requesting that I performance the same style of music for their marriage party or birthday party. It seems that they have got into this sort of music through being made aware of it when I first played for them and they were so intrigued by it.

There is truly little coverage on United Kingdom radio or TV of any music style other than the most recent commercial music. The sad thing is that if younger individuals do not get the occasion to witness other musical styles because it is not in the mainstream expansive casts and because live music is so rare, we are not giving them the occasion to decide Assuming that they like it or not. we have and so been creating a generation for a lot of years that is one-tracked in its musical culture, when we should have been giving our youngsters much more choice.