Live Music – Musicians Fascinate United Kingdom Youngsters

In the United Kingdom for the last 18 years at least, a whole generation has been virtually starved of live artists for a variety of reasons. The coming of Computers being a standard household utility with their accompanying music production and downloadable music format devices, together with expansive 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 artists and potential artistes a like. The biggest losers are the members of our young generations – many of whom have never even heard a live artist or band.
It is simple to see why accordingly, that during my live performances lately, I’m usually faced with a young individual 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 most of my career working with theatre orchestras and larger musical combos, I have recently returned to working many solo performances as a cocktail pianist playing a variety of music styles but usually older standards such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, etc. The thing is, not only am I now locating I’m being booked by the youngster that first saw me a few years ago, but they are requesting that I play the same style of music for their wedding party or birthday event. 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’s  surprisingly 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 young individuals do not get the opening  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 opening  to decide If the y like it or not.  we  have accordingly been creating a generation for many years that’s one-tracked in its musical culture, when  we  should have been giving our youngsters much more option.