Getting Old(er)

Music is a funny thing. For the first many years of life I really didn't care for music at all. Then I picked up on Oldies. Oldies are great; with the new stuff you have to filter the really good out of the ordinary. Oldies have already filtered it all out. What you wind up with is music that use to be good but no longer makes much sense, except for those few timeless classics. Some of my favorites are "The Satelites," "The Righteous Brothers," "The Beach Boys," "The Temptations," Don McClean, and Bill Haly and the Comets. None of that drug music crap that no longer makes any sense. The Beatles were a sixties band that should have never made it out of that time. Some of their early stuff is aight, but the drug music just blows.(drug refrence) Same thing with some of the other "classics." I'm really not a fan of music inspired by drugs and bad acid trips. I rather melodical, heavy-beat, ballads. Recently I've began digging Indie Rock. IR split from mainstream when mainstream became Alternative. The heavy acoustic came into play. Indie stays true to the musical roots- small lables and what not. Unfortunately most of those small lables have been bought out secretly by big ones like Universal but they keep the small label front otherwise you'd have to find a new name for the genre. Blah blah blah, jazz.

I like jazz. I didn't use to. Jazz was too cool for me back in the day. It didn't make sense with the lyrics being far and few between. Sometimes it took too long for a song to play. Also, nobody really plays jazz on the radio, and that is what I really like about jazz. Now you may be thinking, "Paul doesn't own a single jazz song." You'd be right, but that is my opinion on jazz as well. Nobody should ever record jazz. It's kinda like the Emily Dickenson of music. Jazz should be a one-time experience each time. See, one thing I love about jazz is that it should never be played the same way twice. A song changes from performance to performance as the musicians fine-tune their "spin-outs." That's another thing I like about jazz, the solo. In Alternative Rock and even Pop there is one or two peices represented. The guitar solo is so overrated, as is the heavy vocals. With jazz each piece of the band gets to roll, each musician showing their skills. They spin-out when they have the time to show their skills. It lets even the bass sax player get off of their repetitive three cord draw. How often to rock bass players get to excentric solo? Finally there are the jazz instruments. I'm not talking about the actuall instruments but the condition. In classical music, musicians are expected to have a "concert" instrument, where "concert" means flashy and nice (Dis not be cheap). In rock the instruments are replaced every-so-often as they lose their glitter. Jazz is different. Jazz players can play with a dented trombone and an unfinished bass and nobody cares, it's about the sound. Old jazz musicians sometimes couldn't afford to by a mute for their trumpets, many would take and old plunger bottom in place. Now that's cool, using old bathroom stuff to help your music. I wonder if Louis Armstrong used a plunger-mute? I wouldn't put it past him. Jazz is fits perfectly in with Murphy Cheap. I don't have to buy CD's (because that would ruin it) and you can play with a $40 trumpet picked up at a garage sale. Rock on.

Paul "brasskazoo" Murphy