Wow! Dickie is back with a venegence!

Some meandering thoughts as follows…

Dickie, I’m talking about music as an entertainment medium not as a platform to show off your chops nor as a product to mold into something ultimately unrecognizable from it‘s original form. It’s all about entertainment and what folks want to hear. There’s a huge difference and I’m presenting my case accordingly.

No, Tie A Yellow Ribbon is NOT the zenith of popular music. I should have said Che Sera, Sera the Doris Day song from the 50’s is.

I played in Europe almost every night for many years…and….played in the streets for just as many years. So I’m playing the accordion (busking) and egotistically doing things like Dizzy Fingers, Tico Tico, and French Musette to show people how good I was. They didn’t care…..and…..I didn’t make any money. One day I asked the guitarist, who was sharing my busking spot with me, why he played the same four songs over and over again. His reply was he could “play many songs, but they’re the only songs that make me money.” With that in mind, I looked at my own repertoire. I noticed that whenever I played Che Sera Sera, while busking, my accordion case would begin to fill up with money and when I DIDN’T play it, I’d go through a dry spell. I also remember the day I “worked” the tourist queue at one of the historic sites with a tin cup attached to my accordion. I played nothing but the Blue Danube Waltz up and down the line for hours and made a small fortune by the end of the day.

About the same time, I was working with a German guitar player at night in the Hilton in London. We had been doing German music together for about a year at that point. One night he asked me to stop playing my Stauss waltzes and German beer-drinking stuff with sixths and major sevenths. In fact, he asked me to play with “one finger” from then on…another way of saying people want to hear “simple” music and not to make everything so “rich” in chord structure.

He was right. What I learned is to “play a European format and play it simple, with emotion, and to concentrate on playing the melody! NOT like this “dressed up” garbage music of today that America also invented.

Smart musicians know what an audience wants. If arranger keyboardists are not learning anything beyond the 70’s it’s because the people they’re playing to don’t want to hear it. They want to hear pre-70‘s songs that still have melodies.

Modern music is completely devoid of melody…it’s felt rather than heard (boom boom as the dance floor goes up and down at 140 BPM at 120 db).

Americans crave this discombobulated music as it is today, because they need to get their minds off of their problems. The more aggressive it is, the less are the chances of sinking into a reflective state of mind where they would have to address anything going on inside of them. Easier to distract themselves with music they can’t figure out!

My opinion of the difference between European music and American music is this: American music, from the 80’s to the present, is aggressive and is served up with gimmicks to dress up an empty dish, African rhythms to give it “movement,” painful volumes that cause your ears to bleed, and dedicated song stylists to cover up the fact that there is actually no melody line. European music is just plain raw fun, happy, and “feel-good.” I won’t deny that America has been the birth of many musical forms and has produced an incredible amount of wonderfully imaginative songs over the years. But the old saying applies here: “If it don’t need fixin,’ don’t repair it!” America should have left well enough alone before it proceeded to deflower it’s great American musical heritage.

You wrote: “Whereas the US is trying to come up with the NEXT worldwide sensation, by trying to be different, NOT the same.”

Who cares if the US comes up with some worldwide sensation. That’s like politics. Every time a new politician gets voted into office, he has to make changes. Doesn’t matter if the old procedures work just fine….got to make changes!

When I say jazz can be played by any musical buffoon on a tin piano, I meant simple jazz lines like scale runs and common chord substitutions, etc. I’m NOT talking jazz greats who really know their stuff. I’m talking average lounge musicians who can’t play melody lines effectively so they play syncopated “scale runs” that are interpreted as “cool” and everyone goes “Wow…can he play!” Sure he can play…..scale runs and broken chords that any “musical buffoon” can play!

My disclaimer here is this is all opinion based on experience since I haven’t played in Europe for 20 years now and I’m really not conversant with what it’s like there nowadays. But I know when I play an event here and Europeans are part of the crowd, I can tell immediately as they are the first ones on the dance floor to do a waltz (what I consider to be the world‘s first contact sport). This is unheard of with an American audience! You’d think they were still wearing their car seat belts!

Dickie...are you by any chance an orator? How long does it take you to write something like what you wrote above me here?

Lucky