In the UK for the last 18 years at least, a whole generation has been virtually starved of live musicians for a variety of reasons. The arrival of Computers being a standard household utility with their accompanying music production and downloadable music format devices, together with wide spread video and latterly DVD technology has kept a lot of a youngster indoors for the majority of their leisure time. Coupled with the rising overheads and prohibitive licence fees and conditions imposed on UK Clubs 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 young generations – a lot of of whom have never even heard a live musician or band.

It is simple to see why for that reason, that during my live shows lately, I am a lot of the time faced with a young individual totally agape watching the live performer 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’ve recently returned to working many solo shows as a cocktail pianist playing a variety of music styles but a lot of the time older standards such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, etc. The thing is, not only am I now locating I am being booked by the youngster that first saw me several years ago, but they’re requesting that I play 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’s decidedly little coverage on United Kingdom (UK) radio or TV of any music style other than the most recent commercial music. The sad thing is that if young people do not get the occasion to witness other musical styles because it isn’t in the mainstream broad casts and because live music is so rare, all of us are not giving them the occasion to decide If they like it or not. all of us have consequently been creating a generation for a lot of years that is one-tracked in its musical culture, when all of us ought to have been giving our youngsters much more choice.