Blue Notes

Thoughts on the film Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes:

When a society can no longer provide meaning in young people's lives as it did at many points in history through the humanities--and if you devalue the humanities (for example the fact that young people didn't have musical instruments), they will find some way to make music. But the bottom-up approach, while it is useful in the beginning, doesn't create a framework for the future, or for history. You can't always be grassroots because it doesn't scale. It had scaled in the 1980s at the beginning of hip-hop and the using of turntables and records to make music because they didn't have access to traditional instruments. It extended the history of blues and jazz but without the same tools. It begs the question whether you can pass the baton of a genre without the same tools (or knowledge) of the trade.

 9/1/2020 

[9/1/2024: AI-generated music has made the internet the new instrument, as the recording studio became an instrument in the late 60s and early 70s, where you didn’t need any preconceived ideas. The preconceived ideas now are in the form of text prompts and commands: “Write a song about _______ with these lyrics”. The parentage of whatever is generated may include samples of musician performances, and in that sense, includes musical roots. But don’t we need to be aware of what they are, as opposed to using them anonymously?]