Concert Venues

In the UK for the final 18 years at least, a whole generation has been virtually starved of live performers for a variety of reasons. The arrival of PC’s 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 performance recorded music), this has had a devastating effect on professional performers 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 performer or band.

It’s simple to see why accordingly, that during my live performances lately, I’m a lot of the time faced with a young individual totally agape watching the live musician 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 a lot of solo performances 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 finding I’m being booked by the youngster that 1st saw me several years ago, but they are requesting that I performance the same style of music for their marriage party or birthday event. It seems that they have got into this sort of music through being made aware of it when I 1st played for them and they were so intrigued by it.

There’s very little coverage on United Kingdom radio or TV of any music style other than the the majority recent commercial music. The sad thing is that if young people do not get the opportunity to witness other musical styles because it isn’t in the mainstream broad casts and because live music is so rare, we are not giving them the opportunity to decide If they prefer it or not. we have for that reason been creating a generation for many years that’s one-tracked in its musical culture, when we ought to have been giving our youngsters much more option.