What Are You Listening To?

[Ruby]

A live album Shadows and Light - Joni Mitchell. 




Several pithy YouTube comments on this one! - "I'm surprised the stage didn't collapse from the substantial weight of talent assembled there. Incredible players."  The players aside from Joni being Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Michael Brecker and Don Alias.

And another comment that is just brilliant IMHO - "The great thing about this phase of Joni Mitchell's career is that she dragged all the barefoot children of the folk era kicking and screaming into her brilliant evocation of jazz and poetry.  In so doing, she created a genre of music that has never since been attempted much less duplicated.  The whole thing was so colossally subtle that no one noticed it was happening.  If Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel had the musical acumen to pull off such a majestic musical coup, they would have been lauded for it for decades to come.  Since it was Joni, the  revolution was silent, subtle, and so completely innovative as to go unnoticed--like a dog whistle  blown for an audience of deaf people.  I defy any of the current crop of geniuses to make music like this, to write poetry like this, and to do it with such low key humility and flair.  Revisiting this event after so many decades, I'm in awe all over again."

I read an article recently on book publishing and a new app called Blinkist which basically condenses books into 'insights' that you can read or listen to in 15 minutes because hardly anyone seems to have either the attention span or enough time to read books - there is too much other stuff competing for our attention. It's true - there really is, unless you are discerning, and even then it's difficult to get away from the tangled web of Netflix, podcasts, webinars, social media, etc., etc. It's all so insidious. The Blinkist app has been downloaded by 17 million people. The article also opines that are too many books being churned out, and that most of those should have been a 'blink' rather than a book which I can't help thinking applies to the music industry as well - it's all about quantity instead of quality and the machine that churns out crud just keeps rolling on relentlessly. Now where was I going with this (case in point for short attention span! Lol!) - oh yes - this kind of live show might be in danger of extinction. Chatting to a popular SA muso the other day - he's still doing shows but the revenue from those shows accounts for one sixth of his income compared to earnings from merchandise, (and you can sell anything - or rather, people will buy pretty much anything - it's astonishing) whereas before, everyone wanted the live gigs, especially the corporate events, which is where the money is/was. If music is what you do for a living, it's perilous unless you are one step ahead on the business front. I dunno - it's like the slow changes that were happening, and were probably inevitable, have sped up madly. I'm glad there are recordings of shows like these for posterity. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLKb9Ms68ME