Waiting on my keyboard to arrive on Monday, and in the meanwhile was in the mood for piano bar hopping. Saw Damian Williams at Zebra Lounge. Apparently, most nights everybody wants to hear Piano Man and Brown-Eyed Girl, which must suck after a while for a guy playing six nights a week. He plays original stuff at Underground Wonder Bar on Sunday nights, and says he is followed by the best reggae band in Chicago. Damian @ Zebra Lounge hit the spot, but I ended up only briefly stopping into Underground Wonder Bar. The stage setup was great but the band wasn’t my taste.
I usually enjoy the commute, particularly watching the cars in the fast lane hurtle toward the city while waiting for the Garfield train, but having stayed up the previous night to complete a project, the trip back was pretty painful.
But still worth the effort. Before the invention of portable music devices, the culture of music was such that music was meant to be enjoyed in a moment. At live performances, most of the audience were hearing the songs for the first time. Orchestra enthusiasts in the 18th century would be terrible at “name that Mozart piece” compared to your average classically-trained 8-year-old. We are becoming ever more musically literate, and with that literacy comes the price of reflection.
A couple years ago I read a modern philosopher, Adorno, who claimed that the way we listen to and appreciate music has changed, and that as a society we have mostly lost the capacity to truly enjoy music we hear for the first time. We have weakened that muscle that responds to the immediacy of participating in creative expression. It must be sad for the band when cover songs receive some of the loudest cheers and whistles, in contrast to new songs they reveal for the first time, which are met with lukewarm, uncertain applause. The literate audience wants and expects to hear what they already know. But live music, by its nature, is listened to for the first time, and that variability and spontaneously nuanced creation is (or should be) the enthralling piece of it, even if some of the songs are known. The Adorno essay lends itself to oft-repeated extrapolated theories about the increasing popularity of facile music and the usual criticisms that have now trickled down to music snobs everywhere, but at the time it was groundbreaking.
Being able to listen to favorite songs, perfected by the artist in the recording studio, is a mixed blessing. Indisputably, some bands sound much better on the recording than live, but another mixed blessing is repeatedly hearing what the song is “supposed to sound like”. The latter usually feels like more of a curse than a blessing.
