time waits for no man i guess

[sundance_kiddsg]

over the weekend, i had my 6-year old princess in my car when “i want to hold your hand” came on my mp3 player. as she was singing along with the song, my wife commented that my daughter was into oldies.

it then dawned on me that songs by the fab four are considered oldies to me too.

did some mental calculation and realized that since the song was released 50 years ago, by comparison, this would mean that when i was six back in the early 70s, i would have been listening to songs from the 1920s, soon after the first world war.

not sure what point i am making but it was an odd sensation.

 

[Rook]

From xkcd.com

 

[Danny W.]

I've thought about this quite a bit as it relates to music. My first band in the '50's sang and played what we now call doo wop, and the jazz music I listened to and would soon play was bebop. Big band music seemed impossibly old-fashioned and ancient, even though it was only twenty years or less in the past. I loved the Great American Songbook, but only in doo wop or bebop interpretations. Music from sixty years earlier was ridiculously quaint

Time machine forward sixty years and I'm playing in a big band with a horn section that averages 77 years old, with most of our audiences ranging from 60 to 95 years old, playing swing, bop and some '50's rock as though they were all contemporaneous art forms. What we consider our "new" music is sixty years old, and the regular repertoire more like eighty. We sometimes play to much younger audiences and they love our music too, even though the music they normally like makes me want to drive knitting needles through my ears. We often have grandparents and grandkids out on the dance floor at the same time dancing to In The Mood or Shiny Stockings with the kids enjoying it as much as the seniors.

I think much of the difference in attitude comes down to the popular culture of the time. When I was a teen, we felt compelled to listen to music that was not our parent's--not sure if that's as big an issue today. Even back then my mother, who had sung classical music professionally, had no love of traditional jazz or swing, but loved show tunes and liked the Beatles more than I did when they first appeared in the US. She hated doo wop and bop though. Now I know women who are her age if she had lived, who come to our concerts and also to band that does '50's-'60's rock with lots of Elvis and Beatles tunes. That gulf that seemed so wide when I was young seems to have disappeared.

And yes, this all makes me feel old, which I am.

Danny W.