Smartphoning it In

After a decent run, a run no one expected, music has run into its unfair share of glaring obstacles. The sort of problems you can’t merely play away. From cavemen banging on hollowed-out gourds to the choral excesses of reality TV, we should all be happy that music made it this long and did this well. But if we don’t do something, and fast, we’re looking at a musical landscape that’s emptier than the aforementioned gourd. Destined for the same compost heap as the rest of recent prehistory.

Human beings get exhausted listening to the same thing. The trumpet was a novel instrument in the beginning. So was the piano and the viola. Not today, when everything must have a high-tech angle to entice the glazed-over demographic of restless adolescents. Only the supremely deranged reminisce about the good ol’ days of rotary phones and the triangle. 

If phones are so much smarter today, then why not saxophones and vibraphones? What Charlie Parker was able to accomplish on an alto sax, despite being more strung out than soaking wet laundry, pales in comparison to what he’d create with a saxosmartphone. On-stage improvisation could benefit from a helpful app store suddenly at the ready to assist in any melodic digression. While plenty of legendary photographers captured the hazy, smoke-filled light of popular night clubs, where were the selfies? Where were the POV shots taken from inside a piano, drum kit or trombone? I’ll tell you. They weren’t there. No stereotypical duck face self-portrait would compare to the mid-note shot of someone like Freddie Hubbard, quite literally blowing his way into stardom.  

No wonder Sesame Street has fallen on hard times - xylophones never got smarter. Neither did vibraphones, the instrumental choice of someone who couldn’t decide between playing a piano and the drums. Somewhere along the way, instruments stopped getting smart. We didn’t give up after the acoustic guitar, satisfied with the wood apparatus. There’s a universe in which Hendrix sits on a tree stump playing a medieval lute while commuters ignore his every strum. 

Smarten up.