Blog: What has Joe 90 ever done for Jazz?

There is an old Chinese curse that runs “May you live in interesting times”. This may of course be apocryphal but nevertheless nicely sums up the position we find ourselves in during the second decade of the 21st century. The combination of global economic woe and the inexorable rise of digital communication has put the interest into interesting with a vengeance. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Those of us who spent our formative years growing up in the 60’s and 70’s probably had our young minds warped by the curious imaginings of Gerry Anderson who showed us what the 21st century was going to look like. He was the brains behind TV shows such as Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and Joe 90 to name but a few. His shows provided a portal into a future of spectacular aircraft, space travel, mind bending hypnotising machines that could turn a nine year old schoolboy into a quantum engineer and wristwatches that could turn into video communication devices. There was a downside to all this in that everybody would have to be controlled by strings but who cares when you could have your very own jet pack strapped to your back for easy commuting! BUT….. Gerry Anderson didn’t foresee the internet and this is where things get interesting because the internet has changed everything.

The internet and the digital technology we take for granted these days, has turned anyone who so desires into an international recording artist. I can record a track, using technology that was just a dream of the future20 years ago, upload it onto the internet via a plethora of sites and anyone with an internet connection can listen to it anywhere in the world. I can do this as an Mp3 or if I wish I can actually create a CD with all the associated insert material which the recipient can peruse at their leisure whilst sampling the aural delights captured on the shiny disc. However, this raises a thorny issue which is, how do I get paid for it? No offence intended to our younger listeners but I am part of a generation that took it for granted that you paid for the privilege of playing music that someone else had sweated over to create, in the comfort of your own home or car or indeed wherever. File sharing and what is amusingly known as illegal downloading, has changed all that and it seems to me that an awful lot of punters now seem to think that music simply condenses out of the ether via the net and onto their ipods simply at the touch of a few buttons with no detriment to their bank balance.
 

Does it matter? Well yes if you’re trying to make a few shekels from your music but let’s look at from the opposite view. Does it matter that you don’t get paid for your music? No it doesn’t if it means that your music gains a wider audience because more people hear it and wider audiences mean that more people come to your gigs. Obviously you have to get gigs in the first place and frankly, that’s a subject for another day but gigs are a market stall, not just for what you play on the night but one off CD’s available nowhere else (until they get uploaded and shared), merchandise of various sorts and a chance to get your name known which means more gigs, one off CD’s, merchandise, gigs……….. The point is, the recording is now more than ever a merchandising tool to promote a gig which, for a jazz musician especially, is going to be a unique, never to be repeated event which can never be truly captured by any recording device. Jazz, by its nature, will never be played the same way twice which makes the live gig a unique event and we, as jazz musicians, have a duty to ensure that every gig is just that otherwise we are simply going to end up delivering a recital which anyone with net access can enjoy in the comfort of their own homes.
 

So what did Joe 90 ever do for jazz? Possibly programmes of the ilk created by Gerry Anderson created a breeding ground for ideas that resulted in the technology we take for granted today but nobody could predict the ways in which that technology has been put to use. It would be easy to stick your head in the sand, as the major labels do when they say that falling sales due to file sharing mean that they can’t go out and find the upcoming talent but frankly, who cares? The talent is out there and the talent now has the technology to do it for themselves without having to chase a record deal. Music becomes a performance event rather than a recorded event which is how it should be.

Thunderbirds are go!

You can contact me at hart.des1@gmail.com for anything jazz related or simply to tell me that my blog is rubbish but there’s more where this came from.

Des Hart