Jazz Alley From Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to the new greats of today, this is the place for Jazz!

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Tales from the front....

Posted by D Harvey (M) on March 18, 2021 at 19:35:17

In Reply to: RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic posted by Palustris on March 16, 2021 at 09:52:07:

I'm rather enjoying this tangent....

My own experience in trying to introduce music to a work environment years ago was not encouraging. Lots of people wanted music in the workplace, but there were a few different opinions on what kind of music it should be. A few relatively narrow options were tried. Country and classic rock went first. While both options were by far the most popular of all possible options, each generated massive complaints and unhappy, agitated people. Those two options lasted a week each. Then they put on the muzak. Nobody liked it, but the complaints to management and overt agitation in most people also stopped. It seemed the only music everyone could bring themselves to agree on was the stuff they knew nobody else was enjoying either. After a few weeks of Muzak, a few of us who found all of the options given to be....not much enjoyable, pointed out that nobody liked this stuff so it wasn't really the mood boost (on a 12-hour shift) that those of us who had driven this effort were after in the first place. So they went back to playing nothing at all. Myself, I was able to tolerate the classic rock OK, though 12 hours day after day got to be a long time. I did not like the muzak, but I struggled with entire days of "modern" pop country. Sometimes I wanted to hit people. It was a truly visceral reaction at times. This was the late 90's, so streaming didn't really exist at the time. It would be interesting to try something like this again today with truly random and wide-ranging program material being rotated all day long. Maybe the masses could deal with it if they only got annoyed for little bits of time in exchange for hearing something they like regularly. Then of course, you have the people who don't like music at all....

Years before, the summer after my freshman year of college I drove an ice cream truck, which I figured would be a fun summer gig. It was, but the music was a 40-minute loop of really bad synth versions of Disney tunes. That music kept me up at night for about three weeks. After that, I just didn't hear it anymore. Later on, I snuck in a tape of Charlie Parker playing Chi-chi and a few other tunes for a day or two. The kids didn't dig it. One girl of 7 or so said to me "That's fancy music!" Her connotation was not positive and she was not alone. People on the route were even less receptive to Steve Reich's "Tehillim" (yes, I really did do that) which lasted less than a day. The boss got wise to my game and told me I had to stop messing with the music, and I knew he was right from a business perspective. Years later I found out that little kids by and large actually like Monk's music quite a bit. Seriously, put him on and watch the kids dance. It would have been a better choice, but I'm not sure how much better that might have gone with adults mixed in the crowd.

Both of these experiences were dispiriting at the time, but are oddly fun to talk about today.




dh

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