I just can’t get into this new sh☆t when I go backwards through time. Not so far though. We have only been recording music for about 100 years.
People are still alive before a Jazz record even existed. The paradox is that I am asking you listen to my new music, in the world of the living.
But I love listening to these ghosts. Like Jimmy Durante. You recognize his voice. You might not recognize his face but he was a star from the 20s to the 70s.
As much as I say that streaming is a sham for working artists, if you want to visit these ghosts it’s all here. Take a puff of some Jazz Cabbage and go back in time.
The whole idea recorded music is a miracle we take for granted. But it’s one of our great treasures that will be lost to the dustbowls of time.
If I get The Original Jazz Cabbage of the ground this month it’s going to be so weird and fun.
This music is just so beautiful and so sad, and dynamic in ways that make today’s records just sound flat. Like canned food soup next to an Italian grandmother chopping up fresh ingredients and smiling and laughing from eyes that have crossed oceans.
To embody that and try to look at an audience and try to put over Jimmy Durante is just goofy. It’s acting. It’s vaudeville.
But Vaudeville. That’s an art form where unlike this era where Paris Hilton is one of the biggest DJs in the world, celebrities had actual talent. Actors had to sing. Singers had to act. Dancers had to sing a little and act a lot.
There were still heiresses. They didn’t have instagram.
Come see if I have what it takes…come travel through time. Because these songs had some of the best rhymes.
The music was so sad, it’s just cathartic. We were just coming out of the dark ages in a land of immigrants peddling their old stories in this new world.
If it didn’t happen unless you have 4K video, did the world even exist before we recorded our first sounds?
“I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you”Trying to master this music on my own has been an adventure because the world just looks different with these songs filling up your ears with orchestras and tear drop voices giving the greatest performances of their lives.
Because that was the gig. It was good work if you could get it. No protools. One frickin’ take with a union band behind you.
Time changes everything. And this is not the Golden Age. It’s not even the Silver one.
But as an artist, as a singer, and thinker, this is how I came to be born again.
What’s new isn’t actually better when rapid inflation is the inverse of our steady decline. Maybe next year’s model is something mpre expensive, and something worse.
Remember just like a great singer, in life you might get three acts, but you only get one take
– Musician and writer Davin Michael Stedman has many ventures, such as the AMAZING blog, 100milesofmusic.com. Davin’s recent song has become a global earworm and Caribbean dancehall hit. Listen here on Reggaeville: DAVIN MICHAEL STEDMAN & ANTHONY RED ROSE – FREE YOUR MIND FEAT. SLY & ROBBIE WITH LENKY MARSDEN. The video is now available on Youtube: Tuff Gong Television. His single with British band Sherlock Soul is available here.
