Hi Everyone
If you are young, with it, trendy and all the other buzzwords, you are more than likely to be a Swifty. American singer Taylor Swift has been here for a series of stadium concerts including five nights last week at Wembley Stadium in London filled with 92,000 fans each night. Apparently, her appearances here are part of a world tour that has boosted our economy by £1 Billion pounds. With her other appearances here that makes an audience of nearly one million. By now there still may be some of you who have probably spent the last month on an uninhabited island with only this Rubbish for company will be asking who Taylor Swift is. I would probably would have been in that category except that my grandaughter is a Swifty having waited for months for her two nights at Wembley with her friend. Whatever your musical taste these occasions bring people together in the best possible way. Let us hope that the extra billion pounds that our government now has will be used to help young people who are not fortunate enough to enjoy the life of a Swifty.
Now when I was a teenager it was a different musical era, Elvis, Bill Haley and the Comets, the Beetles, Rolling Stones but in my case - Jazz. It was no secret that the Senior Partner had little or no interest in music of any sort but we had a record player which at that time had no plug for headphones and as teenagers of that era only had a bedroom to sleep in. That meant that I either had to wait until she was out, which was rarely, or play my music and wait for the reaction. After about two minutes I would hear the cry "Switch that row off". Thankfully it did not discourage me from collecting nearly six hundred jazz vinyl LPs and CDs over the next almost sixty years. It also made me very tolerant of other people's taste in music, so although most of you are unlikely ever to be a Swifty, accept it as the music of today.
Back in 1956, a young New York photographer persuaded fifty six great jazz musicians, who happened to be in New York at the time, to assemble for a photograph on the steps of a lovely brownstone house in Harlem. On our first visit to New York just three months after 9/11 I went on a jazz night with my American guide who had just started his now very successful business, to various jazz clubs. As part of the trip we stopped outside the house. That iconic photograph called "A Great Day in Harlem" is now a framed poster on the wall in my den. Now just two of those musicians are still alive and they are both now in their 90s. Fortunately, all fifty six are still alive thanks to that great archive You Tube. Hopefully, my Swifty granddaughter will still be in touch with her hero in sixty years time.
Just a Thought :
If it sounds good, it is good.
A rock star plays in front of thousands dressed like he is homeless. A jazz musician plays in front of 20 people dressed like he's a millionaire.
Brian
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