Well I have a terrible confession to make: while everyone else in Boston is freezing to death this week, I escaped to the Bahamas. Here I sit in a house in Nassau in shorts, enjoying balmy weather and taking long walks on the beach. Gosh it is beautiful down here.
Just fyi, The National Orchestra of the Bahamas did my Peter VS the Wolf last May, and I am finally delivering a video of that performance (the mail service between USA and Bahamas is downright dreadful if not non-existent– parcels sent months ago have still not arrived), and so I got invited down again mostly just to chat about future doings and maybe some speaking appearances etc., with the orchestra program down here.
But having spent a little time down here I have come to notice something that seems to always come up when I travel, which is the oh so common practice of satisfying expectations of tourists by presenting a cliche of what a country is, rather than presenting the true character of the culture.
I suppose the reason this is done is obvious– it sells. People want to have a "Caribbean experience," so there is a band playing calypso music and some girls in traditional dress gyrating about down by the wharf.
There is a phrase I often hear down here– it is "tourist music." Many musicians here are looking for ways to expand and grow themselves artistically, and that is always an option, but tourism is a huge business and the gatekeepers– ah, the gatekeepers . . . want no experiments of or new stuff. Just play the same old tunes and give the crowd what they expect.
This is just a guess, but maybe what a lot of the crowd might be searching for in their traveling is something perhaps . . . new and different??? Not that they want to hear some raucous experiment in electronic noises or some contemporary abstract junk, but certainly it is ever so likely that such a rich musical culture is champing at the bit to come up with something new. Sad to say, both visitors and local players are being strangled by the "steady gig" that just conforms to, and confirms, the pre-conceived notions of visitors of what Caribbean music is.
Shame on the tourists who support this stuff.
There is real musical life here and real culture as well, but it is completely hidden from the average tourist. The jitney buses are wonderful mirrors into the local life, as is an evening at the Oyster Bar Restaurant.
I went to hear one of my new friends here sing at a local resort last night. He plays and sings beautifully, but his program there was all standard "tourist music." You should have heard him sing at the Oyster Bar one night. I thought I had a front row seat to a cross between Lou Rawls and Tony Bennett. But you won’t hear him sing like that in the tourist venues. The managers have decided that you don’t want the good stuff. What an opportunity they are missing, to cash in on such a fabulous local resource.
I often deal with gatekeepers and agents myself (See JS Bach Superstar for a great example of what I mean), so I know what these guys have to put up with and I really feel for them. I realize the average person doesn’t really understand classical music enough to know better. But certainly, the true sprit of the musicians down here is worth seeking out, and if you don’t do that or ask for it when you travel, you will almost certainly be steered toward the same old dumb-downed cranked-out stuff that the gatekeeping presenters feel will satisfy you, at minimal cost and bother to them.
If you are a customer you have power and influence. If those with positive ideas say nothing for fear of looking stupid, then only the whiners who are angry or frightened will be heard, and so they will be the ones who determine policy. Right now the people who are afraid of hearing anything new are in charge of the professional music scene just about everywhere. You can make a difference, as both a player and even more as a consumer.
