On 7/22/64 11:59 AM, Paul Richards wrote:
Yeah, but the title of the e-mail says "mainstream". Who in the mainstream is doing anything even like Pat Metheny did with his earlier band Pat Metheny Group in so far as instrumental music with varying "world music" influences? I don't see (or hear) anything coming down the pike.
Bill and I had a very progressive world music/fusion/all instrumental group for 13 years called Worlds Collide.
For a while in the late 80's and the through the mid 90's we were able to get a lot of gigs with this ensemble as well as opening
for other world acts like King Sunny Ade, Youssou NDour, Thomas Mapfumo, Johnny Clegg, Salif Keita, etc, and
even playing very lucrative coroporate gigs opening for the likes of (I know it must sound weird) the Neville Brothers,
Huey Lewis and the News, Cher, Kenny G, et. al.) but the market for progressive instrumental music
outside of the jazz world (hell, including the jazz world unless you were a superstar with an already established
track record) completely dried up. Record stations , even independent ones, stopped playing music like this
and finally the good gigs stopped happening.
The mainstream right now, is not very interested in instrumental music and hasn't been for a long time.
This is not to say that there isn't really good music being made in these fields but, with a lack of good
performance opportunities, we finally hung up the ghost and stopped.
That's been my perspective in Northern California. It's been this way for a good ten years now.
Other than artistic satisfaction (which can be enough for some artists) there's not a huge incentive to put all
the work it takes into creating a progressive instrumental band when there are very few places to play in our area.
Just my 2 cents.
Rick Walker
