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Many interesting posts...the LoOpDoctOrs are eyestrained.
Here are our thoughts...and by the way, we come armed with Keyboards and
Guitars to every gig...we like them both.
1: The piano was the middle class instrument pre-depression. The nineteen
thirties devestated the piano business...the instrument has never really
recovered. Hence,fewer young hands taking up the ivories, so fewer young
hands can transfer those skills to a keyboard.
Also it took a helluva long time to succesfully amplify keyboards... And
spare us arguments about two ton Hammond B-3s.
2: Post World War 2 and with the advent of the electric amp, guitar became
the middle class instrument. There were a host of reasons but briefly...
a: guitar is much less expensive and complex to build then
a piano, and much easiar to learn to play passably well.
b: instrument that gained the most by the advent of
electric amplification (thank you, Leo!)
c: The guitar is a folk instrument that rose with "folk"
music, just as the world was finally throwing off the shackles of
colonialism. Hence, blues, rock, funk, World...(you name it now...the
contempoarary musical scene has just glopped itself silly with disparate
influences) got liberated by WW 2, and the guitar was the secret weapon
that really won the Cold War. Ironically, the guitar had been a "gutter"
instrument...all that poor people in the south could afford.
d: Likewise, America was/is the inventor/promulgator of
loud guitars...has been throughout this century, first with the steel
string, later with the electric. When America conquered the world post WW2
it spread its music and its guitars.
e: the guitar has the most powerful sexual iconography of
any instrument...(have you ever noticed that a Strat is Apollonian and a
Les Paul is Dionysian? Skip this if you haven't studied the
Greeks)...anyway, your average 13 year old gets right away that there are
two things you can buy for about $300 that look and in many ways act like a
bigger cock...an electric guitar and a pistol. Both make noise, and both
scare the shit out of parents. Given the music it serviced (rock and roll)
it was the the perfect "fit."
Meanwhile, even the most outrageous and visual piano players look like
they're taking a dump when pounding it out on the piano. They have to
twist their necks to look at the audience, or stay hidden behind the box,
and no way are they going to be able to pick up and stroke that thang!
Onto other points...
3: the Piano DID have tons of Eddie Van Halens...there names were Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, List, Rachmaniniov, Paderewski, Rachmononov,
Horowitz...these "piano heroes" came between 1750 and 1950.
4: Jazz lost the popularity contest about 1948. It only survives now
through public schools. It is America's high art, but is not particularly
accessible, and to play it you better know more then a blues box and bar
chords. Rock has never had this problem.
5: Bill Frissell is good, but Monk is Monk and inimitable...so just let
Bill be Bill.
6: One final point. Popular music has grown more and more interesting in
the last five years, and the LoOpDoctOrs believe, maybe foolishly, that it
is morphing and absorbing just about anything it can glop onto...so genre
boundaries are becoming less relevent...with the exception of maybe 10 to
17 year olds. They will always have some form of pagan, rebellious,
no-brainer-to-play sex music based around "folk" chords.
7: On technique/virtuosity/and musicality...the LoOpDoctOrs like to think
that it isn't in the fingers...but in the brain and the heart. We are
looking for the ships that will sail us there. We don't ask for perfect
seas either, and can't imagine calling ourselves sailors without knowing
how to deal with foul weather. And whoever wrote that piano was built to
play in "middle C" has just got to be kidding!
Meanwhile we want/demand a varied musical diet. We love it that musicians
from Africa now cross the Atlantic to play on sessions in America and visa
versa.
Best,
the LoOpDoctOrs