Wednesday, April 19, 2006

More Stereotyping

When having a recent talk with a musician friend of mine, we were complaining about the lack of quality music played by the school bands. Why do all the arrangements have to be from the same Woody Herman/Stan Kenton stock? It seems like the band directors are just more comfortable with working with those arrangements.

I remember when I was playing in school, I noticed a racial barrier in the music we played. The majority of the musicians I loved and listed to at home were black, it seemed like all of the arrangements were by white people. I'm not saying white people can't play or anything, it's just something that stood out. We played Basie if via Sammy Nestico.

One time I was playing with some older guys who were all white, and some who played with Stan Kenton. It was funny because they seemed totally unaware of any black musicians. Instead of Coltrane it was all about Stan Getz. We were talking about guitar players and they knew about Howard Roberts, but I got no reaction when I was talking about Wes Montgomery, forget about Grant Green.

All of the people mentioned above are good players, it's just weird situation I've noticed.

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