This blog celebrates music of all kinds, and finds the right stuff everywhere. Hence, Dyverse Music. But is it possible to like so much different music, and appreciate them all equally, like PG Wodehouse's male codfish, 'which suddenly finding itself a parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, resolves to love them all'?[1] Yes, because all music is a manifestation of the human spirit, and the emotions music expresses - joy, love, infatuation, angst, serenity - are universal.
Although it might truly be said that different emotions dominate at different times of life, just as music means different things at different times in life. Consider Seven Ages of Dyverse, to correlate with the seven ages of man.
Rock 'n' roll, or rock, is the first age, the first music to speak directly to adolescent hopes and fears and longings. Rock uses excess and melodrama to protect a fragile sense of identity, and works best when it rages with angst and petulance. My teen years coincided with that cheerfully shabby and optimistic decade, the seventies, and neatly straddled prog-rock and punk. The seventies were absolutely the best decade for music after the sixties.
The Second Age is folk. That is, roots music from one's native soil, which also dovetails with rock if, like me, you were touched by the folk-rock movement. The Third Age, with strong connections to the Second Age, is USA music. This covers blues - no great leap from rock, thanks to Robert Johnson - and soul and country music, which are inextricably linked culturally and emotionally, and are both similarly earthy and direct. Both have a central place for the broken heart.
The Fourth Age is jazz. The Fourth Ager is curious about the formal aspects, the nuts and bolts of music, and naturally turns to jazz, the chosen medium of the finest composers and performers of the last and present centuries. Which isn't to say that jazz isn't also rich in emotion and expression.
Africa and world music (incorporating reggae) constitute the Fifth Age. The love of USA soul encourages a move to trace the sound of blackness to source. The music of the Americas corresponds to the Sixth Age. NB AMERICA AND USA ARE NOT SYNONYMOUS TERMS! There is as much richness in the music of North (i.e. Mexico), Central and South America as there is in the music of USA. Consider the contrasting charms of cumbia from Colombia, or tango from Argentina, or son from Cuba, or huapango from Mexico, or bossa nova from Brazil!
The Seventh Age is Classical. It would be too conventional and un-Dyverse to consider Classical as the pinnacle of human achievement in musical terms. No, Classical crept up stealthily, partly as a result of my radio listening habits: I discovered that no piece of Classical music is so bad that listening to The Archers is preferable. The string quartets of Beethoven hold more appeal than his symphonies, just as chamber jazz is more palatable than big band jazz (intimacy is definitely a Dyverse quality). The writer was still holding out against opera into his fifth decade, but then Puccini came along, and the last barrier came tumbling down.
In short, Dyverse Music celebrates the inexhaustibility of good music. The blog is home to The Dyverse Record Collection, a companion to great albums, with particular attention to forgotten and overlooked classics omitted from every other survey. TDRC stands in opposition to those canonical lists headed with predictability by Sgt Pepper, What's Going On and Pet Sounds (great albums that they are). Other strands include Dyverse Lists, alternative music lists; 'I Was There', which gathers eyewitness accounts of significant concerts from the past, and 'I Am Here', covering reviews of present-day gigs. There are interviews from the archives (from the writer's time as a full-time music journalist), and essays (Dyverse Dyatribes), and Dyverse Values, an authoritative guide to vinyl prices, gleaned by first-hand research into what the same albums can fetch on eBay. And every month a selected artist is singled out for rigorous scrutiny in Obsessions With… The Hero Worship section is devoted to friends, comrades and inspirations (sometimes all three at once) Abner Burnett, Peter Bocking and Bill Leader. Welcome to Dyverse Music. May it bring you joy.
[1] PG Wodehouse, The Custody of the Pumpkin, Blandings Castle and Elsewhere.
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