i've been on and off moving some things around in our house during my jazz listening today (so the currently upbeat good ass Patrice Rushen tracks are helpful) and my brain, when directing my body to do repetitive low attention tasks like "move stuff from a to b", wanders.
today it wandered to family music.
so, while I'm taking a break from wearing a path in some floors, I'm going to ramble, thread-style.
there's a social dynamic that's arisen over the last 20? years maybe wherein two acquaintances might find themselves at a conversation point where one asks the other "so, are there any musicians in your family?"
and then the other participant will either list off a sibling or two who played in band in school, maybe a parent who sings.
and then it's off to other topics, often, as I've seen it happen anyway.
if, by some happenstance, someone of a young-ish generation dropped into casual conversation with my grandfather and asked, he would have looked confused and then listed off what each member of his family did musically.
because when he was a kid, everybody did music. every body.
to put it in perspective a little more, my grandfather was one of thirteen siblings whose parents were German immigrant farmers to the US.
thirteen kids, all did something musically. they weren't an outlier, they were just a family of farmers.
it wasn't that they were all remarkably talented or showed early promise or anything like that.
it was the only way music happened for people. music happened by making it. at home, at school, at church, in town, to celebrate, to mourn, to advertise, all of it.
@djsundog my great grandmother did music lessons, she had a harp and an organ herself, but she'd teach you any instrument... right after teaching herself, if she hadn't already crammed for a prior student
