There are, broadly, two schools of thought on the way music is heading in this country. One view — enthusiastically supported by commercial broadcasters, ad sales folk and others with decided and proudly specific tastes — foresees the future in terms of proliferating boxes, or niche markets. If this view were used, it would conjugate as follows: I am a rock fan, you like jazz, he listens to classical, we ignore anything that doesn't meet the narrow membership criteria of our chosen niche, you had better turn that off, they are never going to catch me listening to that.
The other vision of the future in music is a far more chaotic affair, and if this one were a verb its tenses would be hopelessly mixed up: I used lobe a dedicated rock fan, now I attend the odd prom concert, next week I am off to Ronnie Scott's club, I will play you the Portishead album when you come over next week, and lean hardly wait to see Ry Cooder performing with the Malian guitarist Ali Parka Toure in July.
"Eclectic" is the term normally applied to this nonconformist, categorically evasive approach, and while nobody can claim that eclectic is a new idea, or that it is as popular at the moment as little boxes, it is clearly gaining ground. Headline proof that music does not have to be a matter of strict tribal affiliation came with the massive album sales generated by Nigel Kennedy, the Three Tenors, and a double CD of Gregorian chant by the Benedictine monks of Silos, which has, over the past year and a half, sold as many copies around the world as the latest release by the Rolling Stones. Pavarotti In The Park conclusively demonstrated that the classical repertoire strongly appeals to people who do not subscribe to Gramophone magazine and who are, in Pay's case anyway, considerably younger than the crowd who turn out for Eric Clapton in the Albert Hall.
But the eclectic case is being more subtly and persuasively put in other ways. When the psychedelic ambient duo The Orb had a top-10 hit in 1993 with Little Fluffy Clouds, few of their fans probably realised that the rolling guitar figure that propels the track is a sample from a recording by Pat Metheny of the American avant-garde composer Steve Reich's piece, Different Trains. Music, as Reich would appreciate, now travels in strange ways. While that most impenetrable of all niche markets, rap, has been thoroughly ghettoised in the media, it has been warmly supported — on stage and in the studio — by respected jazz musicians such as Donald Byrd and Courtney Pine, who see in today's outraged insistence that rap isn't "real" music echoes of the furore created in
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