Hopefully, I don’t need it but if I do here is a little (not so) Daily Grist to preface my column. (I’m thinking Jonathan Swift didn’t need to do this but he was obviously much…..much better at it than I.)
tongue-in-cheek – a figure of speech used to imply that a statement or other production is humorously or otherwise not seriously intended, and it should not be taken at face value.
I think that it is time to tell the world. I can’t keep hiding this truth about me that most people don’t have a clue about. Maybe a couple of my close friends have picked up on it but not too many. It turns out that I am genre fluid and have been for some time. Sure, I’ve tried to hide or deny it off and on for years but as of now, I am fully embracing my fluidity.
I first became aware of it in the mid 80’s. A friend convinced me to go to a show at a coffee house that featured jazz. Before the evening was over I had the card of a jazz bass teacher and it was a slippery slope after that.
My roots were strictly folk mixed with a little bluegrass and I continued to play with groups in those genres but unknown to anyone but my wife, I was secretly playing in a jazz quartet and still taking lessons in jazz bass. Life and guilt finally caught up to me and I backed away from jazz and from really any playing at all.
A number of years later, I jumped into bluegrass with both feet. I strived and worked to be a bluegrass bass player and that worked for a while but some of my past influences caught up with me and I started cheating on my bluegrass band. Not just with old time players and you can bet I was doing that too, but you can hardly call that cheating even if it includes contra dances. No, I began playing blues with some bluesy type characters and I liked it.
Once you slip, it is soon a free fall. I went from blues to gypsy jazz and on to some classic rock and I was even looking for Real Book jazz jams on #meet up. All this and I was still hitting 3 or 4 bluegrass jams a week.
It was then that I started to question what genre I was supposed to be playing. I had been calling myself a bluegrass bass player for a good long while, but was I really. The other genres kept pulling me in. I was asking myself, was I a bluegrass player or maybe a blues player, I kinda like the gypsy jazz stuff an awful lot too. I was thoroughly confused and having a serious identity problem.
Considering serious psychotherapy for my confusion, I thought that maybe Google could point me in the right direction, maybe hook me up with others like me. That’s where I found out I was genre fluid. It turns out that this is a real thing………maybe. Look it up.
Google, WebMd or any other web resource couldn’t come up with any solution for me and certainly not conversion therapy (we all know that’s hokum.)
So here I am now genre fluid and proud. With this acceptance, I can now expand my semi-amateur bass status to other genres. This probably means as many exposure gigs as I can stand. You do know that gypsy jazz is played at Farmers Markets too. This week I got my bow out and am looking for a string quartet to play with……..on a semi-amateur basis.
I’m cutting out for now. I’m finding this satire stuff hard and maybe, enough is enough.
See you in April. I’ll have a second grand child by then.
