When I was very young, I started playing pop music. I was in Junior High School, we played classical in band, standards in the after-school "stage band" and top40 with my friends. The top40 was our music, the rebellious rock and roll.

But back then I had my standards. I refused to play country music. Back then country was very simplistic (so was pop), had no saxophones (with the exception of Boots Randolph) and it whined a lot.

A couple of years later, we had to learn a country song for a bar owner that we played regularly in. The guitar player said, "It's acting. Just put on an imaginary cowboy hat and pretend." So he taught me the song on the bass, the bass player played rhythm guitar, and I was off in root/five land. I was actually pretty happy to be playing another instrument.

I don't have those "standards" anymore. Whether the song is challenging or simplistic, I just put on the appropriate imaginary hat and have fun doing it.

But I have to be able to pull it off and it has to work with your baby-boomer targeted audience. So that means no rap and no heavy metal. But if we had enough requests AND if we could cover the song in our duo, I'd learn it, put on the imaginary hat and have a good time exploring that genre.

So who cares if it's a song by the Archies or Buck Owens and his Buckaroos? Not me.

When I was in school and in the concert band we played everything from Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures At An Exhibition" to Antonín Dvořák's "New World Sympbony" (both great pieces of music) to Franz Lehár's "Merry Widow Waltz" which is as corny to my ears as Muskrat Love.

I take them as the come, have fun doing them, and put my all into each performance. And it's a lot more fun than back in my youth when I had things I didn't want to play.

Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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