For me, there are only two kinds of music, music that I like and music that is made for someone else's ears.

I gig twice a week at an outdoor restaurant adjacent to both the most popular city park and the public beach. The restaurant is attached to a resort hotel, and the prices are in the moderate level, much more than the taco and the wings eateries right next door. So we get more middle-aged to elderly people in the audience, and as we always select our tunes to who is there, we play a lot of baby-boomer era music.

We mix this with a little Caribbean (Soca-Reggae), Country, Folk, Jazz, Contemporary, and other various forms, being careful not to play anything too hard-core in the genres that the clientele there would object to. We'll even sprinkle a Sinatra era tune in from time to time. The only two things we don't do are Rap and Metal (although we will play a song or two with a rap section in the middle, and some hard rock that borders on metal).

We don't do set lists, but call songs on the fly judging what we think today's audience will like, and noticing how they react to what we are playing.

I'm always delighted that younger, college aged people come in, enjoy the music and say nice things or give us a thumbs up on the way out. I'm equally delighted that if we give the boomers enough of their own, then end up enjoying music that is from their children's and grandchildren's generation.

I think the generations are more tolerant of each others' music than they were when I was a young person, and I think that is a good thing.

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

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

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