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28/07/2004 The blues after Martin Scorsese
Now that the dust has settled on the Martin Scorsese-produced series of seven films on the blues, it's an opportune time to ask: will the series help arrest the long-term decline of the blues? Only the natives can make that call for the vital US market, but in the UK and the rest of Europe, it appears not. The choice of BBC4, the digital terrestrial channel available only to the minority of UK viewers with Freeview boxes, for transmission of the series, indicated that it was expected to draw a small audience. A sound judgment: the blues becomes less relevant with every passing year. Since the 1960s blues heyday, very little has been produced to suggest that it's a living genre, and there aren't many signs of the under-50s expressing much interest: the blues is as relevant to most music lovers as steam radios or horse-drawn carriages. The future of the music lies not in regaining its peak pre-1970 market but as a niche in the increasingly popular roots music market. While Scorsese's affectionate series, available on DVD, can be seen as a last post for the blues as a vital art form, the series now takes its place in the valuable, ever-growing library of DVD introductions to genre musics for grown-ups, alongside Ken Burns Jazz, Lonesome Highway (country) and innumerable rock series. The genres still waiting for their Scorsese include: opera, classical and world music.
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