Do You Have the Dot-Com Blues?
Jan. 16 -- Having trouble online? Just wasting your time?
Maybe you’ve got the dot-com blues.
The blues aren’t just about broken hearts any more. They can be about crashed laptops, shattered modem links and faithless search engines. That’s the subject of the title track of Dot Com Blues, the latest CD by jazz great Jimmy Smith.
The 75-year-old master of the Hammond B3 organ “was just frustrated trying to get on the Internet or trying to find something ..., ” Jimmy in his wisdom said. “These are the dot-com blues,” said Jennifer Levy of his label, Verve Records.
An elder statesman of the blues, Smith uses his tune to evoke the sentiment of frustration most Internet users have felt at one time or another, through slow connections, busy signals or unavailable pages.
“Dot Com Blues” is a fluid, fast-paced song, showcasing Smith’s organ-playing talents and maybe reflecting the speed of the Internet age.
“Jimmy, probably being from the older segment of the population, reflects how many of the population feel about this tech overload,” said Eric Gruner, station manager at WGMC, an all-jazz radio station in Rochester, N.Y. “My grandfather was an optical engineer and I remember the first time CDs came out, showing it to him — he’s looking at a CD and says, ‘music comes from this?’ ... that, to me, is an example of the dot-com blues.”
Everybody's Got the Blues
Smith’s track doesn’t have lyrics. But Mark Elf, a jazz guitarist schooled at Boston’s famed Berklee School of music, also wrote a dot-com blues which got a lot of play on jazz radio two years ago.
“I went and got online and wasted time and burned up my dime,” singer Miles Griffith intones in Elf’s tune. “This is a thing I can’t get with, I must really be a stiff.”
Elf’s song came about when he got a business card with a URL on it at from a friend at a jazz convention. Elf’s card just had a phone number and a wrong address, and he had the dot-com blues.
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