I am just naïve enough to believe that almost all music is accessible – on some level or another – to almost all people. Obviously I’ve hedged, because some musical genres – Extreme Gangsta Rap and White Power Rock/Nazi Punk, for example – are best avoided by most feeling human beings. But to the point: the great bulk of our planet’s music – from Blues and Jazz to Zydeco and Blue Grass to North Indian Raga, Indonesian Gamelan, West African drumming, and Bhutanese mountain trumpeting (to name but a very few) – is of enduring beauty and quality and has something real and powerful to offer every one of us. The evidence of the immediate appeal of most music to most people is the reaction of children to music. It is my experience that until children become overtly self-conscious about themselves and begin to subjectively discriminate between things (somewhere between ages 6 and 9), there are no more musical creatures on the planet. They will sing without inhibition at the drop of a hat and will dance to pretty much anything with a joy and abandon that the rest of us can only marvel at. They do not know “good […]