Sam Gentle.com

Background concert

A spreadsheet in the foreground and a saxophone in the background

I recently learned about the truly ludicrous number of jazz/lounge background music videos on YouTube. I've always liked listening to music when I work, though normally more electronic than jazz. The interesting thing about jazz, though, is that it's much better suited to live performance and improvisation. Which gives me an idea...

If you got a group of performers together, you could make a live concert designed for people at work. You'd probably want to run it for 12 hours (say, 9am US East to 6pm US West), which means you'd probably need a bunch of musicians working in shifts. The whole thing would be livestreamed, but designed to be left in a background tab or streamed audio-only. Essentially you'd be trying to replicate the kind of cafe jazz experience, but combining everyone's workplaces into one giant cafe.

With the goal of staying somewhat in the background, it would rule out some of the more adventurous or experimental ends of the jazz spectrum, but I still think there'd be room for creativity as a kind of daytime equivalent to Max Richter's Sleep. For the listener, it would probably be a better musical experience than the pre-recorded videos, and there would be an interesting kind of connection to everyone else listening and working live.

I general, I feel like there are way more opportunities to use technology creatively than are really being explored at present, and internet-scale live performance is one of the easiest to get started with since the tech part is already quite mature and there's a lot of low-hanging fruit.