On a road trip to an outdoor concert, I tuned into the local smooth jazz station to get the traffic report and see if they were talking about the event. "You are the Sunshine of My Life," a Stevie Wonder hit from the sixties was playing. I knew it was the right frequency, but had the station flipped to oldies? It was followed by an instrumental version of "Oh, Happy Day," a song that was a hit in the sixties. Well, it was an instrumental, so the station was still playing some type of smooth jazz. A produced sweeper affirmed that I was listening to "Smooth Jazz" and not "Cool FM, your oldies station," but led into Luther Vandross' version of "Goin' out of My Head," which was originally recorded by Little Anthony and the Imperials in - you guessed it - the sixties. The set wrapped up with Chuck Mangione's "Feels so Good," a song that is almost 30 years old, but was at least one decade fresher than the previous ones. Finally, the traffic report came on.  They explained why we were stuck at 5mph and I bolted back to the new releases in my CD player. I was stuck in traffic, but at least I escaped the time warp. How long will that last? Every new release announcement seems to list more CDs that are composed entirely of covers of pop and R&B oldies or jazz standards. Looking at a recent airplay chart there are instrumental versions of "Do It Again," "Winelight," "Get Down On It," and "What Does It Take" in the top 15, and David Pack and Simply Red are charting with their own remakes of songs that were hits for them in the past.

What is up with this? A cover every once in a while for flavor was fine, especially if the artist brought an original take to the song or the original version was not such a big hit that the nostalgia factor overshadowed the new performance. One or two an hour on the radio used to be the maximum, and one or two on a given CD. Now many of our artists are simultaneously discovering an intense desire to record old songs. Do I doubt that this is a heartfelt and intuitive choice and not pressure to deliver safe songs and instant familiarity to a radio format that is rapidly going gold, or should we say silver? Well, it seems weird that most of them have developed this urge over the last year or two after doing incredible original music for so long. They all say that they have an emotional attachment to these songs and they want to record them. I have to take that at face value, after all, they did grow up with these songs and undoubtedly do have an emotional attachment to them. I just liked it better when they put two or three of them on a CD instead of turning the whole thing into a celebration of the past. And how many versions of some of the more frequently covered songs does one need to own?

Are we, as adult music fans, so bonded to the past and stuck in our ways that new music scares us? I don't think so, but some people who have a lot of clout must because the radio format is turning into an oldies format, and artists and A&R people are following suit. This is so sad. One of the most wonderful things about this music, what drew a lot of us to it in the first place, is that it was current music created by and for adults. This was a type of music we could call our own that was fresh and new; where you could still get that rush you get when you hear a new song and it grabs you. It was a much needed alternative to all the radio stations that lulled you into musical complacency with "the songs you grew up with" and the compilation CDs they advertise on late night TV infomercials where the narrators speak of music as nothing more than a vehicle for memories.

The assumption that we bond with the music we listened to when we were teenagers and continue to want to hear only that as we grow older, has been around for quite a while. It worked for people who grew up in the forties and fifties, and some people did latch onto the sixties and cling for dear life. But if you look deeper, what did they latch onto about the sixties and seventies? Adventurousness and innovation! All that "progressive" stuff and how much fun it was discovering it and sharing it with your friends. If that generation is now the target audience for smooth jazz, why is it being assumed that they don't want to discover new music anymore? The fact that most people are too busy to search for new music doesn't mean they won't like it when they hear it. At this point, with almost all adult oriented radio formats playing some configuration of oldies, the search is bound to be so frustrating that they give up. Boomers default to radio. It's where they got turned on to new music when we were growing up, and the ones who are not in the music business don't know that there is a lot more out there than what they are hearing. They just assume there is nothing new available and go back to ignoring the oldies oriented station that plays in the background at the office.

The method that radio stations use for music research is one of the major culprits. When a person hears a rapid fire series of 7-10 second clips of a bunch of songs, they gravitate toward the ones they instantly recognize, especially as they get deeper into the test and fatigue sets in. Pop vocal hits and instrumental versions of them are much more recognizable than original instrumental music, especially when only snippets are being heard. Over the years the pop vocals and covers that "test well" have eclipsed original instrumentals. As more vocals and covers score high in the music tests, they get played more. Since the amount of songs that can be tested is finite, the songs that previously tested well take up more and more of the slots on future music tests and playlists derived from them. In the ten years that this type of testing has been used to dictate playlists, the focus has continually narrowed until we are where we are today: covers and vocals, and vocalists covering their own oldie vocals (eek!). Does this really indicate the audience preference or does the method skew the results? And worse, if the audience is repeatedly told that they are supposed to think and react a certain way do they start to believe it?

I go to a lot of concerts, that's how I keep the faith when the mailbox is full of compilations and tributes to "back in the day." I see people go wild over artists like Euge Groove, Mindi Abair, Paul Taylor and Steve Oliver, who do one or two covers at most, and the crowds are as enthusiastic over new songs from heritage groups like Spyro Gyra or the Rippingtons as they are for the trademark hits. Why does nobody influential seem to "get" this? We grew up with new music. A lot of us found this music because it was new music that could grow up with us. Somewhere along the way, the script got flipped and we are headed into the past. It's not what we came here for and it's not what we want.

- Shannon West