Don’t buy these albums. I’ve never said that in a review before, I have far more albums I like in my queue to bother reviewing any that I don’t. But this album represents an existential threat to working musicians, especially in genre fields like traditional jazz. A full album of AI Christmas Jazz would not have been possible just last year. Now some AI music is good enough to pass for human in a background setting. By next Christmas all of it will be.
While I welcome our AI overlords I would rather direct them towards curing cancer and solving nuclear fusion than putting jazz bassists out of work at Christmastime. Once we have all lost our day jobs it would be nice to think we still had music as a fallback.
The areas AI music will invade first have been the bread and butter of working jazz musicians ever since rock hit the scene: movie and TV scores and scoring. Need a symphonic theme for your film? Don’t ask John Williams or Elmer Bernstein to gather up a band, ask your AI assistant to make you ten to choose from and have them ready in seconds. For decades when a pop star needed the sound of a jazz instrument to complete a track they would call up someone who benefited greatly from those gigs, sometimes for years to come. The next generation of pop stars, if they are not AI themselves, will use AI to generate “saxophone sound” or “walking bass.” People will always
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