SOUNDSLOPE

An interesting feature of the career of any successful modern jazz or creative musician is the huge reliance on the European market for work. I don't have any numbers to back up this claim but I know through conversations and anecdotal evidence that the ability to play in Europe regularly is an essential part of any musician's career who attempts to play this music as a full time occupation.

All of that travel of course comes at a cost, both financially and in energy expended in the course of traveling. It's interesting to note that the rise of this kind of musical travel coincided with the boom of cheap energy in the western world. Following this line of thought one step further, it's worth asking how these artists and that whole framework of travel will work as our all-you-can-eat hydrocarbon buffet starts to run dry, or at least fail to be restocked as quickly.

I've long observed that energy efficiency will be the hallmark of the great economies and nations of the third millennium and the 21st century. It's by no means an original thought, but it still seems to elude the future planning and thinking of many. While there are some established ways we can deal with issues of grid based energy, mostly through a patchwork approach, the issue of transportation energy is far from resolved.

How would our artists be effected if it was no longer practical for promoters in Europe to fly them over for gigs due to rising transportation costs? Or, even if they could continue to do so, if it cut into the artists' bottom line, essentially coming out of their paycheck?

While we can always hope for some kind of energy silver bullet, and science has the ability to surprise us with rapid innovation, hope is not a strategy. One has to wonder how artists will survive and how the entire structure of music tours will change if and when energy costs become truly prohibitive.

The charade of trading pieces of green paper for the tangibly valuable crude oil has already been severely eroded over the past decade as the value of the dollar fell and the number of pieces of paper we had to trade for a barrel of oil increased. Even if you don't buy into the severity of some peak oil theories, there's no doubt that we've reached something resembling peak cheap oil, where the energy and cost expended to recover oil goes up along with the price of the energy extracted.

Look at how resilient the price of oil has been in the face of one of the worst recessions since World War II. At the end of 1999 the price of a barrel of light crude cost around $26, and during the recession it barely reached $40. Already we've seen rebounds into the $70s, with an incredibly weak overall economic recovery. As soon as a real recovery takes hold, assuming it does, we'll see spikes back up into the mid to upper $100s and it very well may induce a double dip recession. Our economy is so built around cheap energy that it's incredibly sensitive to these spikes.

All of this speculation is important to consider for people who make a portion of their living traveling. Even if we make some kind of transition to a new energy source, it will no doubt be a rocky one. We will surely see more business done via videoconferencing, and while nothing can replace the experience of live music, I think artists need to think creatively about the future and ways to present their own music.