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Musician claims music has become impotent.

Musician Billy Jenkins, a Visiting Artist at the Royal Academy of Music and an influential performer, composer and polemic on the British jazz scene for over three decades, has declared that “music is ceasing to have the power and spirituality it once had”.

The musician blames television, radio and broadband downloading. Says Jenkins: “It is quite simple. To broadcast requires the signal to be compressed to maximise the signal. Thus, soft sections become loud and loud sections become soft, which totally negates the intent of the composer and performer.” Jenkins feels that this is not a problem with popular music that has been recorded with the broadcast medium in mind, but totally destroys the nuance and intonation of jazz, classical and acoustic music.

Explaining how he feels downloading music has diluted subtly even further, he goes on to say: “A six minute jazz quintet track at CD quality would need about 60MB to retain the essence. To speed access, this might be reduced to as much as 3MB and that is done by removing aspects of the sounds that are arbitrarily deemed ‘unnecessary'. All finesse is destroyed. To top it all, most download music is now listened through tiny earphones or poor quality computer speakers – usually as a background soundtrack whilst attending to other issues. It is making the consumer aurally lazy and indifferent.”

Throw in what Billy calls “the absurdity of continual background ‘music' to accompany almost any link, advert or television programme and the ease that people today also switch off their ‘spatial awareness' when in earshot of someone speaking on their mobile phone”, and it is not hard to appreciate Jenkins' concern.

His final statement is directed at the authorities: “This government went out of their way to placate the broadcast industry with their recent Entertainment Licence Bill. They want music tempered, compressed and controlled. Fortunately, it seems there is a growing awareness that television and the making of programmes are, in fact, a rather corrupt, manipulative and deceitful medium, which includes the abuse of music - society needs to reclaim it's true nature and spirit.”

Billy Jenkins has been performing for over 25 years. His prolific and revered career takes in 32 music releases and hundreds of live appearances. He is widely respected as both and avant garde jazz guitarist, bluesman and art rock iconoclast

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