Last night I was at Dazzle Jazz Denver to hear Cyrus Chestnut. His trio—bassist Herman Burney and drummer Kelton Norris—locked in from the downbeat. Years together give a band a shared brain; you can hear it in the space between notes.

After the set I bumped into local players Larry Vernec (bass) and Adam Wolf (piano). They have forty‑plus years together. We traded small talk until close. Late night for me, but those hours are often when loose thoughts connect.

AI in the Lounge

During the break the woman next to me, a retired high‑school music teacher, asked about AI. She’d just finished Klara and the Sun and couldn’t shake the human‑robot friendship theme.

I told her AI can generate useful things—text, images, even music—but I’ve never heard three computers improvise like Cyrus’s trio. The real magic was how they listened to one another, not the notes themselves.

A Billy Strings Detour

Earlier that day my childhood friend Ed texted a Billy Strings livestream. I replied with a link to BT ALC Big Band Radio on Spotify—lots of current releases. Ed loved the funk and said he wished he could sit in with a horn section. Same.

We used to play together as kids. Watching the late‑night duo at Dazzle—two friends still grooving decades later—I pictured us doing the same. Regret is a quiet instrument.

When the Band Isn’t a Band

Saturday morning I dug into the artists behind the songs I had saved. One track, by Take Your Time, had a tight groove but no artist bio. A search pulled up a Reddit thread: Take Your Time on Spotify — AI generated?. The creator confirmed:

“I prompt the style I want, pick the best parts, then clean everything in Ableton and iZotope. A few hours later the playlist is done.”

So the “band” is software. The song Straight to the Point, had 6K listens. The account pulls 105K monthly listeners. I’d favorited the track before knowing any of this.

Sampling, Lip‑Syncs, and Memex

Music has blurred lines for decades. Mocean Worker builds tracks from samples. Milli Vanilli lip‑synced. The Monkees didn’t play on their early records. Technology keeps moving the line.

In 1945 Vannevar Bush sketched the Memex, a desk that could summon any piece of media. That future arrived faster than he or the Memorex marketers expected.

Is It Real?

Last night a flesh‑and‑blood trio proved chemistry still matters. This morning an algorithm fooled me into toe‑tapping. Both moments were real because I experienced them.

If the groove connects, does the source matter? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Better to ask, does it resonate? If yes, live enough.

Bozos on the Bus

Engineer Robert Lucky captured this feeling back in 1996 in his IEEE Spectrum column Bozos on the Bus. Technology, he wrote, is a Greyhound hurtling into the fog. None of us—not even the people who built the engine—knows exactly where we’re headed. We just hang on, wide‑eyed, until the ride smooths out.

AI‑generated playlists are the latest swerve. One night I’m sure I can tell a living rhythm section from latent‑space funk; the next morning an algorithm slips into my Favorites without a red flag. Lucky’s point holds: every breakthrough turns us into bozos for a minute, gawking until the novelty fades and the bus lurches again.

So when someone asks whether the music is “real,” I think of Lucky’s shrug. Stay on the bus, keep listening, and try not to spill your coffee.

Acknowledgements

This article was generated by ChatGPT o3. I removed some of the bold text in favor of links as is my style. ChatGPT got almost all the links wrong except for the ones I provide. It rewrote some of the quotes, changed context (I didn’t bump into Adam and Larry, just listened), and generally fluffed it up, but kind of in my style. An interesting tidbit is that I never told ChatGPT Ed and I played horns as kids.

The above paragraph was written entirely by yours truly. The entire process took about 1.5 hours.