Glass Enclosure

 

I am constantly involved with music. If I'm not actually buying it, then I'm researching it, re-organizing it, writing about it, or just listening to it. The amount of music I have on my computer actually became a problem this past year, as college assignments (saved until the last grades were in, just in case) took up space already reserved for the next twenty albums I had on my wish list. My MacBook Pro holds 250 gigabytes; my music is 165 gigabytes, and jazz alone is 150 gigabytes of that. 

As someone who not only listens to but also simply accrues this much music, I necessarily have songs or artists who hold a special place in my ears; these are the musicians and albums that seem to flip some switch in my brain, removing any stresses of the day and slowing me down to a more human pace. I talked about some of these albums in a recent article (Stepping Back, Moving On), but those records were the discs I've lived with and loved for years. They might be intricate mazes of sound, but I know where every twist and turn is - and when every note has the power to surprise and delight, who could resist revisiting every one? David Prentice is this way about Kurt Rosenwinkel, a bassist friend of mine feels the same about Charles Mingus, and even jazz masters like a Jackie McLean or Lester Young had their home base musicians; whether it was Frank Sinatra or Charlie Parker, it had that same beauty, that same familiarity, and the same surprises which somehow still surprised. 

But McLean and Young were able to buy vinyl records, and transcribe from them, wear them down. The relationship between that black plastic disc and the ears that listened to it was a special one indeed. Having so much oddly transient music formats available to me in a few clicks is a very different relationship, one defined more by how I have my music more than how I actually hear it.

I.

I'm old enough that my first albums, the ones I talked about in Stepping Back, Moving On, are all on CD. The Internet existed, but it was still the age of Windows 97 and the old version of Ask Jeeves that was actually Ask Jeeves. I think of those first CDs as very real things, discs that I could take out of their cases and put into stereos, with liner notes that I could actually read on a page. 

MP3s, which don't really exist in the physical world beyond being encased in a very real laptop, are a different matter, and even those favorite albums, when transformed from their comforting actuality into one out of thousands of files in my iTunes, take on different properties. Without the investment that comes with a CD or a record (taking it out of the sleeve, putting it in the player, turning it on - after all this, we might as well hear the whole thing), any piece of music becomes just one more thing that's keeping you from hearing the next piece of music, which then becomes an obstacle to hearing the next, and so forth. When music is moved from the isolation of a CD to the crowded stadium that is iTunes, the way we interact with it changes dramatically.

That "isolation" is both mental and physical. An album like Jim Hall's Jazz Guitar is, in essence, a musical universe of its own. Over the course of about forty-five minutes, Hall, Carl Perkins and Red Mitchell create a unique kind of soundworld, to borrow a phrase from Manfred Eicher. If all music is a house, then a single album is a room. When we play that album, we open, and then close, the door. We spend our time in that space, and then we leave it. But iTunes is, to use Bud Powell's evocative phrase, a "glass enclosure" - each room is totally visible from every other, and those rooms are, to mix my metaphors, greener from the other side of the fence.

This can do two sequential things. First, it distracts us from the music at hand. Second, it overshadows whatever we're hearing with the inevitable "iconic" version. Billie Holiday is a good example. Holiday managed to build a discography of personal and classic recordings. Once heard, they're hard to forget. If I'm listening to Anita O'Day's "What A Little Moonlight Can Do," I will always start thinking about about Holiday's recording, which is (let's face it) the only good recording of "What A Little Moonlight Can Do" in existence. With vinyl or CD, I would be more likely to hear Anita out, because of the investment I've already put into listening to it in the first place, and the physical relationship I can have with it, such as reading liner notes or even just watching the record spin. 

As it is, I just click on Bille Holiday's version, which sits about an inch above Anita's on my computer screen. The boundaries of the music break, and the universes that both O'Day and Holiday worked to create are shattered. iTunes's glass walls don't necessarily enhance our listening experience; sometimes, we're hearing more at the expense of listening to it.

II.

In the archives, you'll find an article of mine about boxed sets and "complete" reissues. These collections are like a physical extension of the iTunes glass house. There are extreme examples, such as the recent $365 Miles Davis box from Columbia, but others, while slightly more subtle, achieve the same ends.

A few years ago, a guitarist friend of mine gave me three Bill Evans box sets, from Riverside, Verve and Fantasy. These labels have reissued all of Evans's recordings in one large lump, often with bountiful alternate takes. These three boxes drove me insane. My parents and my girlfriend can attest that I actually could not sleep when I had these sets in their "complete" form. It was just too vague, too disorienting for me. As someone who was raised with music in its more physical forms, having this much meta music was too much. In the end, I spent hours tracking down the original albums and rearranging all the box sets into the separate albums they held. 

The box set is another way that today's culture of presenting music as an instant gratification, "gotta catch 'em all" kind of product hurts our experience of actually listening to it. Evans is a perfect example. The pianist was very picky about what takes and what gigs were or were not released. Albums are compositions in themselves, narratives that are shaped by the artists just as much as they shape a solo or a melody. When a label interrupts the flow of that narrative with alternate takes, they are destroying the artist's composition. And when those alternate takes were expressly rejected by the artist, they are destroying the artist's composition twofold: first, they are destroying the narrative; second, they are diluting the power of what remains.

These big box sets are physical iTunes libraries. They are a pool of music where on track has equal weight with every other. When we listen to a set like the Evans Verve box, we are discouraged from viewing each album as separate entities that deserve to be isolated and heard on their own terms; rather, we are encouraged to approach music song by song, often with a disregard for variety or narrative flow. One reissued album might have five takes of the same tune in a row; not only does this stall the force and momentum of the artist in question, but it also bores us and drives us to find new sounds to keep us interested. And like iTunes, box sets also diminish the physical relationship between music and the people who hear it; there might be a 400-page booklet with the box, but does it include the liner notes and cover art to every album it contains? Probably not. Ultimately, box sets generalize an artist's output until it has no special meaning, until the listener can't form a bond with any one song or album. There are just too many choices, choices that we as listeners aren't necessarily meant to have.

III.

Joshua Redman's Back East, released in 2007, is one of my favorite Redman records. I think that it sounds good, both musically and technically, and I think that Redman's contributions are among his best work. Contrasting his playing on Back East with that on, say, Spirit Of The Moment: Live At The Village Vanguard is a pleasure, because it demonstrates how much Redman has matured over the years. His sound is fuller and more even, his ideas are better expressed, and his whole attitude towards playing seems to have benefited from increased introspection and thoughtfulness. But, as a whole, Spirit Of The Moment is a clearer musical statement, even though Redman's playing on it easily loses out to his later work. Why? Back East is fun to listen to, but the sequence of guest saxophonists and shifting rhythm sections remove the doors from Redman's room in our musical house; this time, it is an artist-imposed glass enclosure, and it is built into the music itself (instead of being a byproduct of our method of hearing it), but the effects are the same.

This way of making records is relatively recent. Starting with Louis Armstrong, many of the most famous names in jazz are also associated with long-standing ensembles. There were the Hot Fives and Sevens, the Duke Ellington band's long-staying members, the Bill Evans trios, Miles Davis's quintets and the Dave Brubeck and John Coltrane quartets. Some musicians in the post-Internet era have retained this way of playing jazz. The Bad Plus and Jason Moran have been doing it for a decade. Charles Lloyd has used the same quartet (which includes Moran) for three years, Wayne Shorter for nine. Brad Mehldau made his name with a series of albums over a few years with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy (the post-Rossy edition with Jeff Ballard has also endured). And, of course, there's Keith Jarrett (there always is). 

But the end of the record-label age, more  a matter of status than actual sales, and the relative ease of recording independently, free from the needs of PR representatives looking for a static, marketable image (as with Miles, Brubeck or Coltrane), means that musicians (who have always had a bounty of ideas) are free to explore a more diverse array of projects with an equally varied pool of musicians. 

It often has amazing results: musicians like Kurt Rosenwinkel have made an art of presenting a flexible musical vision that can easily bring new players into the fold. But Rosenwinkel has achieved this by keeping his own style relatively static over the years, letting his shifting ensembles provide the forward momentum that just isn't his strong suit. For musicians like Joshua Redman, whose styles have steadily evolved over the years, this approach can distract and dilute from their own playing. 

Earlier, I mentioned that albums are compositions in themselves because artists choose what takes are the best and what tracks go where, thus creating a kind of storyline or narrative for the record that is uniquely theirs. A Bill Evans record progresses differently than a Miles Davis record, for example. Big box sets destroy this narrative, this overarching compositional element, not only by reissuing tracks with no dividers between them (where does one story end and the other begin? That is essential information for a listener) but also by disrupting the narrative with takes rejected by the original creator. 

Back East is an example of this process taking place in the artist's mind rather than in the label's PR office. Of course, Redman fashions a narrative over the course of Back East; the question is, what kind of narrative? The fact is that along with iTunes, the internet, shorter consumer attention spans and the transformation of major labels from creative entities to ones that recycle and reissue comes a new conception of the album, a conception that builds the glass walls into its music rather than having them imposed on it in an iTunes library or a reissue.

When Back East was released, it was compared to Sonny Rollins's 1957 recording Way Out West. Both featured tenor saxophonists working with a bass/drums rhythm section; Redman played "Way Out West," "Wagon Wheels" and "I'm An Old Cowhand" on Back East, all of which show up on Rollins's record; Redman released his album fifty years after Way Out West was recorded; and Redman's playing was itself more firmly in the pared down, muscularly nimble Rollins camp than ever before. But there are several key differences between the two discs, differences that highlight the way that glass walls have influenced the way we make music as well as the way we hear it.

First of all, there is length, both of the record overall and of its individual tracks. Way Out West is about forty-five minutes long, whereas Back East is an hour and ten minutes. But two of Rollins's performances are almost eight minutes long and another is more than ten; Redman's tracks are, with one exception, all less than seven. And Way Out West is a trio record, made by Rollins, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne. Back East has a cast of ten, including three rhythm sections (Larry Grenadier, Christian McBride and Reuben Rogers on bass and Brian Blade, Ali Jackson and Eric Harland on drums) and three guest saxophonists (Joe Lovano, Chris Cheek and Dewey Redman). Joshua Redman even cedes one track to his father, meaning that the record's leader doesn't play on every song.

There's nothing wrong with this. But it does invite a different kind of interaction with the record than Way Out West, and that interaction is no longer based on a one-on-one, isolated relationship; like iTunes and box sets, Back East is a glass-walled experience. We are treated to several tracks where Redman is the sole saxophonist, but another horn is always in sight, either in the next solo or the next track. And the diverse styles of the bassists and drummers creates a kind of stylistic limbo: Christian McBride and Brian Blade appeared on one of Redman's best albums, Mood Swing, in 1994, and they carry that sound with them, but Eric Harland and Larry Grenadier are a different kettle of fish. Redman navigates these twists and turns admirably, but as listeners we can be caught in the maze. Is this 1994 or 2007? Well, it's both - instead of putting Mood Swing and Back East in the same iTunes playlist, using our computer's glass walls to remove each album's boundaries, we can just listen to Back East, where the boundaries are pre-removed.

It's not a bad thing. But it's different. Progress has to be made, and that means that a Way Out West shouldn't be made again. We have to make the music of our own lives, not of those that came before. Albums like Back East are becoming the norm, and that's very cool.

But those old albums still have their unique compositional elements and need for devoted attention without distractions - those qualities don't disappear. But, with iTunes, shuffle and sloppy reissues, we're losing ways to listen to those albums the way they need to be heard. The issue is not changing the way we listen to the present - it's preserving the way we hear the past. To listen to Kind Of Blue like we listen to Robert Glasper's Double Booked does it a disservice, and vice versa. 

In this turbulent age for recorded music, we need to commit even more strongly to listening to music on its own terms. So paint over the walls of our glass enclosure; we'll lose some visibility, but we just might gain some insight.

Comments

[Thames]

Good writing. Do you actually pay for mp3s or do you download for free? Do you ever buy CDs anymore?

[Jon Wertheim]

Thank you, and okay, wow. Here's how it works:

If something's out of print or unavailable in the United States, I try to find it (yes, usually for free) online. If something is on the iTunes store, I buy it there. And when I have some cash lying around, I buy CDs. I also buy records when I get the chance, although my turntable needs some work done at the moment. And I get promotional CDs for free.

Thanks for reading.
j

[Will Yager]

I'm the same way about boxed sets; I've spent many, many hours trying to rearrange my Monk Complete Riverside Recordings and various Coltrane sets.