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.
