There are records I have listened to so many times that I no longer know whether I am hearing the music or remembering it.
Kind of Blue is the obvious example.
I have owned it in several forms. Vinyl, cassette, CD and vinyl again when we all decided that buying records for a second time was progress. I played it to students. I played it at home. I used it to explain modal jazz to people who had not asked for an explanation of modal jazz.
Liz has heard the opening of “So What” often enough to identify it from the first few seconds.
“That one again?” she says.
It is never a question.
The difficulty with a record like Kind of Blue is that it becomes too familiar. You know when Coltrane is about to enter. You anticipate the small gaps in Miles Davis’s phrases. Even the studio noise begins to feel composed.
After enough years, listening becomes a form of waiting.
Here comes the piano.
Here comes the trumpet.
Here comes the bit I like.
That is not quite the same as hearing music.
When I first began teaching, I assumed repeated listening always produced greater understanding. This seemed reasonable. A difficult record might resist you at first but reveal itself gradually. Listen ten times and you will hear more than you did on the first. Listen fifty times and you will start noticing what the drummer is doing behind the soloist.
Keep going and eventually, I thought, the whole thing would open.
It does work that way for a while.
Then something else happens.
You stop being surprised.
Jazz relies on surprise more than most music. A phrase bends away from where you expected it to land. A player leaves a silence where another musician would have filled the space. The rhythm section changes direction without appearing to discuss it first.
Once you know every turn, some of that risk disappears. The musicians are still improvising but you are no longer travelling with them. You have been down the road before. You know exactly where it leads.
This is particularly strange with Thelonious Monk.
Monk’s playing is full of interruptions, crooked corners and notes that appear to have entered through the wrong door. The first time you hear him, the music can feel unstable. After several decades, even the instability becomes dependable.
I know where the wrong-sounding note is.
I am waiting for it.
It arrives exactly on time.
There is something faintly ridiculous about becoming comfortable with music that was designed to prevent comfort.
I once played Kind of Blue to a class and asked them to write down their immediate reactions. One student wrote, “Nothing happens.”
At the time, I regarded this as evidence of a serious educational failure, probably his.
Now I wonder if he heard something I had stopped hearing. The record did not carry any history for him. It was not important. Nobody had yet explained that it was a masterpiece and that sensible people were expected to sit respectfully during “Blue in Green.”
He just heard a slow piece of music in a classroom.
There is a freedom in that kind of ignorance.
Long-term listeners bring too much with them. We hear reputations, sleeve notes, old reviews and arguments conducted years ago in pubs. We remember who introduced us to a record. We remember the room where we first played it and the equipment we could barely afford.
The music gets buried beneath its own significance.
This does not mean we should stop listening to old records. I have tried putting certain albums away for a while but this tends to involve moving them to another shelf and then spending twenty minutes looking for them.
Distance does help, though.
A few months without a familiar record can loosen the grip of memory. You come back and notice something embarrassingly obvious. A bass line you had somehow ignored. A drum figure sitting beneath a solo. The way a musician enters slightly earlier than your memory insisted.
Different circumstances help too.
Music changes when you are not listening ceremonially.
Play a treasured record while cooking and it loses some of its museum glass. Hear it from another room and the balance changes. The saxophone reaches you but the piano becomes part of the house. You stop concentrating and an overlooked phrase catches your attention.
This may be why records sometimes sound better when somebody else puts them on.
You have not prepared yourself to admire them.
Liz does this occasionally. She chooses something from the collection without consulting the filing system, which I have explained is there for a reason. Her selection method involves recognising a sleeve or remembering that she did not dislike it last time.
Then a record I have known for decades begins playing without warning.
For a few seconds I cannot place it.
Those are often the best few seconds.
The music exists before the title arrives. Before the personnel and recording date fall into position. Before I remember what I think about it.
Then recognition catches up.
“Oh,” I say. “This.”
Liz looks at me as though I have contributed very little.
She is usually right.
I still play Kind of Blue. Of course I do. There are habits too old and too pleasant to correct.
But occasionally I try to listen without following the map. I concentrate on the musician I usually neglect. I start halfway through a side. I let the record continue while I leave the room.
It does not become new again. Nothing listened to for forty years can genuinely do that.
Every so often, though, it becomes music rather than memory.
That is enough to keep it near the turntable.
