Vinyl Romance
Vinyl Romance 1 by D.R. Halliday
VINYL ROMANCE 1
By D.R. Halliday
A couple of years ago my son David and I were hanging in my office/smoking
room, conversing over martinis (the house cocktail) to the accompaniment of a
playlist, which had originally been a CD, compiled largely from the vinyl records
in my collection. That CD is one of fifty that I compiled over a period of four
years (2001-2004) exclusively of piano trios (piano, bass, and drums, the standard
modern jazz rhythm section). The rules I imposed upon myself in compiling those
fifty discs were few and simple:
a) Fill as much of each disc as possible with a sequence of compelling
recordings embodying enough variety to keep the flow of music interesting
without succumbing to any “jarring” segues.
b) Don’t include more than one performance by a particular pianist on any one
disc.
c) Don’t include more than one performance of a particular song on any one
disc.
Those fifty CDs, now conveniently loaded into my laptop, contain over 700
performances, recorded over a 65-year period, featuring 205 jazz pianists from
more than 20 countries.
The selection of which pianists to include was entirely a product of my personal
tastes, which might be somewhat discernable from the frequency with which each
appears on the discs. Here’s a partial breakdown for jazz piano afficionados who
might be curious regarding the tastes of a fellow afficionado: of the 205 pianists
who appear on the 50 CDs, only 15 make more than 10 appearances, led by Erroll
Garner (20 performances), followed by Thelonious Monk (19), Teddy Wilson (18),
Paul Bley (17), Tommy Flanagan (16), Bill Evans (15), Brad Mehldau and Oscar
Peterson (14 each) Chick Corea (12), Earl Hines and Wynton Kelly (11 each), and
Monty Alexander, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Jessica Williams (10 each).
It’s certainly arguable that such pianists as Bud Powell and Keith Jarrett (8 each),
Martial Solal (7), McCoy Tyner, Jaki Byard, and Roland Hanna (6 each), and
Herbie Hancock and Andrew Hill (5 each) deserve more space than I gave them.
But such arguments among jazz lovers usually promote more solidarity than
enmity, attributable to mere Geschmackssache (German: “matters of taste”) and
however much my fellow jazz lovers might disagree with me on this or that matter
of taste, they’ll doubtless applaud my motive to curate and compile all those discs –
a pure labor of love – a love of jazz that extends down into the grooves of all those
vinyl records that initially supplied the now-digitized music that David and I were
enjoying that night.
As we listened, our conversation unsurprisingly turned to the relative merits of
vinyl verses digital recordings.
David was well-equipped for this conversation because, while certainly reliant on
digital technology to access the wealth of music available today and to produce and
distribute his own music, he is nevertheless a child of the Pre-digital Age of
recorded music, whose listening began with vinyl.
Born in 1973, he had his first turntable in 1978, at age five. CD technology would
not be introduced until 1982 and CDs would not begin to outsell vinyl records until
1986. And like many, perhaps most, music lovers of the time, David and I resisted
investing in this new and relatively expensive technology: I held out until around
1988 and David until 1990, as a high school sophomore.
Even then, our recorded music purchases continued for a time to be mostly vinyl,
bought “hands on,” from record stores. There were many record stores in those
days, large and small, specializing in both used and new records. Several of the
used stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly Village Music in Mill
Valley, hold fond memories, but among the larger stores specializing in new
records, Tower Records could lay credible claim to being the “gold standard,” and
our California residences provided tolerable access to Tower stores in Sacramento,
San Francisco, and Concord. David often eagerly accompanied me on my frequent
shopping trips to those stores.
About those days (and nights – Tower stores stayed open until midnight) we
reminisced fondly as we discussed the question of vinyl versus digital. Compared
to other record stores Tower stores were huge, with what seemed an awesome
selection of LPs in every imaginable category. “Going into a Tower,” David
recalled, “was like walking into a church of music.” And he never got bored while
I’d take my time thumbing through the massive selection of jazz albums, which
ranged from early recordings by the likes of The Original Dixieland Jazz Band,
Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, James P.
Johnson, Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbecke, Johnny Dodds, Fletcher Henderson,
Bennie Moten, and Jimmy Noone, through Swing Era greats like Benny Goodman,
Count Basie, and Artie Shaw, bebop giants like Monk, Bird, Dizzy, Fats Navarro,
and Bud Powell, the hard bop of Horace Silver and Art Blakey, post bop, avante
garde, fusion – the entire history of jazz up to the latest releases by Keith Jarrett,
Weather Report, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Sun Ra. It was all there in the
form of vinyl, tucked into one-foot-square liners, many with compelling cover art
and informative liner notes as readable as the pages of a large book.
And while I was immersed in this veritable ocean of jazz history, David would
explore the entire store, beginning with pop/rock and going on to investigate
whatever caught his attention. “One Tower store,” he recalled, “had a separate
room entirely dedicated to classical music, with classical music playing inside, and
on one wall of each store, always hung the 100 top-selling 45 RPM singles of the
week. It’s funny,” David went on, “but no matter how long you took checking out
the jazz section, I never got the feeling, ‘Gee, I wish Dad would hurry up’ – I was
just always entertained by what there was to see.’”
But, as the title of Colin Hanks’s 2015 documentary on the rise and fall of Tower
Records laments, All Things Must Pass. Tower, which opened for business in
1960 in a Sacramento drug store and grew to expand its reach world-wide,
declared bankruptcy in 2006. Its demise has been attributed to a number of things,
but David and I agreed that the digital revolution – first CDs and then computer
downloads and streaming – played a significant role, and vinyl’s demise seemed
inevitably to mirror that of Tower Records.
Or did it? Curiously, as David informed me in our conversation, the year 2019 saw
vinyl sales again top CD sales. That doesn’t signal the inevitable triumph of vinyl
over digital; downloads and streaming will preclude that from ever happening.
Still, for us vinyl lovers, this renewed interest in vinyl is welcome news.
A further bit of welcome news is something I’ve observed in recent movies and
TV series, where, increasingly, turntables are appearing in the dwellings of the
hippest and most sympathetic characters. The prime example is, appropriately
enough, Amazon Prime’s series Bosch, which I’d recommend unreservedly to all
who share my love of jazz and film noir.
The series is based on the crime novels of Michael Connelly, a gifted and
compassionate writer with a deep knowledge of criminality, police procedure, and
the city of Los Angeles, the epicenter of film noir, where his novels are set and
where he spent three years on the crime beat for the Los Angeles Times.
Connelly’s protagonist is the LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus “Harry”
Bosch, a hard man with a soft spot for jazz, the sound of which permeates the
series soundtrack with recordings by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Eddie
“Lockjaw” Davis, Frank Morgan, Coleman Hawkins, Gene Ammons, Red
Garland, Jack Teagarden, Ben Webster, Charlie Haden, Hank Jones, Stan Getz,
Zoot Sims, Milt Jackson, Grace Kelly, John Coltrane, Ray Barretto, and Art
Pepper.
Detective Bosch, through a windfall generated by a successful movie based on one
of his cases, has acquired a house that juts out from a hill high above Los Angeles,
with a glass wall and a deck that provide an Olympian view of the city and some
respite from its myriad urban evils. In his living room, directly behind the glass,
on a waist-high cabinet, sits his audio system, including a turntable and another
component prominently labeled McIntosh. This setting, particularly at night, with
all the lights of the city twinkling in the distance below, provides a near ideal
complement to the music of the vinyl records (mostly jazz ballads) that spin on
Bosch’s turntable.
That turntable, David and I agreed, is integral to the setting: removing it and
replacing it with a CD player or computer or any other digital device would
undermine the powerful ambience it adds to the setting, detracting from its – what
would be the right word? Magic? Mystery? Mystique? – I finally settled on the
word romance, a choice confirmed by the second definition of the word I later
discovered in the Oxford Dictionary: “Romance: 2 a quality or feeling of mystery,
excitement and remoteness from everyday life: the beauty and romance of the
night.”
That definition certainly applies to the setting I’ve been describing of Bosch’s
abode high on the hill above the lights of Los Angeles. But both David and I had
experienced such a feeling for vinyl long before seeing the Bosch series and, as we
continued our conversation, we tried to articulate the reasons – despite the fact that
for convenience’ sake the majority of our listening is now digitally generated –
vinyl continues to hold that proverbial special place in our hearts. Is it pure
nostalgia? Snobbish purism? Or is it something more? Were Bosch to join our
conversation, he might flatly state that vinyl is the superior medium.
His preference for vinyl over digital is perfectly articulated in a conversation he
has with his teenaged daughter Maddie whom the hard-ass detective loves with a
tenderness typical of fathers for their daughters (I know; I have a daughter). The
conversation begins immediately after Maddie has listened to a recording Bosch
has played for her by Art Pepper of “Patricia,” an original composition that the
great alto saxophonist wrote for his own daughter:
Bosch: How’d you like the tune?
Maddie: It was good. I don’t really know anything about jazz, but I liked it.
Bosch: I’ll get you some CDs.
Maddie: I don’t have a CD player. I download all my music.
Bosch: Right. I’ll get you some discs and a CD player. Better yet, I’ll get you
some vinyl and a turntable – best way to listen.
“Listen,” David observed, is the key word in Bosch’s evaluation. But “listen” as
opposed to what? Simon & Garfunkel provide a useful answer in the lyric of their
mid-sixties hit “The Sound of Silence,” which speaks of “people hearing without
listening.” The phrase draws a distinction between passive and active perception,
between passively “hearing” and actively “listening” – between a kind of diffuse
awareness of an auditory stimulus and a purposeful, focused concentration on that
stimulus. It is the latter that yields the ultimate gratification we derive from
recorded music, and vinyl, while perhaps less convenient than digital, provides the
superior way to achieve that gratifying result, not only in the warmer, more
inviting sound that vinyl produces but also in the preparation involved in listening
to a vinyl record.
Which requires more than merely pressing a couple of buttons. You must first
hold the record, protected by its liner and inner sleeve, in your hands, remove the
record itself from said liner and inner sleeve, pick the side of the record you wish
to hear, place the record on the turntable, lift the tone arm, and lower it precisely
on the record’s desired groove.
This preparatory process, as my wife Jill joined our conversation to point out, is
tactile in nature, adding a sensory dimension, absent from digital playback, to our
anticipation of the music to come. This enhanced anticipation tends to oblige us to
focus more closely on the music itself. It’s the same principle as grinding whole
beans for coffee rather than sticking a pod in your Keurig machine and pressing a
button or preparing a meal from fresh ingredients rather than slapping a frozen TV
dinner into the microwave and pressing another button – immediate gratification
deferred, ultimate satisfaction enhanced – foreplay.
Eventually, as David and I continued discussing this subject, he suggested I write
about it, say, a series of columns or blog posts that he’d be happy to add to his
Lone Peak Sound website. We considered a series of columns or short posts, each
consisting of my musings on one vinyl record of significance in my life. Since I
own thousands, that sounded like a fairly easy and enjoyable task but due to other
responsibilities and my own sloth, I put that task off until now, when the imminent
release of David’s new album Sometimes it Snows in April (on vinyl!) seemed to
demand that I either put up or shut up.
Only the choice of a title for my planned series of posts was lacking but, recalling
Bosch’s hillside retreat and the Oxford definition of “romance,” cited earlier, i.e.,
“a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement and remoteness from everyday life: the
beauty and romance of the night,” that choice seemed inevitable. Hence, Vinyl
Romance.
Reflections on particular vinyl records significant in my personal experience will
provide the content of future columns . . .
