Coltrane, vinyl, and the joys of going deep
The other night, using my fingertips, I picked up an LP.
I blew gently over the surface for any dust that had accumulated in the decades since it was last removed from its sleeve and laid the record lightly on the turntable.
As precisely as a midtown Manhattan diamond cutter, I placed the stylus above where the first tune began, moved the lever to lower the tonearm, and waited for the magic to begin.
It was not unusual for me to listen to Blue Train, in need of John Coltrane’s wailing tenor saxophone, and the lift of Lee Morgan’s trumpet, which I have in my itunes library.
What was notable was this: instead of doing some other task — driving the car, walking the dog, riding the exercise bike — I just sat there in the semi-dark on a chair doing nothing else throughout the tune’s entire 10 minutes and 43 seconds.
Or did I budge during the whole 9:10 of Moment’s Notice, the sprightly other tune on the side?
When the needle hit the end groove, I turned the record over, sat back down again and listened to that side too.
During the entire 41 minutes and 25 seconds it took to play the album — number 52 in Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest jazz recordings of all time, by an artist who was enough of prophet to be canonized as the patron saint of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco — I did not look at my emails, watch a Youtube video, or say something to my wife.
I did not walk restlessly over and lift the needle in search of a tune that, at that moment, better suited my mood, as I routinely do when itunes is the source of my listening pleasure.
No, I just did as the artist wanted: listened to his music — not just the parts that immediately appealed to me, but the hard-going bits, which said what Coltrane felt worth saying — in the order that he wanted, on a device that did his vision justice.
SHORT ATTENTION SPANS
It was work for a man with a flickering circa-2024 attention span. The truth is that I was always a little this way. Maybe COVID made things worse.
Mostly I blame our screen-dominated lives, the way they make us seek constant stimulation, the way they have shortened our patience, to the point that few things enthrall us for long.
So, like magpies, we are attracted to the latest shiny object, but only for a short period before we flit on to something new.
At least this is how it seems to me.
I have proof: the tight little selection of songs on my itunes algorithm that shows how I fall back on the same tunes over and over again until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The way my Netflix “Continue Watching” crawl just keeps growing, to the point where the list of movies and series that I have watched then abandoned now seems as long as the possible options under Crime or Romantic Comedy.
The pile of partly completed books, some with only a few pages read, next to my side of the bed.
It’s a sort-of-life, it can be argued, this unwillingness to go deeply into things, this skirting of the surface.
A NEW BEGINNING
My hope is that my new turntable, German, belt-driven with an automatic single play, which has been reconditioned by a neighbour, marks a new beginning.
Everything about the process requires care and focus.
When you slide an album out of your cabinet — hopefully stacked vertically, maybe by genre, or artist, at very least alphabetically — attention must be paid.
The best kind of cover was not dreamt up by some marketing department hoping for boffo sales. It is a thing of beauty, as is the case with Blue Train, where Lee Wulf’s pensive portrait of Coltrane stares out, as if the tenor man is contemplating how, in the decade more he had to live, he would change American music.
The cover notes can also be a delight, becoming, in the right hands, artful enough for me. I think here, for example, of the essay on the back cover of Kind of Blue, the bestselling jazz album of all time, which stopped me in my tracks recently when I picked up the album for the first time in a long time.
“There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous,” wrote Bill Evans, the pianist on the Miles Davis recording, in as good a description of jazz as I have run across.
“He must paint on a thin-stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.”
The music, when the right record begins, is, as a colleague put it the other day, “a privilege.”
CURATED PLAYLIST
It is wonderful to put together a playlist, which suits your personal taste, from tunes downloaded off the internet. On an LP recording, though, you are getting a playlist curated by the artist themselves. It feels personal. Not to sit there and listen right through with rapt attention would be an insult.
Plus, it is good for you. The music which can stir emotions and memories, inspire wonder, and as an essay in the New York Times a few years back put it, carry the wisdom of the world. Research shows us that listening to music even stimulates hard-to-reach parts of the brain.
I am also talking about what happens when you are alone with the kind of music that allows you to go deep.
Research shows that contemplation, in any form, is good for the body and the soul for a whole range of reasons. My experience, as well, is that when you slow down, and get rid of the distractions, you notice things.
When you immerse yourself in another’s view of the world — which is what an LP like Blue Train, or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, or Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is — life seems bigger not smaller, which is why a new perspective is a helpful thing.
It does you good to block out the workaday existence for a while, doesn’t it, to just let the turntable turn and the vinyl work its magic.