In an earlier post, I wrote about “clearing the vaults,” i.e., making a sizable amount of little-heard music that I’ve created over several decades publicly available on Bandcamp. More recently, I’ve turned to a different but related clearance activity: compact disc management.
As the editor of JazzTimes for five years, I got a lot of CDs in the mail. To receive several dozen in a single week was not uncommon. (Jazz’s evolution away from physical media has been slower than that of other genres.) Because good fortune has granted me the luxury of a home office with plenty of storage space, I was able to work out a general system for coping with the inflow. Or so I thought.
On one side of my desk, behind my office chair, is a row of cabinets with CD drawers inside. These drawers contain what I call “the permanent collection”—music I’ve heard, liked and concluded I may wish to return to in the future. On the other side of my desk are additional cabinets and a set of open shelves. While I worked for JazzTimes, the open shelves, immediately in front of the desk, were for new arrivals that I wanted to hear at some point; the cabinets, to the right of the desk, were for new arrivals that I hadn’t liked or wasn’t interested in, and that would eventually find another home. In between, arranged in more or less orderly piles on my desk, were the CDs that I felt warranted immediate attention.
Although this system seemed sensible, it didn’t end up working so well. The worst thing about it was that the immediate attention piles kept growing. When you have a hundred or more CDs stacked up around you, that whole immediate attention concept goes awry. Just how soon is immediate anyway? And who gets priority? Should this album receive more immediate attention than that one? Why?
Compounding the problem was the fact that I am, to put it mildly, not a multitasker. I can listen to music while working on something else—I enjoy doing so—but most of the time, that music leaves no definite impression on me. If I want to learn something from a piece or form an opinion about it, I need to focus on it exclusively. However, moments of exclusive focus are rare when one is the sole editorial staff member of an international magazine. There are always articles to assign, reviews to edit, writers to bug, publicists to negotiate with, photos to find, meetings to attend, spreadsheets to fill out, invoices to track down. I couldn’t delegate these tasks to someone else (at least I thought I couldn’t), but I could delegate the task of listening, to freelance writers whose opinions I trusted.
And so, by about the third year of my editorship, I had essentially stopped listening to most new music. Days, sometimes weeks would pass without my putting on a single one of the hundreds of CDs that labels and publicists and individual artists were sending me. Looking around my workspace frequently triggered sharp pangs of guilt; every one of these discs, after all, represented the time, creativity, effort, hopes and dreams of multiple talented people, which I was cruelly ignoring. But I couldn’t imagine an alternative. It was impossible for me to run JazzTimes the way I felt it needed to be run and at the same time listen to new jazz recordings the way I felt they should be heard.
By now you may be saying to yourself something along the lines of: “He edited an international music magazine and he didn’t listen to music? What’s wrong with this picture?” Short answer: A lot is wrong with this picture. Longer answer: The third year of my editorship coincided with the coming of the COVID-19 pandemic and a long, painful period of upheaval in my family. For nearly two years, from March 2020 to November 2021, due to an apartment renovation project that with the benefit of hindsight seems uncannily ill-timed, my workspace was not the luxurious office where I sit today. It consisted of an easy chair, a standing lamp and one corner of a small coffee table. CDs were piled wherever I could fit them and difficult to listen to regularly in a room that I had to share daily with my wife and daughter. Because my father-in-law was being treated for laryngeal cancer nearby, we felt obliged to stay in New York City for the duration of the lockdown and beyond. I did the best I could during this time, and my best was damn good—I’ll always be particularly proud of the issue we published in December 2020 commemorating JazzTimes’ 50th anniversary—but I was mentally, physically, emotionally and logistically overwhelmed, to an extent that didn’t become clear until much later.
The result of all this was that when I resigned from JazzTimes in January 2023, I had a lot of CDs to go through, some of which had been patiently waiting for me to listen to them since 2018. It took me almost another year—a year of unprecedented personal challenge, followed by gradual recovery and stabilization—to get there. But a few weeks ago, I finally embarked on the great evaluation and reorganization project, taking the stacks off the shelves in front of me, making space in the drawers behind me, and deciding which of the discs piled on my desk would stay and which would go.
At first, the elimination process was easy. If I knew a particular album could be found on streaming services and the physical package didn’t, in my opinion, add much to the enjoyment of the music, then it wouldn’t go in the permanent collection; I trusted that I could hear it online if I needed it. For this reason, I deemed most recent releases on bigger labels like Blue Note, ECM and Mack Avenue superfluous, while more low-profile stuff—like a valuable series of Sam Rivers live recordings from the 1970s put out with copious liner notes by the tiny Lithuanian imprint NoBusiness—would be given a secure cabinet location.
Those selections having been made, I was left with four stacks of potentially permanent CDs on my desk, totaling about 70. Each day, I listened to four or five of them in full, and based on that single airing, I decided their fate. I understood that I had to be honest with myself. It wasn’t enough to think that the music on a given disc was good; if I was going to keep it, I had to believe that I might listen to it again. That stipulation got rid of quite a few.
Of those that remained, some were surprises and some weren’t. I didn’t expect, for example, that I was going to be so moved by Claus Ogerman’s 1974 orchestral suite Symbiosis, written for and featuring Bill Evans on piano and recently reissued by MPS. But I did breathe a huge sigh of relief when I put on James Brandon Lewis’ Jesup Wagon, which JazzTimes’ critics had voted the best new jazz album of 2021. I was not among those who voted for it because, although I’d meant to listen to it, I never had. It was reassuring to hear it at last and confirm that it was in fact very good. It’s now in the permanent collection.
Two days ago, I reached the bottom of the final pile. Half of the 70 CDs are staying. Half joined a pre-existing group of about 150 that are going. The complete permanent collection has been reordered (alphabetically, by either band name or artist last name) to include the keepers.
I’m not sure whether this discussion of my purging process is of much interest to anyone other than me. But it’s a big part of what I’ve been doing over the past few weeks, and I think it brings home several important but oft-forgotten points: that the world is packed to the gills with music, that music is meant to be listened to, and that listening to even a small fraction of what’s out there—I mean really listening—is a full-time job in itself.
For the record (so to speak), my recent CD rationalization achievements don’t mean that I’m now in the market for more CDs. At the moment, I’m content with what I have and happy to give it the attention it deserves, with no expectations, no obligations and no immediacy considerations.
Thanks Mac. I understand and appreciate your quandary. Couple things. It’s more difficult than ever to dedicate time to real listening. With so much music waiting and backing up each day (used to be the case for me, not now) spending quality time listening outside the car is nearly impossible. Also, you’re lucky to be a non- multi-tasker. Because even when you do manage to set aside time to listen, it’s too easy to fidget or start in on something else at the same time.