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In Praise of Playlists
These playlists act as radio shows. I have always loved radio and still have my favorite stations I check in on periodically via the internet. And now I have hundreds of my own private radio shows.
I sat down and tried to come up with a guess as to how many complete albums I listen to a year. A rough approximation. My guess is about 1,000, a little less than three a day. You can come up with your own number.
Next I went to some discographies and tried to count the number of works, including their work as sidemen, of three trumpeters and three saxophonists I love:
Lee Morgan
trumpet1938 - 1972
Freddie Hubbard
trumpet1938 - 2008
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Joe Henderson
saxophone1937 - 2001
Sonny Rollins
saxophoneb.1930
Wayne Shorter
saxophone1933 - 2023
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Now if you are like me and love all music, it gets even more complicated. I would say jazz is about 50% of what I listen to. So now those 500+ albums represent a year of listening.
And then take those 500+ albums and factor that into how many worthy jazz albums there are in existence. Does that represent 1%? Who knows. The numbers get intimidating for a guy that failed math like me.
Now for the moment I will pretend I only listen to complete albums and give all worthy albums from my whole collection a fair place in the rotation. This morning I put on Joe Henderson's In 'n Out (Blue Note, 1964). The title cut is an absolute gem. The whole album is good but that particular cut has always blown me away. And using the math I just laid out, I quickly realize it might be a decade before I hear it again. So depressing!
So how do I work around that? Playlists!
I have been making playlists for 50 years. The summer before I went off to college I took my paper route earnings and bought a used reel-to-reel tape recorder for about $75 and a bunch of blank tapes and set about recording all my favorite stuff from our family collection. Great stuff. My father was a lexicographer who read music publications (Rolling Stone, Downbeat, etc) as part of his process of gathering word citations and bought stuff that was getting rave reviews...usually with the corners cut off because they were promotional copies he bought from the used record store near his office. The owner rarely washed his t-shirts and my dad would periodically come home with an armful of albums announcing he had another batch from "Blackshirt." Those were great days.
After college I moved to cassettes. At the end of that run I was up to 800 90-minute cassettes. When I got married I even had a custom-made chest of drawers created specifically to hold them.Then came blank CDs. Harder to count because I numbered them by genre. But around 700 in 120-minute increments. So to quickly return to the math, those 700 discs now make my music collection manageable. The cut "In 'n Out" now is in regular rotation. And to be clear, this does not preclude me from returning to the whole recording from time to time. Which I will.
Lately I have gone pure digital for most of the new stuff I bring into my collection. I still buy some physical copies of CDs. For instance I always support live musicians by buying CDs they have for sale at the shows I go to. But digital works wonderfully.
I will give you an example of how my process works. I love the bassist
Scott Colley
bassb.1963
So I make decisions. Cuts that fall into the once-a-decade category get left behind. Cuts that I immediately know are keepers go into the keeper file to be distributed among the hourlong playlists I create. And finally there are the cuts I am unsure about. Those have their own big file and I systematically return to that file to make final decisions.
Back to the math. If I only listened to whole albums in an equally weighted rotation, the title cut of Colley's Architect of the Silent Moment (CAM Jazz, 2007), which I played today, would have to wait in limbo for many years before I heard it again. As it is, since it has found its way into a playlist, I will hear it all the time.
Here is the other advantage. These playlists act as radio shows. I have always loved radio and still have my favorite stations I check in on periodically via the internet. And now I have hundreds of my own private radio shows. I put on my playlist titled, say, Jazz 96, and I have no idea what is coming. It is all stuff I love but each cut comes as a wonderful surprise.
I will finish with some caveats in regard to playlists. There are recordings I refuse to break into cuts. "Peaceful" just has to come after "Shhh." To stick with Davis....his recordings with
Gil Evans
composer / conductor1912 - 1988
Look, I have two twentysomethings that love music, and like most of their generation they listen sporadically and in small portions. So I will always applaud those listening to whole albums at a time. A dying breed. Stand proud.
I only offer what has worked for me as an alternative. Here is the song list from one of my earliest self-made CD's, brilliantly titled Jazz III:
David Murray
saxophone, tenorb.1955
Jack DeJohnette
drumsb.1942
George Adams
saxophone, tenorb.1940
Max Roach
drums1925 - 2007
Woody Shaw
trumpet1944 - 1989
Cannonball Adderley
saxophone1928 - 1975
Dave Douglas
trumpetb.1963
Joe Farrell
saxophone1937 - 1986
Buck Hill
saxophone, tenorb.1927
The next time you are at the beach or airport or on public transportation and the folks near you start analyzing The Bachelor, put your earbuds in, click on this playlist and drift away.
Now I get it...there are some that will push back on this. That this is feeding huge conglomerates, gigantic music services that are not perfect solutions by any means. I know that streaming does not make musicians rich. I wish there was a fairer way to compensate musicians. All I can do is give my perspective. Let me bring this back to All About Jazz. Each week I attempt to sample, via my music service, every disc that is new to me that has been mentioned or reviewed in an AAJ article. And almost inevitably they are at my fingertips. I was even searching for some relatively obscure
Johnny Dyani
bass1945 - 1986
A good example is
Francois Houle
clarinetBut please....when you find recordings that you love as a whole, buy them! Support living musicians in particular. And where possible, go to their websites and buy from there.
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