This is a precious piece of jazz history, all the more so for being recorded in pre-corporate Las Vegas, which was fertile ground that helped good musicians become great.
Sometimes the perfect response is not what is said, but what is sung. Music is the great analogue to speech. And it seems that we often experience pleasure in a perfect match-up of words and music set alight by especially gifted musicians.
I always think of Nick Hornby’s feral but passionate clerks in High Fidelity. They shake off their mid-morning torpor when challenged by the owner to name the” top five” of any genre: autobiographies of musicians, blues recordings, songs about death, angry songs about women, songs to take on a desert island. In the novel and the even better film Barry and Dick may appear to be adrift and underemployed. But they are also connoisseurs, reminding us that we are all critics, and that ecstasy can even come in the transient moments of a musical phrase.
I’ve come to think of a particular song in this way. The music comes from a live recording made in 1966 and recognized by Rolling Stone, among others, as one of the best live recordings ever made. Track 18 is an especially precious slice of jazz history, all the more so for being recorded in pre-corporate Las Vegas, which was fertile ground that helped good musicians become great. The album is Sinatra at the Sands, made at time when the former “kid” from Hoboken was feeling the heat of the British pop invasion, and a declining interest in the Great American Songbook.
Everything comes together to make the music a perfect miniature of the brassy and confident music of its time. In the crowded Copa Room there’s the legendary Count Basie Band. Fronting it is a young but effective Quincy Jones, who has arranged the charts to show off the the legendary group assembled long ago by another “kid:” this one from Red Bank.
Jones, Basie and Sinatra Pinterest
And then there’s the song, a once-placid ballad written thirty years earlier by Rogers and Hart, but reborn to become the perfect vehicle for a singer in complete control. Frank Sinatra’s musical instincts were never better: a mixture of Rat Pack swagger and his total mastery of the tricky mechanics of jazz phrasing. At times ahead of drummer Sonny Payne’s rock solid beat and at times behind, it all adds up to a moment capturing musicians at the top of their game.
Ownership of the thing itself—an urgency that kept postwar teens in book and music stores for hours on end—seems to be a fading passion.
I wonder about the future of the personal library: those numerous shelves lined with books and music that still line the walls of many of our homes. Owning a physical copy of the work of a writer or performer was, until recently, a sometimes obsessive pursuit for devoted listeners and readers. For many these displays of neatly organized works are a badge of honor, meant in part to suggest membership in certain aesthetic tribes within the culture.
I’m writing in a room cluttered with stuffed bookcases. It’s the same in other parts of the house, where CD cases sit on table tops and stand upright on shelves. We are clearly vestiges of the Edison past. In the early days of recording the idea of capturing sound was completely engrossing. Thomas Edison was as much in awe of the idea as everyone else. Add in the possibility of owning a disk of a performance that could be played at will, and the nation collectively swooned at the chance. Shellac cylinders and flat disks soon became their own fetishized possessions. Every middle class parlor had a record player and a growing collection of relatively expensive 78 r.p.m. records. Jump ahead several generations well into the 1990s and teens were still heirs to this passion of record collecting. British novelist Nick Hornby enshrined three clearly recognizable obsessives in his wonderful 1995 book, (and, later, a film) High Fidelity. In our own ways we were Jack Black: voracious readers of album liner-notes, and dead-certain of what to display with pride and what to hide.
Ownership is its own reward: something many of us still feel as we purchase a book we will read and perhaps re-read at a later time.
The personalized library has been memorialized by the wealthy with its own room in turn-of-the-century mansions. The rest of us starting out as impoverished students usually exercised the less baroque option of bookcases made from bricks and boards. In either case books were considered intellectual and decorating necessities. Their presence meant that you were a serious collector. Robert Pirsig on one shelf and Miles Davis on another conferred status.
Now the tide has receded. To more younger consumers in most places (except Japan, with its continuing love of CDs) these music and print libraries seem to be an anachronism, like the player-piano rolls I remember as a child collecting dust in a corner of my grandmother’s lace-curtained living room. Digital “natives” are just as happy essentially leasing access to commercial libraries, such as those offered by Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple and others. Even the e-book, which is sold as the digital equivalent of a hard copy, is never quite the owner’s in the ways that the paper version is. It can’t be easily loaned or resold because its storage is usually in a proprietary “cloud.” Digital “immigrants” used to owning works are not quite convinced that we will have access to the work in perpetuity. A cloud-based purchase of an author’s book or a composer’s symphony seems less permanent.
Communication scholar Joshua Meyrowitz partly explains what has changed in his use of the phrase, “the Association factor.” When we own a hard copy of another’s work—when it is in our physical possession—we more readily identify ourselves with it. It’s an artifact tied to our identity, an outward representation of our place on the human map. So if I am carrying around a copy of a particular novel or have a copy of music cd sitting in the living room, I’m probably prepared to defend its presence in my space. I’ve “associated” myself with it. By contrast, a person may feel no responsibility to defend a song that presents itself to houseguests on Spotify. The lease of a channel of media content seems less personal than outright ownership, even though custom music sources have the advantage of opening our ears to much larger libraries.
My own adult children are mostly consumers of these digital services, and just as passionate in their own ways about their music and books as earlier generations. But ownership of the thing itself—a fact that kept postwar teens in book and music stores for hours on end—seems to be a passing signifier of the avid appreciator. No doubt that for many modern consumers walls of CDs and books look archaic. Why hold “hard” copies if they are all available in digitized files? Perhaps the only answer is that some books and performances are too precious to not hold in one’s hands.
