Hi, everyone! After much encouragement from friends and family, I have decided to start a regular blog. “Tales from the Woodshed” is a working title, referring to the copious amounts of hours I spend (or should spend) in the practice room. The purpose of this blog will be to share my various thoughts on teaching practices, musical trends, enlightening articles and what have you at least once a week. Feel free to leave your comments below. I would love to hear your thoughts!

Today I would like to share some of my opinions about the importance of listening to records. As a jazz musician, I have heard from all of my heroes how crucial it is to listen to great records. Not a single successful jazz musician, or any musician, for that matter, has become successful without spending countless hours listening to the greats. In other words, to become great at music, you need to LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN! Seems pretty simple, right? Well, perhaps not. The problem is that we have an overabundance of music at our fingertips nowadays, but not the ears to properly process it. I used to think that when a mentor would say, “listen to records”, they meant “listen to recordings.” Boy, was I wrong!

I recently had the privilege of working with David Halliday and Corey Christiansen as part of the Halliday-Christiansen Project, an auditioned group focused on mentoring young musicians like myself. I’ll never forget the night after one of our performances when Corey turned to me and asked, “How many records do you own?” At the time I did not own a single record. I realized that with the surface-level sound of all my compressed mp3s and mp4s to inform my ears, I had seriously stunted my ability to listen deeply to music. A few months later my dad loaned me one of his old turntables, my wife bought me three records for my birthday, and let me tell you – I’m happy to be a convalescent bad listener!

Luke Gillespie, professor of music in jazz studies at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, said in a recent article: “Listening is a kind of sacred ritual that should be part of our lives on a daily basis…Listen actively with full concentration. That means not doing e-mail, social networking or something else that will distract from your full attention while you listen” (Downbeat, Sept. 2019 Issue, p.77). I love the idea that listening is sacred, something you can only do with every fiber of your being, and putting a record on and listening with your undivided attention is the ticket to that kind of experience. The recent vinyl revolution is in large part because compressed formats like mp3, mp4 and WAV simply don’t have the same richness of sound that a full-bodied analogue record does. Without that quality of sound, it is virtually impossible to internalize what the music should really feel like. One of the records I own now is a recording of the Miles Davis and John Coltrane Quintet in Copenhagen, Denmark, playing live renditions of some of the tracks from Kind of Blue. While listening to this record, I noticed that I could hear Wynton Kelly just as well as I could hear Jimmy Cobb, and Jimmy wasn’t overpowering Miles or Paul Chambers, either. Each musician occupied his own distinct sphere the entire time, whether he was soloing or comping. The overall effect was staggering, because for the first time in my life I could actually hear the entire picture in clarity instead of one crystal-clear image surrounded by smudges of sound.

With all that said, I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to give up listening to compressed audio entirely. The volume of music on Spotify, Amazon and iTunes is simply unbeatable for the price you pay, and the accessibility wherever you go makes it much more ergonomic to a busy workday than a record player. After all, listening to something, even if it’s a discount version, is better than not listening at all. Even so, I believe we need records in order to truly experience what generations of jazz musicians have used as their source material for decades. We simply cannot allow great records to gather dust on the shelf while we settle for their discount-streamed equivalents. To all of you who have hundreds of records in your collection, I salute you. I plan to continue to build my own collection, and thereby my ears, with as many great records as possible.