(HOST) Commentator David Moats is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has received some excellent gifts in his time, but he says that one of the most recent – is one of the best.
(MOATS) My kids gave me a turntable as a gift, and I’ve delved back in the closet to pull out my old LPs, and it’s a revelation.
Music is omnipresent now, a never-ending stream, downloaded and stored and mixed and burned.
People forget what a big deal an LP was.
Each album purchased back then was a major decision.
I was into jazz, so I read liner notes, examined personnel and debated with myself that most serious aesthetic issue: live performance or studio recording – which was better?
Each album became a cherished piece of art – and it wasn’t just the music.
The art of the album cover burned its way into my consciousness.
There was that impressionistic portrait of Oscar Peterson, done with splashes of vivid paint.
There was that moody blue portrait of Miles Davis.
The liner notes of that Miles Davis album also captured my imagination and deepened the mystery of jazz to me.
The small essay compares jazz improvisation to a form of spontaneous Japanese painting, and then it describes the additional challenge of group improvisation.
Group improvisation? When I was 12 years old, this was a mystery supreme.
Now I see, looking at the old album, that the liner notes were written by Bill Evans, the great pianist who played on the record.
The whole thing blows my mind.
The fact is an LP in those days was a discrete creation, a complete statement in and of itself, with its own integrity.
It’s a lot different from streaming music, and different from the CDs that have taken some of these old albums and padded them with previously discarded tracks.
There were disadvantages to the LPs.
You had to turn them over every 20 minutes.
My old records crackle and pop from the scratches caused by less than careful handling.
The sound quality of today’s CDs, especially for classical music, seems to be richer and clearer.
But to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium is at least part of the message.
It reminds me of recent discussions about the future of the book.
With the availability of electronic libraries and electronic books, will we even need the book itself?
But a book – like a record – is a discrete thing, not part of a stream.
It’s a statement constructed by an author, with a beginning, middle and end.
And the structure of a physical book expresses the nature of that finite creation.
I wouldn’t say LPs are superior to CDs, though I will defend the artistic integrity of the old LPs.
I will say that there’s nothing superior to a book – I don’t care what happens on the screen or over the air – though I will concede that a text acted out on stage in real life may be even more sublime than the text itself.
As for those old album covers, the one with the woman in red, draping herself over Dave Brubeck’s piano, is as bizarre and intriguing to me now as it was when I was 10 years old.
Brubeck seems to be laughing at her – and laughing at her still.