Two weeks without music streaming. Peacock's 'Tales of Another'

How to live without streaming

As mentioned in another post, I closed my Spotify subscription and since I don’t want to listen to any advertisement, I ended up not using it at all! I bought a used Hiby R3 Pro Saber (2022) and I’ve been exclusively using that, adding music to the SD card. An amazing feature is the support for up to 2TB SD cards, meaning that in the future I’ll be able to put almost all my music on a single SD card, or two at maximum.

I’ve been buying downloads, not streams, from Qobuz, the latest being Gary Peacock’s Tales of Another, a record that despite my love for Keith Jarrett in my twenties, I never listened to. It wasn’t cheap, around 18€, but it’s a price that I can pay for a record.

How does it feel?

I think the most important difference with streamed music is that I’ve been actually listening to the music, repeatedly and carefully. To me, listening to Spotify results in a shallow listening, as a certain album could/should be listened to once, and then move on to something else.

Is it so because I’m old enough to remember the experience of listening to a physical record? Do I feel a sense of gratification in owning a fixed amount of media files, rather than accessing a virtually unlimited library? Am I fantasizing about being able to perceive a better audio quality, as my files are mostly 44100 / 16 FLACs? Whatever the reason is, the enjoyment is real!

Carbon footprint

Spotify’s average emission of ~276g/year/user is quite low, even though it’s probably much higher now because of the introduction of videos played with the music. However, while low at the level of the individual, it is substantial as a whole because of the large userbase. According to Greenly, the cumulative impact of global streaming is a significant environmental factor.

Gary Peacock’s Tales of Another

And now, after this long tirade, some words about the music. I’ve heard about Tales of Another since I’ve got interested in Keith Jarrett, almost 35 years ago. However, I never listened to the record. How was it possible? The “Standards” trio’s debut, six years before their first official album, how could I miss that, especially after buying even the least appraised Keith Jarrett albums, such as The Survivors’ Suite?

Thirty-five years later, so many things have changed: I do not have anymore that youthful obsession for Jarrett, even though I appreciate him on a deeper level as a composer. I do think he should get much more credit as one of the great jazz composers, with an uncanny ability to create pieces that feel like classics (a quality he shares with Joe Zawinul) and the ability to build extremely evocative and original musical landscapes. As an example, the balance between anguish and harmonic geometry in the title track “Personal Mountains” from the homonymous album, the Sehnsucht that pervades “The Journey Home” (in the album My Song), the many joyful Ornette-inspired compositions…

Anyway, back to the music. At first, I was unimpressed: I did not like the sound, and the music felt quite dull. At first, I wasn’t fond of the mix, with the drums panned slightly left and the piano on the right. The music felt calm, relaxing, and dynamically compressed, with that overly polished, emotionally distant ECM sound that many people are critical of (I’m not). Then I started to listen to it multiple times, since I paid for it. If I were listening to it on Spotify, I would have surely changed to something else to compensate for the uneasiness of the first listening experience.

Then I began noticing the oddities, like Jack DeJohnette playing almost exclusively on the ride cymbal on the first track, with a metronomic precision that contrasts with the composition’s melancholic mood. In the same track, Jarrett’s constant swing contributes to a sense of forward propulsion that prevents the pensive atmosphere from becoming stagnant. There are some free jazz moments that are wonderful, characterised by an unleashed and controlled wildness, even though I found myself wishing them to become less polite. What I really found interesting, is that this record prototypes all the tropes that will become fully realised in the Standards Trio, the one-note rock vamps, the “sound” of that trio, their interplay.

However, I began noticing how many artistic outcomes the 70s, especially the second half, possess a layer of sadness. I can hear that in very different genres, in Pierre Boulez’s “Rituel”, in György Ligeti before his piano studies, in rock songs (obviously in “Hotel California”), in this and many other ECM recordings from that period. In this music there’s a feeling of searching for a lost landscape, the spark of the 60s innovation is almost gone, and with it, the grand narratives and maybe hopes of modernism, and a new path is not yet found.