The Re-Listening Experience

[Peter Friedman]

One of the interesting aspects of more than five decades of listening to jazz, and over that time period collecting an extensive library of recordings, is the process of re-evaluation of those recordings.

I find that I am sometimes quite surprised when I put on a recording that I have not heard in a long time.

Every so often I am amazed at how damn good it sounds. It may have been something I previously enjoyed, but did not consider it to be at the "outstanding" level. I now see that session in a very different light.

Other times I discover that a recording I liked previously now sounds dull and uninspired. That one now gets moved to the disposal box.

My suspicion is that this is an experience many others have had?

[John Tapscott]

I would say that for me re-listening to a recording after a number of years seldom results in a downgrading of the session. It either stays just about the same as I thought it was, or actually comes up in my estmation. Which of course, means that my collection only gets larger, never smaller.

[Late]

That one now gets moved to the disposal box.

Really?

(To make room for new recordings?)

[sal]

The re-listening experience is one of the main reasons I've stopped buying so many jazz recordings over the past couple of years. I feel like I have a lifetime of listening in the music that I already have.

[Dan Gould]

I'm with John, if I really enjoyed a recording before, its unheard of for me to decide its dull later on. If anything, familiarity can dull the pleasure, but it never loses its enjoyability.

[BruceH]

One of the interesting aspects of more than five decades of listening to jazz, and over that time period collecting an extensive library of recordings, is the process of re-evaluation of those recordings.

I find that I am sometimes quite surprised when I put on a recording that I have not heard in a long time.

Every so often I am amazed at how damn good it sounds. It may have been something I previously enjoyed, but did not consider it to be at the "outstanding" level. I now see that session in a very different light.

Other times I discover that a recording I liked previously now sounds dull and uninspired. That one now gets moved to the disposal box.

My suspicion is that this is an experience many others have had?

Well sure! That's a lot of what being a long-time music aficionado is all about. The longer you listen, the bigger your ears get. Revisit something you haven't listened to in a while and all of a sudden you hear things in it that you didn't hear before. (Occasionally it works the other way, and something you once thought was great now seems shallow and limited. But sometimes you can even get past that, and appreciate its limitations for what they are, even glory in them.) To get a little more philosophical about it, you're constantly changing (and hopefully growing) as a human being. Therefore something you listen to now will not seem the same as it did years ago because you're not the same person.

Edited November 19, 2008 by BruceH

[A Lark Ascending]

Over time you've also listened to a lot more music, probably some very different, so you are hearing with different ears than on initial listening.

I've often listened to a recording, been underwhelmed, and then passed the musician by for years. But then hearing something else by him/her has given me a different perspective. Returning to the original recording has revealed pleasures I never previously found. It's almost as if I needed some other musical context to allow me to lock into the original purchase.

[BruceH]

Indeed!

[ejp626]

I find that I have downgraded a lot of CDs lately. Most of them are free-blowing sessions (from the late '60s and '70s) that didn't grab me too much the first time around and haven't improved for me with time and repeated listens. On a personal level, I just feel even more strongly that this was an artistic dead end, though of course some good and even great albums emerged from it. So I don't try as hard as much as I would have in the past (to find some redeeming feature) and am letting them go. On a more philosophical note, I am thinning the shelves and need to clear out nearly 300 CDs. This makes me far more brutal about these decisions, but then (to reverse Simmel's argument in The Philosophy of Money) to help myself feel better about the decision to part with a CD, I must also turn strongly against it.