Traveling through time and space

In the April 2024 issue of this magazine, a piece by Editor Jim Austin appeared in the “As We See It” space. It was titled “On assessing sonic illusions,” and it has haunted me for more than a year. Jim’s thesis was that a music recording is a “synthetic, whole-cloth creation ... a complete fabrication.” He writes: “Very few recordings correspond to an actual performance. Most are studio concoctions with pieced-together instrumental tracks and artificial ambience that document no sonic event that ever occurred.”

- BY THOMAS CONRAD

When it came to rock and pop and classical music, I could accept Jim’s idea. Most pop records are indeed “pieced together” in the studio. Oddly enough, so are a great many classical albums because of the classical world’s current obsession with perfection. But when it came to the music nearest and dearest to me—jazz—I recoiled. Could it really be said that jazz recordings, even live jazz recordings, were original creations that did not correspond to an actual musical event? For me that was a bridge too far.

Later Jim wrote, “It is often ... written, including in this magazine, that a recording can be a time machine, ... moving you through space and time to experience things you couldn’t otherwise, like Thelonious Monk playing at the It Club....” I plead guilty. I have often avowed in the pages of Stereophile, in my reviews of live jazz recordings, that I have been imaginatively transported to the It Club in Los Angeles or the Penthouse in Seattle (both long gone) or the Black Hawk in San Francisco (where Miles Davis once lit the night on fire, but which is now a parking lot). But Jim says that even a live recording is “so far removed” from what happened in the real world “that it makes sense to think of it as something new.”

I accepted, of course, that reproduced music is an illusion. So what was my problem? Was my fondness for time travel sentimental self-indulgence or an allegiance to deeper truth? I decided to seek the counsel of two experts. I provided a copy of Jim’s “As We See It” to Joe Harley and Jimmy Katz.