It was in the days when a particular jazz radio station consistently failed to back-announce many of the tracks it played that I began to consider the possibility that I had spent my entire life listening to recorded music in the wrong way. That interesting record that had already started when I tuned in? It would forever remain a mystery. I couldn’t go out and buy it, or fit it neatly into the organogram of musical evolution that all serious fans carry around in their heads. So I learned to relinquish the lifelong urge to fit every piece of music into an ever-expanding taxonomy. Suddenly stripped of context, the music was just there to be appreciated for itself, in the moment, in the way we apprehend it before knowledge sets up filters to shape our responses.
For a member of a generation of enthusiasts accustomed to collecting and classifying music with a librarian’s rigour, this came as a shock. That rigour always seemed a slightly perverse response to music of black American origin, the spontaneity and informality of which had set postwar Britain free from a set of inherited cultural restraints. But it made it seem obligatory to possess the complete works not only of the obvious people – in my case Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, Curtis Mayfield, Terry Riley and so on – but also of figures cherished for their obscurity. Eventually, when the record industry was almost on its last legs, it spotted my generation’s continuing weakness and found ways to feed it. Whereas the desire to own every 45 released on the Motown label in its first 10 years had once been a hopeless dream, a very expensive and carefully curated series of multi-disc sets brought that ambition within reach. That no one who is now under, say, 35 years of age is likely to feel such a compulsion represents an important saving of both money and living space.
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