In the Order Received....

A modest proposal for bringing some historical order to streaming

In the grand discographical smorgasbord of streaming, the timeline of an artist’s work – the stepwise project-by-project and year-by-year chronicle of endeavor – is increasingly smudgy, opaque. If not entirely optional.

Album releases don’t necessarily appear in chronological order. To understand how an artist got to where they presently are, research is sometimes required – and that means initiating a search, because, as previously established, Spotify and the other services do not care about basic information like credits. Live albums, even career-defining ones like Frampton Comes Alive, are broken out on a separate list, removed from their historical moment. It’s as though the data bots and their human overseers can’t be bothered with even the faintest outline of a narrative. Here’s what we’ve got on Joni Mitchell – you figure out how it all fits together.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because a friend of mine is listening to the complete works of Gary Burton, the jazz vibraphone player, in sequence, starting with his very first record. That’s New Vibe Man in Town, Burton’s 1962 debut for RCA Victor – a polite standards affair that jazz critics sometimes describe as “inconsequential.” The album launched Burton, creating demand for him as a sideman with high-profile stars like Stan Getz. From there Burton was busy; he did a series of acoustic mainstream jazz dates for RCA (including the shrewd, intermittently inspired The Groovy Sound of Music, featuring jazzified selections from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical) before moving to Atlantic in 1969.

Almost immediately, the orientation of Burton’s records changed. He surrounded himself with electric guitars, basses and keyboards, and wrote music notable for its open plateaus and questing spirit. The best-known works from this era – Good Vibes (1970) and Gary Burton and Keith Jarrett (1971) – balance a unified group sound against intricate, frighteningly inspired solo declarations.

Burton’s approach – specifically, his wide four-mallet chord voicings and torrid storm-chasing single lines – evolved rapidly. In late 1972, he and pianist Chick Corea recorded the still astonishing Crystal Silence, a duo work that came to define the placid, understated, conversational ethos of ECM Records in its early days.

That record is iconic no matter what – and, as such, it has served as the first encounter with Burton for many listeners. Still, I’d argue it registers differently, perhaps more startlingly, when you hear what came before it. Go back a few records, to when Burton was contending with backbeat music or the challenging originals written by his frequent bassist Steve Swallow, and it becomes possible to appreciate the discreet steps in Burton’s thinking. As a soloist, certainly, but also a bandleader and a conceptualist. He had one idea of what it meant to be a “Vibe Man” in 1962 and quite another a decade later.

This listening approach takes time and patience and some sleuthing; a few weeks back I attempted to do the grand tour of Ry Cooder, completely forgetting about the many (many!) film soundtracks he’d done in the 1980s. Some of those are transportive, deeply evocative sonic landscapes that help show how Cooder’s approach to the guitar (and particularly slide guitar) changed depending on the context. When conjuring a background passage for film, he can be a mournful gospel worshipper bathed in deep reverb. But when necessary, Cooder can become a ruthless dispenser of cries and moans that are alive with the essence of the blues, as he does on the funk-leaning “UFO Has Landed In the Ghetto” from 1982’s unfairly overlooked The Slide Area.

And: Listening in sequence can make clear how an artist’s attraction to an instrument or a style can inspire interesting tangents: Cooder used accordion, most often played by the amazing Norteno musician Flaco Jimenez, as a tear-inducing element on tunes like “He’ll Have To Go” as far back as his fifth album Chicken Skin Music (1976). Over the years, as their collaboration evolved, Cooder brought Jimenez into stylistic smashups where accordion might not always be wanted – see the lively, hard-driving title track to Cooder’s 1986 Get Rhythm, which juxtaposes old-time gospel quartet singing with Norteno accordion riffs and blues rhythm guitar. It’s an ambitious cultural sampler disguised as a feelgood romp, and it might not have come together at an earlier point in Cooder’s career. He needed the tours with Jimenez, the soundtrack moments and all the rest, to understand how far he could nudge the accordion away from tradition.

Listening in chronological order can be enlightening about the steps in an artist’s journey. It also provides instant context, fostering appreciation for the unsuccessful experiments as well as the often rapid evolutionary leaps that are part of a long-tenured artist’s career. One more recent example: Those who this year discovered Kate Bush via Stranger Things’ use of her 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill” may be astonished to encounter the more acoustic ruminations of her debut, the miraculous The Kick Inside made seven years earlier.

Go in order sometimes! Make a conscious decision to avoid whatever the algorithm says is the Top Track and instead seek out the first track, and the one after that. And so on and so on, in the order received.

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