Music Is Not Measured in Data Points

On dusty old forgotten records and what they have to teach the streaming era

The choir is outside, gathered near a shade-providing tree. The conductor, far left, seems in mid-gesture, and all eyes of the Choir of the Federal University of Bahia are on him. The year of the recording is not listed — even Discogs doesn’t have it — but from the limited notes it’s possible to deduce that it’s sometime after 1965.

Just a wild guess: None of these singers are worrying about whether the sound they’re making might charm or antagonize a algorithm residing in some far-off server farm. They’re too busy making music.

The great organist Shirley Scott is heard in both small group and studio orchestra settings in a record made over two days in July 1965. They’re playing crisp, inventive Gary McFarland arrangements of bossa nova and Afro-Cuban jazz tunes, like “Soul Sauce.” The execution is lively, the soloing is spirited; the participants are immersed in creating an inviting sonic landscape. Almighty metrics like “audience engagement,” “page views” and “return on digital spend” have not yet entered the lexicon.

No data points here! Just a suite of fantasias on Cuban dance styles (rumba, guanguanco) composed by Gilberto Valdés and played by the Orquesta De Camara De Madrid. Deep. Sometimes kitschy. Notable for its dramatic soft-loud dynamic contrasts.

I’m not ready (yet!) to assert that digital-era emphasis on scorekeeping has adversely impacted the creative process. Just saying that by listening to music made before the tortured (and easily finessed) statistics became ubiquitous, it’s possible to gain some perspective on the endlessly chopped and sorted analysis, the page views measured in nanoseconds and all the rest. The non-musical decisions that can impact (and, alas, have impacted) the musical ones.

Dropping into old records, it’s possible to pick up a wonderfully unguarded, irreverent, music-for-its-own sake feeling. A sense that the artists are getting after what makes them happy, not “optimizing” the tracks or scheming about what could generate traffic on the endlessly needy Internet. Pure expression, and the exacting execution of the music, are the paramount concerns — that goes for tiny-label releases that wouldn’t have a prayer in the SEO era and for records by chart-toppers like Prince and the Revolution. Today brings an upgraded Live, from Syracuse in 1985, a riveting performance during the height of the Purple Rain frenzy. When it was first released, the audio was treble-heavy and messy, marred by unbalanced backing vocals and other strange mixing decisions. Both the audio and video have been cleaned up for this reissue, and as a result, the irreverent, delightfully unhinged, electrifying performances are rendered with remarkable clarity. The players are all in. The crowd is all in. There’s maybe a handful of cellphones in the building. The music might not be perfect but the spirit is alive, and unmissable. Except, maybe, to a computer program.

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