The Return of Live Music

Before Covid, my most meaningful musical experiences came from live performances, primarily in West Coast jazz venues: SFJAZZ, Yoshi’s, Kuumbwa Jazz Center, The Bluewhale (the last having sadly closed). SFJAZZ has the best sound system of the four, the intimate Joe Henderson Lab is a particularly sonorous room, but of course that doesn’t mean I heard the best music there. I’ve always found Yoshi’s P.A. to be excessively sibilant, a shortcoming I cure by sitting as close to the stage as I can. I heard Wayne Shorter there when he was still in fine form, and no imperfection in Yoshi’s sound system was about to mar the power of that performance. He and his band--John Patittuci, Danilo Perez, Brian Blade--played with savage elegance, their music impressionistic, painterly even, despite its peaks of thrashing intensity.

Listening to recordings of this band reminds me of watching video of a play: If only I’d been in the room!

As has often been noted on this forum, live music sounds very different from recorded music, but that doesn’t mean it sounds better. In fact, live mixes can be rough and uneven, unlike the skillfully weighted and balanced--yet artificial--stereo images of an expert recording. But flawed audio equipment doesn’t stop a live band from sounding beautiful. It doesn’t stop a recorded band from sounding beautiful. Excellence in music is different from excellence in sound reproduction. This is terribly obvious.

Sound systems produce sound, but music is bigger than sound.

Audiogon has taught me that I’m not much of an audiophile. The machinery that amplifies music, or reproduces it from recordings, is important stuff, marvelous really, but it’s only a means to access the far more marvelous art of Wayne Shorter and others. I know many on this forum agree. Any importance audio equipment can claim is borrowed from music itself--though music has plenty of importance to borrow!

Recordings perform the crucial service of capturing the passing beauty of an ephemeral art form. No one can overstate the value of preserving elite musical performances that would otherwise be gone forever. And of course performances preserved well are preferable to those preserved badly. But there is nothing like being in the presence of the music as the music is made. Hearing firsthand the energy and force of those sonic structures, as they flood into being before ebbing away, is to sit face to face with something recorded music sees only through a glass darkly.

Now that venues are finally reopening, will anyone else’s system soon take a back seat to the clubs and concert halls where music is created live?