The influence of jazz was clear, and Piazzolla had a story to account for it.  He claimed that when he was in Paris in 1954, studying composition with the legendary Nadia Boulanger, he had seen a performance by an octet led by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.  The interplay between the musicians and, most of all, their obvious sense of collective joy inspired Piazzolla, and he immediately began planning his own octet.  The story appealingly confirms the jazz influence on New Tango.  Unfortunately, as Diego Fischerman and Abel Gilbert have shown, it never happened.  Mulligan did perform at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1954 but with a quartet not an octet and, more problematically, two months before Piazzolla arrived in France. ¹

I would argue that Piazzolla’s borrowings from jazz could only have come via records. Most conceptions of jazz identify improvisation as the genre’s central aesthetic practice. And yet apart from a few early experiments, Piazzolla did not make much use of improvisation, nor did he imitate jazz’s swing-based rhythm. Instead, what drew him to the sort of cool jazz Mulligan specialized in was the sophistication of its arrangements, the intricate interplay reminiscent of chamber music. With Boulanger, Piazzolla was studying counterpoint, a technique that drew him to Bach and away from tango. In this context, cool jazz was a revelation, whether he heard it in the interwoven melodic lines played by Mulligan and trombonist Bob Brookmeyer on the Salle Pleyel album or in Gil Evans’s elaborate arrangements on the Birth of the Cool recordings of Miles Davis’s Nonet, which also featured Mulligan. ² Here was a popular music form that employed serious composition, harmony, arrangement, and even counterpoint. Cool jazz showed Piazzolla that it was possible to be a serious tango composer. And this is a revelation that would have been much more difficult to have on the basis of a handful of live performances. Records would have allowed Piazzolla to bring cool jazz into his home and listen to it in the context of his classical composition studies and his ongoing tango practice.

The key role of records in the transnational dissemination of music was demonstrated more than a decade ago by Lise Waxer in her brilliant book on the history of salsa in Cali. ³ Located in southwestern Colombia, far from the Caribbean, Cali has no direct connection to salsa, a music and dance genre based on Afro-Cuban forms and invented in New York City. Yet by the 1980s, Cali had emerged as a major center of salsa performance and consumption, and Caleños embraced the music as a symbol of their city. Waxer uncovers the way record collectors and DJs disseminated salsa records, appropriating and resignifying the music in the process. She shows that Caleños adopted a foreign musical form as their own in order to compete with culturally dominant forms like música andina and, later, the cumbia produced on the Atlantic Coast. The city’s record collectors used transnational music to express local concerns. For example, a preference for salsa dura, the old-fashioned style associated with New York in the 1960s, expressed a macho rejection of frivolous consumerism and other values associated with women. In general, Waxer’s account stresses the agency of the listener, an agency that records facilitated. Since they were collecting records and not, say, tuning into New York or Puerto Rican radio stations, Caleños built their own distinctive salsa corpus. And they used these records in creative ways: DJs played 33 rpm bugalú records at 45 rpm in order to create a faster music more conducive to local dance styles.

In Cali, as in Buenos Aires and Paris, records enabled the transmission and reappropriation of musical styles; they were the material reality of musical exchange. And yet, like Piazzolla, who put a live performance and not a record at the center of his own story of musical borrowing, most scholars have neglected the records at the center of the transnational history of music. By paying attention to records and by tracing their paths of distribution, scholars can write this history in new ways. Of course, historians will have to attend to the power of multinational record companies to decide what music appeared on record and which records were distributed where. But as both Piazzolla and Caleño salsa fans demonstrate, any transnational history of records will also have to reconstruct the agency of record listeners.

The pho­tos were an orga­ni­za­tional bur­den. What was the sub­ject? Was it “Yosemite vaca­tion, 1981?” or was it “Timmy, age 8?” Was this a pic­ture of El Cap­i­tan, or of the vaca­tion, or of mom and dad?  Lots of par­ents would set up an album for each kid. But then what do you do with a pic­ture that has Timmy and Susie in it? You need a dupli­cate, or if it’s Timmy and Susie at Yosemite, triplicate.

Sekula points out that pho­tographs were instantly use­ful to polit­i­cal authority–as a record of events, as a way to track identity, as a way to observe racial and eugeni­cal dif­fer­ences in immi­grant pop­u­la­tions. There they posed the same kind of prob­lems, on a mag­ni­fied scale–is this a forger, or an Ital­ian, or an exam­ple of atavis­tic phys­iog­nomy? How do we file this?

This was always an issue with records. They were heavy and bulky and vis­i­ble in your room: they made a record not just of a musi­cal per­for­mance, but a record of your per­sonal taste, an archive. You had to think about how to orga­nize them. Alphabet­i­cal order, sure, but really, do the Bea­t­les really belong between Bach and Art Blakey? It made more sense to organize records by genre: this is rock, this is folk, this is jazz, this is folk rock, this is fusion, this is gospel, this is contempo­rary gospel, this is tra­di­tional gospel, uh oh a con­tem­po­rary gospel artist just released a tra­di­tional gospel album.… Even­tu­ally, you’d run into the prob­lem of the bound­ary trans­gress­ing ani­mal, a record that was both or nei­ther, and really, you’d need two of that one.*

You could just shove them on a shelf in any order, and of course peo­ple did, but the vinyl archive was deeply per­sonal, a record of taste and expe­ri­ence. Barry Levin­son summed it up poignantly in this scene from Diner, in which a young mar­ried cou­ple is not hav­ing much luck fig­ur­ing out how to live with each other.

This is a moment enabled by gen­der pol­i­tics and the spe­cific form of vinyl. He’s deeply obsessed with records and their “meta­data” and she could not care less. Appro­pri­ately, the com­ments on the scene on YouTube include this:

What’s really funny about this scene is the cam­era focuses on the label of the record play­ing– a turquoise Capi­tol label that would accom­pany a Gene Vin­cent or Ten­nessee Ernie Ford Capi­tol label LP. But what is play­ing? “Hav­ing Fun” by Mem­phis Slim, recorded for Chess Records, which would have been on a black label with sil­ver lettering

Indeed.

Records always posed this prob­lem of archiv­ing and cat­e­gory mak­ing. If you had more than a dozen, they com­pelled you to come up with some kind of orga­ni­za­tional scheme, and as Levin­son points out, those orga­ni­za­tional schemes could be deeply impor­tant. Vis­it­ing someone’s house and perus­ing their record col­lec­tion told you all sorts of things about them–not just that they pre­ferred disco to clas­si­cal, or pre­ferred the obscure and the odd to the pop­u­lar, but that they had imposed a struc­ture of mean­ing on the music.

I’d be inclined to argue that the form of the record itself com­pelled this kind of orga­ni­za­tional obses­sive­ness. It’s phys­i­cal shape and size mat­tered. The care­fully cho­sen cover art, twelve inches square, rein­forced this. It the record against var­i­ous cul­tural per­sonae: earnest folkie, groovy swinger; honky tonker; jazzbo.

Jazz lovers will eas­ily recall the cover of Miles Davis’ Porgy and Bess: styl­ish, racially trans­gres­sive, ambigu­ous, hip, sophisticated.

You couldn’t put this next to a coun­try and west­ern record, or an R&B record, or some folk music.

Records were care­fully cho­sen by their own­ers; they were com­modi­ties that marked out the bounds of the buyer’s self. The vinyl record needed to be ordered and clas­si­fied and stored: needed to you to place it, both phys­i­cally and men­tally, and that place­ment was a per­sonal statement.

Here’s a youtube clip of a per­son explain­ing his record col­lec­tion–because other record col­lec­tors had asked him to:

This looks pretty obvi­ously like gen­dered behav­ior; where women might occa­sion­ally pull the fam­ily snap­shots out from under the bed and orga­nize them into mean­ing­ful photo albums, this kind of obses­sive record-organizing seems to be mostly a guy thing.

But the photo album and the obses­sive record-categorizing stem from the same impulse, the desire to make con­sump­tion more mean­ing­ful. When you take com­modi­ties and re-organize them, re-purpose them, you’re try­ing to give them mean­ing. Maybe you’re sim­ply rein­forc­ing the mean­ing assigned by who­ever is sell­ing the com­mod­ity, and insist­ing that Ray Charles is a R&B singer, regard­less of what he thinks, or jazz must be thought of in the way thePorgy and Bess cover demands. Or maybe you orga­nized the records because you liked draw­ing up aes­thetic tax­onomies and chains of “influence.”

But the act of orga­niz­ing is an act of think­ing about what the com­modi­ties mean and how they should be under­stood. Vinyl buy­ers wanted to impose tax­onomies on their records, or rein­force exist­ing cat­e­gories, and they’d use the phys­i­cal objects to map out the dif­fer­ences between indi­vid­ual per­form­ers and dif­fer­ent kinds of music.

At the same time, record-organizing looks like what Max Weber described as the ratio­nal­iza­tion of life. Weber argued the late nine­teenth cen­tury. Mod­ern meth­ods of infor­ma­tion stor­age and retrieval that makes pos­si­ble larger sys­tems of manage­ment. If you go to the Build­ing Museum in DC, you can see how some­one tried to man­age mil­lions of pen­sion records before the inven­tion of the ver­ti­cal fil­ing cab­i­net. It’s a not quite mod­ern building.

In his essay on pho­tog­ra­phy Sekula points out how pho­tographs served the state’s need to orga­nize and clas­sify its citizens–police records, pass­port pho­tos, pub­lic health pro­grams with a eugeni­cal bent. File cab­i­nets full of pho­tographs were both a tool of the state and an orga­ni­za­tional dilemna.

We can see traces of the state all over that Miles Davis album cover: the woman flir­ta­tiously touch­ing his trum­pet speaks to role assigned to women as muse, not cre­ator. Her racially ambigu­ous char­ac­ter speaks to the cul­ture of seg­re­ga­tion. The music itself was enmeshed in cul­tural pol­i­tics, a jazz ver­sion of an opera based on south­ern African Amer­i­can folk themes by George Gersh­win, the New York-born son of Jew­ish immi­grants. Choos­ing that record, and plac­ing it in the jazz category, both rein­forced the com­mer­cial mean­ing of jazz and placed the buyer in some degree of oppo­si­tion to pre­vail­ing racial norms and cat­e­gories the state acted to reinforce.

But dig­i­tal media just com­pletely elim­i­nates these problems/complications//pleasures. A sin­gle dig­i­tal file takes up no phys­i­cal space: it doesn’t need to be displayed–in fact really can’t be dis­played, if it’s not on a cd–and doesn’t invite perusal. You can tag an mp3 file as what­ever you want, as mul­ti­ple gen­res, because it doesn’t have to occupy phys­i­cal space; it can be simul­ta­ne­ously country/jazz/rock. There’s no need to cat­e­go­rize it in a fixed way, because it doesn’t have much of phys­i­cal exis­tence. The whole tire­some oblig­a­tion of the archive is dis­cour­aged or elim­i­nated, and so to the con­scious nego­ti­a­tion with the state’s needs and demands. It’s been auto­mated. Instead of actively work­ing to clas­sify the object, the mp3 can come to the lis­tener as part of an algo­rith­mic  matrix of per­sonal pref­er­ence, mapped by Pan­dora or Amazon.

One com­par­i­son might be to time and time­keep­ers. When stan­dard­ized time didn’t exist, peo­ple needed pub­lic clocks to track time, being on time, track­ing the time, was a con­scious effort and a rela­tion­ship with a phys­i­cal object, the watch. Today thor­oughly stan­dard­ized time is every­where, and auto­mated. Watches are now like vinyl records; unnec­es­sary, nostal­gic hip­ster sta­tus objects.

This may be one rea­son why music sales have declined. The record imposed or enabled the “value added” of mak­ing categories. The cat­e­gories were deeply mean­ing­ful both per­son­ally and polit­i­cally, as Barry Levin­son pointed out so well. They spoke to who you were in rela­tion to the real­i­ties pol­i­tics imposed. The mp3 more or less makes that process point­less, and it makes the stakes much lower.

*I feel like I need to pro­claim that I don’t own any records and don’t have a turntable and don’t want one. If they sound better I don’t care. While I loved the record cov­ers, stor­ing and main­tain­ing record albums was a pain in the neck. And I don’t want to tan­gle with genre for­ma­tion. This isn’t a nos­tal­gic post, just an effort to fig­ure out what the dif­fer­ence in differ­ent tech­nolo­gies means.

This piece is cross-posted from The Aporetic with permission from the author.