Art on Air #4 Steve Bishop, ‘Agency’

Agency 

The line was patchy. It would occasionally drop off, a blizzard of interference blanketing  the audio. Through the wind-tunnel whooshing of low-bandwidth compression, the  music still played, still sounded good. I don’t mind waiting, I thought.  

I was on hold to a helpline for the Social Insurance Registration Office of Service  Canada, a public-facing agency of the Canadian government. Finding myself directed to  a virtual queue, I was surprised to hear Miles Davis used as the hold music. As time  progressed, I realized: callers were being played his 1959 album Kind of Blue in its entirety. 

Kind of Blue is regarded as the most critically acclaimed jazz album of all time, and is also the best-selling jazz album of all time. Its near-universal appeal, however, is not an indicator that it wasn’t at the cutting edge of its time – far from it. It was the first full album of all modal-jazz compositions, but the advances it took musically were camouflaged by how melodic and pleasant the music sounded. Released in the same year, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come pushed a different, more raw direction in jazz to the world’s attention. The genre would come to be called ‘free jazz’,  placing increasingly greater importance on visceral improvisation, further dismantling the conventions and structure of jazz. Kind of Blue wasn’t as sonically radical as that but radicality can be alienating, and you don’t want to alienate the person on the other end of the phone. 

The line went silent while a voice interrupted to let me know I was important. The music resumed, omitting the muted section. Having listened to this album countless times, I  could make up the missing parts in my mind. Davis never played these songs the same way twice, but the familiarity of those specific recordings have made them definitive versions. Jazz, with its traditions of standards and interpretations, ‘fake books’ and ‘real books’, is music that is particularly resistant to being definitive. (1)

Discogs.com has 423 different pressings of Kind of Blue listed on their website, which asks another question: Which release of Kind of Blue is the definitive one? A ‘like-new’  pressing of the original US release from 1959 is not impossible to find, whereas modern reissues take turns trying to outdo each other in terms of digging up, polishing and repackaging the artefact: new stereo reissues, remastered reissues, heavyweight 180g  remastered vinyl reissues, limited-edition reissues on blue-coloured vinyl, extra heavyweight 200g reissues, newly-remastered-from-the-original-master-tapes with bonus tracks, enhanced CDs, Super Audio CDs, HDCDs, CDs partnered with DVDs,  50th Anniversary Collector’s Editions, 60th Anniversary Collector’s Editions, double-LP audiophile reissues with Gain 2™ Ultra Analog technology, box sets housing miniature  LP replicas made in collaboration with clothing brand Supreme, and so on. (2) Everyone of these tries, in some way, to more authentically memorialise an already frozen state of spontaneity.  

Back to waiting, I hear the album’s final track peter out and the same song start up again from the beginning. Something about it was vaguely different. The government’s virtual queuing system uses a 1997 reissue of Kind of Blue, which revealed, for the first time, alternate takes of the familiar 1959 tracks. Tracks like these expand our knowledge of a moment in time but, also chip away at its foundations. It’s a destabilising listen to hear that the version we’ve always known was just the version chosen from multiple others. 

The uneasiness of the singular being undermined by its variations is nothing new; for the past century, physicists have developed an understanding of reality in relation to the idea of there being multiple other realities. Quantum mechanics describes a universe where all interactions exist as a series of probable outcomes. Only when observed are these probabilities resolved into an actual outcome. This anything-is-possible-until-observed quirk has led to many interpretations of what this means for our understanding of reality.  

The oldest is Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg’s Copenhagen interpretation from the  mid-1920s, which surmises that the universe chooses at random one outcome from a  variety of all possible outcomes, collapsing these possibilities into the single timeline of the universe we exist in. In this scenario, Davis is always improvising; until observed,  his playing exists in a state of every possible combination of notes and timing, and stays this way until the universe chooses. Although every possibility is equally as real as any other, ultimately choices were made, Davis improvised one solo on that particular take,  and this take is what ended up on the album.

In a later theory from 1957, dubbed the ‘many-worlds interpretation’, Hugh Everett III  describes a reality where, instead of the universe collapsing all possibilities into a  singular outcome, all the possibilities play out simultaneously, with infinite timelines branching off into infinite universes, with every quantum interaction, which is every particle interaction everywhere. This interpretation is a deterministic view of reality;  foregoing the free will of an individual for a reality where the individual is multiplied,  existing in infinite universes following every possible path in life. In this scenario, Davis’  band played every combination of notes and timing, and we just happen to find ourselves in the universe in which he played the version we know. If there is a Miles  Davis who played in the key of D, there is another who played in D minor. In each universe, he was only ever going to play in that particular key and furthermore there is no such thing as jazz. 

My phone to my ear, I think of Davis’ First Great Quintet, stuck in the labyrinth of the virtual queuing system; being transferred between departments, never deviating from their one version of the songs, jazz without improv. The sound of the avant garde literally becoming establishment. That what was once music of the counterculture is now being used by a government agency seems all the more poignant considering that in 1959 Davis couldn’t stand on the street without being assaulted by the police. (3)

The problem with the ‘many-worlds’ theory is that if people don’t have a choice, then it clears them of responsibility for their actions. In addition, determinism runs counter to humankind’s conscious experience: It simply doesn’t feel as though we aren’t able make decisions for ourselves. This disconnect between theory and instinct is made apparent when posing this question next to a form of music that is so emblematic of self-expression. Quantum mechanics as a theoretical model can’t account for feelings,  or how consciousness exists, aka ‘the hard problem’. (4) For the best part of a century, 4 humans have been accessing the world of quantum mechanics without being able to explain why it works or how this connects to the human experience of whatever reality we exist in. Still, making a phone call and waiting on hold would be impossible without  Quantum mechanics, which is used for communication satellites and the silicon chips in my phone.  

Similarly, music theory can go some way to explain why music makes us feel a certain way, why chord sequences and key changes are effective due to mathematics, intervals and frequency ratios, but doesn’t account for the imperceptibly minute nuances in sound that cause an emotional response. The ability for sound to be considered ‘music’ at all is due to conscious human decisions to frame it as such – decisions based on context and history. If one day you were to drop the needle on Kind of Blue and find the first song is in a different key then you should start to worry – not because it would be diluting a  legacy, but because it would mean indeterminacy. Humankind, stranded amongst a new version of events, without context or history, passively watching the universe play itself out. 

Back to waiting, I, along with everyone else on hold, hear the song fade out and a new entirely different song starts up. I feel some small relief that it’s not a surprise revision of  'Flamenco Sketches’. This song isn’t jazz, it’s classical and I’m trying to make out what the new song is, when a dial tone interrupts the music, then a jolting click, someone begins talking, and I think about what I’m going to say. 

(1) The first fake books appeared in the 1940s and consisted of photocopies of index cards with the melodies of popular jazz songs compiled into one convenient book for musicians to refer to if called upon to ‘fake’ playing a song they didn’t know. The real book, first produced in the 1970s by two students at Berklee College of Music, was the same concept but with contemporary songs. Both books were illegal as they reproduced copyrighted material without permission.

(2) Although Kind of Blue has been kept in print and reissues of it have been plentiful ever since its release, there had been a sudden surge in releases in the past decade due to expiring European copyright laws,  which were revised in 2013 to expire seventy years from year of first release, creating a window for recordings made prior to 1963 to have fallen into the public domain in Europe. 

(3) Kind of Blue was recorded in March–April 1959 and released in the US on 17 August, 1959. Eight days later, on 25 August 1959, Davis was attacked by two white police officers outside of the New York City jazz club Birdland, where his band was completing a two-week residency. 

(4) David Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’, The Journal of Consciousness Studies vol. 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–219.

https://www.stevebishop.org