Locked Doors and Silences

Here are two points of view expressed by poets of unequal stature:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter . . . (John Keats)
Sharing is caring. (Barney the Purple Dinosaur.)

Most human beings have some possessiveness, necessary if we are to survive. We want to find our shoes where we left them last night, because walking to the bus without shoes is not going to be easy or comfortable. So a certain amount of “That’s mine, and it belongs to me,” is understandable. If we go to the refrigerator and find that someone has eaten our food, we are both hungry and upset.

But there is also the strong need for generosity within a community. There is a tipping point at which “That’s mine, and you can’t have any of it,” becomes selfishness. Others shouldn’t go hungry so that we can be full.

Music, unlike shoes and food, however, does not vanish when it is shared. In fact, any art form I can think of requires an audience. The writer wants her poems read; the painter wants the landscape or the portrait to be seen; the band wants to have people, listening, in the room.

Imagine a locked door. Secure, with as many padlocks as you want, or secret codes. You and I don’t have the keys or the codes. We know treasures exist behind the door but we are not allowed in. The keeper of the treasures is not listening to our polite tapping.

This is entirely relevant to the music celebrated here.

As soon as there were jazz records, there were jazz collectors who saw those objects as valuable, not only for the music they contained, but for their rarity and for the ways in which that rarity could be profitable. I think of young John Hammond and others like him, buying two copies of the new Bessie Smith record, one to play, “one to keep,” pristine and valuable. To his credit, Hammond supervised the first reissue of all of Bessie’s recordings on a series of LPs that I and others could buy at local department stores.

But others had different ideas of sharing, and not-sharing. Decades ago, when I might have been nineteen, I visited a local jazz friend of my age who had connections I did not. He played for me a tape of selections from Ellington’s 1940 dance date at Fargo, North Dakota, music that was not readily available. I was enchanted. I couldn’t bear the idea that I would go home and never hear those versions of “Star Dust” or “St. Louis Blues” again. “Would you make a copy of that for me?” I politely asked my friend. “Oh, no,” he said, startled. “X (an eminent collector) gave this to me and told me not to share it.” I didn’t argue, nor did I wrestle the tape box out of his grip, but I thought, “That’s not nice. Duke wanted his music to be heard, but I guess you don’t understand that.” Now, I know that the eminent collector had plans to issue the music on his own label, and I assume that he thought that tape copies I would have and copied for others might diminish sales.

Echoing this: more than one famous musician, when I’ve asked to video-record their live performance, has politely but firmly refused because it would diminish CD sales. Theft of personal intellectual property. I respect that, although I don’t agree. If people can’t hear you, how can they love you?

I have worked closely with several respected collectors who had astonishing libraries of rare recordings, who also operated on the principle of DO NOT COPY. One of them even decorated the cassettes he sent me with those words written in large orange letters. That he had made a copy for me, in unspoken violation, perhaps, of his agreement with the source of the music, was not something I pointed out to him: to do so would be to call him a hypocrite and would end the free exchange of ambrosial music.

But music needs to be heard to be valued. An unplayed disc or tape is enticing because of its rarity, but it is silent. It exists only in our imagination and in our longing to hear it.

This principle of “It belongs to me and I won’t let you have it,” goes beyond the zealously protective individual to the institutional. The word that gets used is “permission.” “Yes, we have pages from a fan’s diary, full of stories of the personal lives and expressions of our heroes, now dead. You can come to our library; you can take photos of the handwritten pages, but you cannot publish them.”

“You can come to our library; you can look at the boxes of audio and video tapes. Some day we have plans to digitize them and share them, but right now we don’t have the money or the staff. You say that fifty-year old recording tape is deteriorating? We will have to have a meeting about this.”

I know I am making an assumption without evidence here, but I doubt that Bennie Morton or Lester Young or Sidney Catlett, in the ethereal afterlife, is furious that anyone is sharing their music without paying them or their heirs. Better that than to be forgotten. Better that then to have one’s life-work disappear into silence. What musician wants to be only a few pages in a discography, and nothing else?

So, in this discussion, I think Keats was wrong. And for the first and perhaps only time in my life, I am firmly on the side of Barney the Purple Dinosaur.

I do not pretend to be anyone’s role model and would be embarrassed if you told me I was, but the purpose of this blog, seventeen years old this month, has been to share joy, to increase happiness. Not, I insist, to lock up happiness where only I could enjoy it. To have the only copy of “That Sweet Something, Dear,” by King Oliver, locked away where it cannot be heard, may be intensely gratifying to the keeper of the disc, but it is also, to use a hard word, selfish.

Is the world richer or poorer because this music can be heard, with no money sent to the artists, by anyone who can go online?

My position is Walt Whitman’s:

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

I will keep sharing. I wish that others were equally motivated to do so. When I am too old to blog, I would like my shelves to be empty.

May your happiness increase!