Not Everything Is for Everyone

On a New York bar where everyone sat side by side, and the one thing the Listening Club asks at the door

By Rafi Mercer

The session begins without a word.

There's no welcome, no introduction, no explanation of what we are about to hear. The needle goes down, and the first sound reaches the room before anyone has been told anything. For a few seconds, everyone listening is in exactly the same position. Nobody knows more than anyone else, and nobody has an opinion yet. There is only sound, and a small collective lean towards it.

I built it that way on purpose, though for a long time I couldn't have told you why.

When I think about New York, I don't think first about the music, though there was always music. I think about who was sitting along the bar. Young and old on the same stretch of wood. Every colour of skin. Someone who might have been worth a fortune beside someone who plainly wasn't. The cool, and the carefully on trend. The ones who were a little bit mad, and the ones who were entirely, reassuringly normal.

What stayed with me is that the room only worked because all of them were in it. Take any one of them out and it would have become a different place, smaller and more sure of itself. The mix wasn't decoration. It was the thing itself.

Music, left to itself, rarely does this. It sorts us. Research into why we love what we love keeps arriving at the same uncomfortable place: taste is partly a badge. The records we fall for in our teenage years set hard, and by the time they do, they've become a way of saying who we are and, more quietly, who we are not. Walk into most music venues and you can read the tribe from the door: the jazz club, the metal bar, the club night where everyone has made the same decisions about their shoes. There's nothing wrong with any of that. It just isn't the room I remember.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg, writing about bars, cafés and barbershops in The Great Good Place, had a word for the room I remember. He called the best of these places levellers. In a leveller, your standing outside the door counts for very little once you're through it. The wealthy man and the broke one are both just regulars, and the only currency that matters is whether you're decent company.

I've come to think a listening bar might be one of the few rooms left that can still level. Everyone faces the same direction. The record is the centre of gravity, not the crowd, and when the shared act is attention, there is simply less room to perform who you are. The music does the work a dress code would otherwise do.

This brings me to the part I find hardest to hold.

Every session of the Listening Club has to be something you didn't see coming. We began with Donald Byrd's Places and Spaces, from 1975. It is the Mizell brothers at their most polished: strings and horns gliding over a groove built for motion, warm enough to heat a room on its own. The next month it was Promises, from 2021: Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra in one long piece of nine movements. A small keyboard phrase circles for most of its length while Sanders's saxophone moves through it like weather. The two records are nearly half a century apart and were made for entirely different rooms. We never name the record in advance. The month is announced with faces, never the album.

That is deliberate, and it will cost me people. Some will come for one record and find the next isn't theirs, and they'll drift. I'm making my peace with that, slowly, and some months with less grace than others.

Here is what I've understood about surprise, though. David Huron, in Sweet Anticipation, argues that much of music's pleasure lives in prediction. We guess what comes next, and the reward arrives when we're proved right. Better still is being wrong in a way that makes sense a moment later. But you can only be surprised by something that first taught you what to expect. A chord change undoes you because the song spent three minutes laying the floor it then pulls away. If everything is unexpected, nothing is.

So the record changes, but the frame doesn't. The session is on the last Sunday of every month, needle down, no words. The whole album plays in order, and the gaps between tracks are left alone because they are part of the architecture. It is played properly, with context and care. Those are the things that let a stranger follow you somewhere unfamiliar. The promise isn't that they'll like it. The promise is that it was chosen for a reason.

Sociologists noticed decades ago that cultured taste was shifting. The snob, who likes only the correct thing, was giving way to the omnivore, who will take a little of everything on its merits. It's a generous way to listen, though it has its own trap, because liking everything can become one more way of being the cleverest person at the bar. The club isn't asking anyone to like everything. It's asking them to stay for the whole side.

This is where the New York bar and the club turn out to be the same idea. "Not everything is for everyone" sounds like a closed door, but I don't think it is. The door of that bar was open to anyone. What it asked of you was a kind of willingness: to be in that room on its terms, beside people you would never otherwise sit beside. The club asks the same. It isn't looking for jazz people or electronic people, or people who grew up with the right records on the shelf. It's looking for people who can stand not knowing what comes next. That willingness doesn't belong to any age, income or colour. It turns up everywhere, and along that bar it sat in every shape there was.

So the ones who leave were never lost. They came, they heard something, and they chose, which is more respect than most music is shown now. And the ones who stay aren't there in spite of the unexpected. They're there because of it.

On the last Sunday of the month, the needle will go down again. Nobody in the room will know what it is. For a few seconds, all of them, whoever they are and wherever in the world they're sitting, will be exactly equal.

What is the Tracks & Tales Listening Club?

The Listening Club is a monthly online listening session. One album is played in full on vinyl, with context and care, and presented by Rafi Mercer. It takes place on the last Sunday of every month and is open to listeners anywhere in the world.

Why doesn't the Listening Club announce the album in advance?

The not-knowing is part of the experience. Each session is chosen to be different from the last, and arriving without expectations lets the record meet you on its own terms. Every listener starts from the same place when the needle goes down.

What makes a listening bar different from an ordinary bar?

In a listening bar, the music is the reason for the room rather than its background. The sound system is taken seriously, records are usually played in full or with real care, and conversation is kept low enough that people can actually hear what's playing.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.

Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.