The Seventh Record

On settling the next Listening Club session, and the six that made it harder

By Rafi Mercer

On the second of March 1959, Miles Davis walked into Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York with sketches his band had barely seen. It was a converted church, a tall room built to hold sound. Two sessions later, on the twenty-second of April, Kind of Blue existed. Five tracks. Most of it played the way musicians play when they don't yet know what they're supposed to be playing.

Hours. That's what the most important jazz record ever made asked of the people who made it.

I've been thinking about that room this week, because the record I've chosen for the seventh Listening Club session did not arrive in hours. There was a battle with this one, and I won't pretend otherwise. But I think I've finally settled it. And the reason it was hard says more about the six sessions that came before than about the seventh.

When you start something like the Listening Club, the first choice feels like the biggest. It isn't. The first record has nothing to answer to. It only has to be good, and it only has to be heard properly. The seventh has six records standing behind it, and every one of them has changed what a session can be.

The first was Donald Byrd's Places & Spaces. It was 1975, the Mizell brothers' production, a trumpet player who had come up through hard bop now letting the groove carry him somewhere warmer. That session set the shape we've kept ever since. One album, played in full, on vinyl, start to finish. Between its tracks, other records: Miles Davis among them, music that belonged to the same world. No introduction. The session opens without words. Needle down, and the room fills.

Then Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders' Promises, a single composition in nine movements. The same small figure returns again and again, and each time it arrives it means something slightly different, because the strings around it have moved and Sanders has moved and you have moved. That session taught me that repetition is not the same thing as standing still. It's a hard lesson to give a room. It's harder to give a room that has a phone in its pocket.

Then Kind of Blue itself. The long echo. The danger with a record that famous is that people stop hearing it. Everyone has it. Almost nobody sits with it. What that session asked was simple. Put down what you think you know about it and listen to five tracks made by people who were finding them for the first time.

Then Donny Hathaway's Extension of a Man, his final studio album. It opens with a forty-five-piece orchestra he conducted at twenty-seven and closes with a prayer. It is the heaviest record we've played. Not loud. Heavy. The kind of weight that sits in your chest for a day afterwards.

Then something no one expected: Fred again.. and Brian Eno's Secret Life. Two neighbours, forty-four years apart in age, passing voice notes and phone recordings back and forth through lockdown. It's a quiet record about closeness made at a time when closeness was rationed. After Hathaway, it felt like opening a window.

And most recently, Grace Jones's Nightclubbing. Compass Point, Nassau, 1981. Chris Blackwell putting Sly and Robbie and the rest of that house band around a voice that refused to sit where anyone expected it to. Heat. Edge. Betty Davis in the room beside it. It was the most physical session we've done. People told me they felt it in their shoulders.

Six records. No shared genre and no shared decade. Two of them are barely shared continents. If you laid them out on a table you'd struggle to say what holds them together. Byrd's warmth. Sanders' patience. Davis's restraint. Hathaway's weight. Eno's quiet. Jones's heat.

What holds them together is how they ask to be heard. Each one rewards the whole album, in order, without interruption. Each one changes when other music is placed in the gaps between its tracks. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. The tracks between are the story, really. The album is the spine. What sits between its songs is what lets you feel the spine.

That's also why the seventh was difficult.

Every session leaves a temperature behind it. After the heat of Nightclubbing, you can't simply turn the dial back to cool and call it contrast. That's the obvious move, and the obvious move is almost always wrong. A seventh record has to stand beside the six without repeating any of them. It has to stay true to the session form (vinyl, in full, other music threaded through) while asking the room for something it hasn't been asked before. And it has to work in fifteen countries at once, for people who will each be sitting in a different kind of room at a different hour, joined only by a link in an email and the decision to stay.

Records came close. Some were right for a different month. Some were right for a different version of the Listening Club than the one these six sessions have built. That's the thing I hadn't understood when I started. The sessions are not a list. They are a sequence, and every one changes the next.

I'm not going to tell you what the seventh record is. Not yet.

Peter in Oxford, one of our Founding Members, put it better than I could after an earlier session: "The viewer needs to wait and let the session unfold. There can't be any preconceptions." I've thought about that line more than almost anything anyone has said about the Listening Club. Knowing the record in advance doesn't spoil it. But arriving without a plan for how you'll feel about it changes how it lands. Davis's band walked into that church on East 30th Street without knowing what they were about to play. There's a version of that available to a listener too. Not knowing, at least for a while, is a gift.

So the record stays under the sleeve for now. The five faces will arrive first, the way they always do, and some of you will work it out. That's part of it.

What I can tell you is when. The Listening Club gathers on the last Sunday of the month at 4PM GMT, and the link arrives by email to members on the day. You'll need to be a member to be in the room. If you've been reading these and wondering whether it's for you, the six sessions above are the best answer I can give. Each one is waiting in the archive.

Two days in a converted church in 1959. A battle of rather longer in Yorkshire in 2026.

Needle down. Then we'll see.

What is the seventh Listening Club session?

It's the next monthly gathering of the Tracks & Tales Listening Club: one album played in full on vinyl, with other records threaded between its tracks. The record will be revealed closer to the session. It takes place on the last Sunday of the month at 4PM GMT, and the link is emailed to members on the day.

Can I listen to the earlier Listening Club sessions?

Yes. All six previous sessions, from Donald Byrd's Places & Spaces to Grace Jones's Nightclubbing, are collected in the Listening Club Sessions archive, each with the full running order and the records played between tracks.

Why play a whole album on vinyl instead of a playlist?

Because an album is an argument made in order. Played in full, on a format you can't skip through easily, it asks for the kind of attention streaming rarely gets. The records placed between its tracks don't interrupt that argument. They deepen it.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. If this resonated, subscribe.

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