Five Things Before the Parcels
Tracks & Tales is now the whole day, not the edges of it. Here is what I've promised myself, and why I stopped at five.
By Rafi Mercer
The sleeve is red. On a grey Harrogate morning it is the brightest thing in the room, propped against the shelf while side A turns. The piano has already arrived. It didn't introduce itself. It came in mid-stride on "It Could Happen to You," as though the trio had been playing for an hour and someone had only just thought to open the door.
Ryo Fukui recorded Scenery at Yamaha Hall in Sapporo in 1976. He was twenty-eight. He had first sat down at a piano at twenty-two, and he taught himself. His brother Yoshinori was on drums and Satoshi Denpo was on bass. There are six tracks: four standards that everyone has played, and two of Fukui's own, "Early Summer" and the title track that closes the record. This was the mid-seventies, when the jazz kissa were at their height across Japan, and rooms full of strangers sat in silence to hear imported records played properly. Trio Records put Scenery out, and Japan mostly let it settle. It wasn't alone in that. Hiroshi Suzuki's Cat had arrived the year before with the same quiet, and it waited too.
What strikes you first is the groove. Denpo's bass walks with real weight, the kind you feel in the floorboards before you hear it, and the drums sit just behind him, unhurried. Over that, Fukui's right hand runs bright and quick while his left keeps time with a firmness that never turns heavy. It swings without showing off. On "Willow Weep for Me" he slows enough that you can hear the room between the notes. Then "Autumn Leaves" comes in with a fresh urgency, as if the band had remembered something it needed to say before the tape ran out.
Fukui didn't chase the record afterwards. He made one more album the following year, then spent the next eighteen years playing live before he recorded again. In 1995 he and his wife Yasuko opened their own jazz club in Sapporo and called it Slowboat. He played there for most of the rest of his life. I know what a room like that can do. I've sat in a few, from the 100 Club on Oxford Street to Bar Martha in Tokyo, and each one gave me space to listen. Fukui died in 2016. The wider world found Scenery properly only after that, mostly through people passing it from one screen to another, and that red sleeve has since turned up on shelves a very long way from Hokkaido. A man plays in his own room, night after night, and the record waits.
My first editorial piece for Tracks & Tales went up on 23 August 2025, and I've written most days since. Today is different in one respect, and it's a large one. Tracks & Tales is now my job. It's no longer the thing I fit around something else, or the three hours before the day starts. It is the day.
That's a lot of open space, and open space needs some shape. So I've made myself a few promises about how to build this differently, and I've capped them at five. That isn't a framework. It's self-knowledge. Past five, I start forgetting what I agreed with myself, and then I start renegotiating. I didn't read or write until my mid-teens, so I learnt to carry things in my ears long before I could put them on paper. Five is what I can carry.
The first, and the one at the very top, is the album. Every day starts with one record, played whole, with no skips, no jumps and no changing my mind halfway through side A. I do the research first, reading around, following a name or a label or a session player until something sounds right. Then I listen properly, and then I make a call on it. I learnt that discipline buying jazz for Virgin in London in the nineties. The call was never really about whether I liked a record. It was whether the record earned its place on the shelf. That still seems to me the right question to ask.
The second is to put that record on social media. I'm not doing it for reach. I've watched enough numbers in my working life to know what chasing them does to a person. My channels are meant to work as a shelf, a visible run of spines, the kind I've been building here for a while, that anyone can stop in front of, pull something out and take it home. Social media probably wasn't built for that. Part of what I'm doing here is anti-social, though: slowing down and listening with intent, in the one place designed to stop you doing either. A gentle rebellion against the system, done one sleeve at a time.
The third is to write the record up. Not a long essay, but some structured thoughts on what the record is, where it came from, and why it matters now. It's the buyer's note, made public, and it goes on the Listening Shelf with the rest.
The fourth is the Daily, which is this. Now that I have the time, I'll try to make it actually daily. It's where the personal goes: whatever surfaces while I build Tracks & Tales, the small decisions, the odd memory, the things I notice. On some days it may simply hand me instructions, like a note left on the kitchen table by a version of me who was thinking more clearly the night before. Today's is partly that.
The fifth is the one I'll be tempted to skip, which is exactly why it made the list. Once the first four are done, I stop. I listen, I read, and I take a moment with what I've made before rushing on to the next thing. Listen, then read, then look. That has always been the order of things for me, and a working day deserves the same order.
The hope underneath all five is a quiet one. Given time, people may find me, find the work, and join in, in whatever way suits them. Some will read. Some will come to the Listening Club. Some will just pull one record off the shelf and never write to say so, and that counts too.
Then there's the part that doesn't make the five, because it isn't a promise. It's simply the post. The book orders that came in overnight get packed and shipped. Any messages from the community get answered. These aren't afterthoughts. They come after the listening because the listening is what makes them worth doing.
Side B is on now. "Autumn Leaves" has given way to "Scenery," and Fukui's own tune is gentler than the standards before it. The groove is still there underneath, but there's more air above it, and the left hand is lighter. I play a little myself, badly, and I listen to this record knowing exactly how far off I am. Fukui started at twenty-two, which most people would call late. I'm fifty. I've decided to take that arithmetic as encouragement rather than a verdict.
The title track runs out and the needle lifts. The red sleeve goes back on the shelf. There are parcels on the table.
Who was Ryo Fukui, and why is Scenery so highly regarded?
Ryo Fukui was a self-taught jazz pianist from Hokkaido who recorded Scenery, his debut, in Sapporo in 1976 with his brother Yoshinori Fukui on drums and Satoshi Denpo on bass. Little known outside Japan during his lifetime, the record has since become one of the most cherished Japanese jazz albums, admired for its swing, its touch, and the confidence of a pianist only a few years into playing.
Why listen to an album all the way through without skipping?
Albums are usually sequenced on purpose. The order of the tracks, the pause between sides and the way a record builds and settles are all part of how it's meant to be heard. Listening start to finish, without changing your mind, gives the music the attention it was made for, and it trains the kind of patience that listening bars are built around.
What is The Listening Club?
The Listening Club is the Tracks & Tales monthly session. On the last Sunday of every month, members gather online, wherever they are, to hear one album on vinyl in full, with notes on what to listen for. It's a shared hour of slow listening, held around the world at the same time.
If the record is still turning where you are, subscribe and the next one will find you tomorrow.
Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.
