The Quiet Rebellion Runs Both Ways

Old records, new records, and the people who study one to make the other

By Rafi Mercer

The job came to me because nobody else wanted it. Jazz buying for Virgin Megastores in London, the mid-1990s, a department most of the building walked past on the way to somewhere louder. I took it partly out of curiosity and partly because someone had to. What I didn't understand then, and understand better now, is that a jazz rack is a lesson in time. It doesn't care what year anything was made.

Alphabetical order is the most democratic thing in a record shop. Under C, Coltrane. A few inches along, whoever had been listening to Coltrane hardest that year. The old record and the new one, spine to spine, arguing quietly.

I've been thinking about that rack a lot, because the conversation around music has gone strange. You'll have heard it. Everyone is listening to old music. Young people are buying the records their parents owned. Songs from before the listener was born sit at the top of the streaming charts. The industry even has a word for it. Anything older than eighteen months is catalogue, and catalogue is now most of what gets played. The story writes itself: new music has run out of road, and the only way forward is backwards.

I don't believe it. Not because the numbers are wrong, but because of where I've been spending my ears. Over the last year I've listened to more new music than I have in a long time, deliberately, most days. And what keeps happening is recognition. A drum pattern that has walked in from a 1970s soul record. A chord voicing borrowed, respectfully, from somebody's Blue Note session. A vocal that breathes in the same places an older singer breathed. New music isn't abandoning old music. It's made by people who have studied it with more attention than most of us ever gave it.

The London jazz scene of the last decade is the clearest proof I know. Ezra Collective won the Mercury Prize in 2023, the first jazz act to do it, and underneath their sound you can hear Afrobeat, spiritual jazz and the city's own grime all at once, every layer acknowledged. Shabaka Hutchings spent years as one of the most forceful saxophonists in the country, then put the instrument down to play flutes. That's what you do when you've learned a tradition so thoroughly you're ready to step sideways from it.

Then there's Promises. We gave it a full session at the Listening Club this year. Floating Points, an electronic producer who trained as a neuroscientist. Pharoah Sanders, who had stood beside John Coltrane in the mid-1960s and was eighty when the record came out in 2021. The London Symphony Orchestra, arriving slowly, like weather. One repeating keyboard phrase, a saxophone with nothing left to prove, and a swell of strings that takes its time. It is unmistakably a new record. It could only have been made by people who had spent their lives inside old ones.

So that's one half. The other half is harder to wave away.

Out on the edges there is music that is genuinely new. Not new in the way a fresh record has always been new, but new in how it's made and how it reaches us. Tracks built on a phone and released the same evening. Songs shaped around their first few seconds, because that's how long they get before a thumb moves. Music generated with no musician in the room at all, arriving on streaming services in quantities no buyer could ever audition. Some of it is thrilling. Some of it is just volume.

Here I've had to be honest with myself. Is this the best way? Or is it simply evolution, the same thing that happened when the electric guitar arrived, when the sampler arrived, when somebody first plugged a drum machine into a mixing desk and the purists wrote letters? Music has always evolved. The people objecting have nearly always been wrong in the long run.

I think it's evolution. I also think something else is happening.

I've long believed the format we hold music in changes every twenty-five or thirty years. Shellac, vinyl, tape, disc, file. Each change frightened someone. This one is different in a single respect. It isn't really a format. It's the absence of one. Unlimited access, no edges, nothing to hold. And unlimited access carries a risk the earlier changes didn't: it can turn all music into one thing. A single endless room where every record is the same distance away and nothing has weight.

That's what the old-music story is actually about. Not nostalgia. A gentle rebellion against the system. Someone buying a record, sitting down and letting it play from the first side to the last isn't claiming the past was better. They're saying they'd like to choose the pace. They'd like something with edges.

But here's what the narrative misses. The rebellion doesn't belong to old music. It never did. A young player who has spent three years inside Alice Coltrane's records and then made something of her own is doing exactly what the person lowering a needle onto a 1974 pressing is doing. Both are refusing the feed. Both are paying attention in a culture that rewards them for not bothering. The quiet rebellion isn't old against new. It's attention against flatness, and it runs both ways.

And change is inevitable. I'm not interested in pretending otherwise. Once you open the door to a new way of making and hearing music, you don't get to close it again. Nobody has ever successfully un-invented anything. The sampler stayed. The stream will stay. Whatever comes after the stream will stay too.

So the question isn't whether to let the change in. It's already in. The question is what you carry through the door with you. Listening first, properly, with the volume up and the phone in another room. Knowing the old records well enough to hear them living inside the new ones. Giving the new ones the same courtesy: a full play, no skipping, a second listen before deciding anything.

Do that and the line between old and new stops being a line. It becomes a conversation, and you get a seat in the room.

If I were still buying for that department, I'd have one small problem with Promises. Where does it go? Under F, for the producer. Under S, for the saxophonist who had stood next to Coltrane. The rack would make me choose.

The record doesn't.

Is most new music just old music reworked?

Not reworked so much as studied. Most musicians learn by listening deeply to what came before, and those influences surface in rhythm, harmony and phrasing. The best new records acknowledge that inheritance and then do something the originals couldn't.

What is Promises by Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders?

A 2021 album recorded by the electronic producer Floating Points, the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It's a single continuous piece in nine movements, built around one repeating keyboard phrase, and it's one of the clearest examples of a modern record shaped by a lifetime of older music.

What is the Tracks & Tales Listening Club?

A monthly online session, held on the last Sunday of every month and open to members anywhere in the world. Each session plays one album on vinyl, in full, start to finish, with host notes to guide the listening.

If this found you at the right moment, subscribe and the next one will find you too.

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