Shirley Horn: “You Won’t Forget Me” w/ Miles Davis on tpt (1990)
Gradually, by painful steps, vinyl was superseded. CDs appeared, I assume because they were less costly to produce or perhaps easier to keep intact, but once you scratched a CD, it was unplayable, where for the most part, scratches on vinyl only meant surface static. People moved to tape decks –eight-track was the gold standard– but I never did. I had enough money invested in LPs and stereo equipment that I stayed loyal to vinyl until it became untenable. I don’t know how many long play records I owned but two years ago when we moved east, I shipped seven boxes to our son who still has a record player.
Eventually, I switched to CDs for playing in the house, tape cassettes for car and Boom box. Tape cassettes were not a convenient technology. The tape stretched and broke. It would get snarled in the player. Esthetically, too, they were a disaster –no space for serious graphics and little in the way of liner notes. The dust jacket for a 12-inch vinyl recording could be a work of art. I loved reading the liner notes on new artists and pieces. Pre-Google and Wikipedia, it was an easy way to learn about new music.
For a spell, if you wanted to play music in your car, cassettes were the only way to go. 
The Walkman, a portable CD player, came along but it didn’t fill the bill. I used one once or twice and gave it away. It was too sensitive to movement: jiggle it and what you got was garbage. I didn’t buy many tape cassettes –just a few for the car. I remember two: a live performance by Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and B. B. King, and alto sax player Black Arthur Blythe playing Thelonious Monk tunes. I picked up the Blythe album on CD later on but I never bothered replacing the Bland-King album because the fidelity was so low. Besides, though I love Bobby Bland, B. B. King has never really turned me on. I know he’s good, but …
At one time, we owned two –or was it three?- Boom boxes. They were triple threats: they could be used as radio, CD player or tape cassette player. We still have one. Esther uses it to listen to music away from the computer.
iPods, I did use. I used to have an iPod dock in the kitchen, next to the coffee maker, on which I would listen to music while I prepared meals. Now I have a speaker remote linked to my computer and my iTunes folder by wi fi but because it’s at the transmission limit for wi fi, it works only intermittently.
You can track changes in recording technology by looking at your car. For years, cars came equipped with tape decks. Then CD players appeared and for a short while, a car might have both. It’s CDs only now. But even that’s disappearing. Now people pull music off the cloud or from their iPhones. When we lease a new car two years from now, I don’t expect it to have a CD player. As to Walkmen and iPods, they have effectively vanished –they’re obsolescent technology.
I still buy CDs. I upload them into my iTunes folder on my computer. There are 26,567 songs currently on file there, ninety days worth of playing, 245.59 gigabytes of data.
If I can’t play CDs in my car in the future, I’ll have to find a new way to gain access to the music I want to play, not through some radio jockey. But that’s a problem for two years from now, not now.
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The first CD I bought was the Oscar Peterson trio, Live from Chicago. The second was Chet Baker Sings. The third was Shirley Horn, Miles playing on the title cut, You Won’t Forget Me.
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There will come a day, probably fairly soon, when records will be gone, or an expensive minority taste. People will pay for the right to stream music they like.
If I’m around then, I’ll probably regret it. I like holding the artifact on which the music is recorded and delivered –looking at it, holding it, admiring the cover art and photos in the CD booklet, reading the liner notes.
I like having something physical in my hands, not just a wisp of sound.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, “She’s Putting Something in My Food”
MUSIC & ME 