Brian Eno’s long been one of my favorite musicians in any genre—I’m listening to his 1993 album Neroli as I write this—so I was happy to see Philip Sherburne’s lengthy interview with him over at Pitchfork. “Whether talking art or politics or philosophy,” Sherburne writes, “everything in the world seems suddenly much more interesting in Brian Eno’s company.”
And, I imagine, much more profound. Case in point: “[M]odern jazz wouldn’t have existed without recording, because to make improvisations sound sensible, you need to hear them again and again, so that all those little details that sound a bit random at first start to fit. You anticipate them and they seem right after a while.”
I’ve been listening to jazz for 35 years. And that had never once occurred to me.