Recordame

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! Today, I'm playing a jazz song called "Recordame." This song, which was inspired by Latin music, was actually written by the saxophonist Joe Henderson when he was only 15. His song title came from the Spanish word "recuerdame," which means "remember me." That got me thinking about how recordings "remember" songs for us. I hope you like listening to it!


Listen to the song here
(Can't see an audio player? It might not work if you're viewing this in an email client. If you are on teawithliya.blogspot.ca, you may need to try a different browser.)



Let's say it's 1605, or some time long before you could record songs, let alone store them in files on computers. You've been scribbling on a piece of paper, about to finish turning the melody you thought of several days ago into a brand new song. When you find a day to perform the song, your audience likes it so much that they start finding people to tell about the song. Nowadays, you could just find an obscure enough place to put a phone that no one would warn you against bringing recording devices, press a button, and have a sample of the song to take home... but, it's 1605. 

Your audience, instead of discreetly deriving a digital documentation of your music, will have to find ways to describe the song you just played. A listener who is also a musician even talks about the detailed sixteenth-note lines you played. The people who have just heard about your song agree to ask you for another performance.

However, there's one problem - the piece of paper you wrote your song on is gone! You try to justify your decision to not make a backup copy beforehand. After all, that would be another candle to light on another dark night, which you would spend writing down the notes again and emptying another container of ink. Chances are you would destroy another cell in your strained eyes, too. 

Image by Hawksky from Pixabay

Fortunately, you've looked at that piece of paper for long enough to remember some of what was on it. You've practiced the song, too, so you try to rewrite some of the notes. There are a few sections that you can't remember, so you fill in the blanks with something else.

The musician who listened to your song the first time comes back for your next performance, but they notice that something's changed. That piece of the song that the listener pointed out is gone. Now, instead of improvising your way out of a mistake you made while playing the song, you have to improvise your way out of the questions that the listener is asking.

If you had had a recording of the song, you and the original listener would have had proof of what the song sounded like. Without that or the piece of paper, the contents of the song are simply stored in a person's memory.

The same thing would happen to songs that would be sung by groups of people that didn't write them down, since everyone had heard the song, or there wasn't a system of notation for them to use. The song would simply be passed from one person to another, and it might change as years passed. When there isn't a recording, your brain is the recording.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

But now, things have changed. If you're playing an instrument and you think of a song idea, you might even record it before you write it down. When you hear about a new song, what do you do? Look up a recording, of course! The ability to record the song also sets a standard for how the song should be played, since there's a concrete definition of that song.

If it really was 1605, you wouldn't be listening to this song right now. You'd be walking to a building where you'd listen to me playing it. But now that I have recordings, neither you nor I have to depend on our memories to be able to "recordame."

Keep filling your teacup with music!
~Liya