BEING THERE

I REMEMBER THE ONLY TIME I EVER SAW CHET BAKER. IT WAS AT PARNELL’S, A JAZZ CLUB IN PIONEER SQUARE IN SEATTLE, LONG SINCE DEFUNCT. IT WAS A FEW YEARS BEFORE BAKER DIED UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES, IN AMSTERDAM IN 1988, AFTER A LIFE OF CREATIVITY, NOTORIOUS DISSIPATION, AND ADDICTION.

Emaciated, with a caved-in face, he already looked near death. He played like an angel. I remember something that happened to me toward the end of the night. Sometimes last sets in jazz clubs, when the crowd has thinned, seem to exist outside of time. There came a moment when, almost alone with Baker’s soft trumpet glow, in the presence of a lyricism ethereal as mist, I suddenly felt like I had been taken out of my body. It was a feeling of surpassing peacefulness. I had been released from the bondage of self. This instance of spiritual liberation came at the hands of a junkie, but the only drug involved was music.

I have often thought that such moments made me a music collector and an audiophile. I wanted to be able to repeat that experience, and others like it. I wanted to be able to choose the sensation of being there. For me, and I suspect for many readers of this magazine, that desire leads to the acquisition of better and better playback equipment and more and more recorded music. It also leads to the realization that recorded music varies enormously in its sonic quality and character, and therefore in its ability to provide the illusion of being there.

This is a story about one audiophile’s pursuit. The subject is large. I could focus on gear, talk about my first, worst, best-loved music system—it was a KLH Model Eleven—and the many increasingly expensive systems I have owned since. I could discuss my permanent, ongoing search for