For hundreds of thousands of years, the human musical experience was quite straightforward: if you wanted to listen to music, you needed someone to perform it for you. Then in 1877, Edison invented the phonograph and forever upended that requirement: music could now be recorded in advance, then replayed whenever. Over time, this recording process grew so elaborate that the final sounds delivered by the audio engineers were often well beyond anything the band ever produced contemporaneously. Of course, humans will always demand in-person concerts, so if you're a group that made it big based on an elaborate studio setup, how can you tour? Well, inevitably you hack something together and hope to pack the seats. And if you're really enterprising, you'll record some of those live shows too,¹ and in so doing you will have created a dilemma all music lovers today face: live or studio albums?²

This week's album, 8:30, puts that question to us directly. We first heard Weather Report in the studio³ on their monumental album, Heavy Weather; three of those eight tracks appear as part of 8:30's epic 80-minute live set. So which is the superior experience? As someone helplessly Gould-pilled, I hew towards the studio. Even though this is a quite faithful live album, studio recordings in general offer a level of polish and detail that simply can't be equalled in a single take—what sends shivers down my spine is not the canned cheers of a faceless crowd, but rather, e.g., the sublime soloing of Zawinul near the end of "A Remark You Made" (a solo that comes through much more cleanly in the studio!). Of course, that's not to say live albums are intrinsically worse: at their best, they can capture intimate, conversational moments between performer and audience that have no studio equivalent; Jaco Pastorius illustrates that perfectly here with "Slang" (and Wayne Shorter isn't far behind with "Thanks for the Memory"). They can also serve as pseudo-"Best of" albums, samplers of an artist's wider oeuvre—just as the first half of 8:30 does, with many inclusions from Weather Report's earlier hits. And finally, the spontaneity of live performance sometimes produces wonderfully weird things that, while unpolished, ought to be preserved all the same (see the second half of 8:30, which features alien babble, a children's choir, and a train running through the stage).

So all that to say: live albums aren't worse in general; they simply aren't my preference. At first, I turned my nose up at 8:30, finding it to be a worse version of Heavy Weather with other miscellaneous goodies thrown in. But with the benefit of repeated listens, I've come to appreciate it as 80 minutes of often euphoric, frequently conversational, and always captivating jazz fusion.

Such milquetoast takes make for poor engagement bait, however. So instead of closing there, allow me to present my Universal Theory of Studio Versus Live Albums, which will predict every other part of your personality with 100% accuracy based simply on your album preference:

Favourite track: Badia/Boogie Woogie Waltz Medley