Time & Perspective Quote by John Abercrombie

Perfection here isn’t a virtue so much as a workflow, and Abercrombie knows exactly how loaded that is. In a few brisk sentences he maps a fault line in modern music-making: the studio as a place where performance stops being something you risk in real time and becomes something you assemble. “Eight bars of this and six bars of that” has the blunt, almost mechanical sound of editing-room talk, not romantic artistry. It’s not an insult, but it’s not neutral either. The subtext is that “perfection” is often a product of splicing, not transcendence.

Invoking Glenn Gould sharpens the point. Gould is the patron saint of the controlled recording: a pianist who openly preferred the studio to the stage and treated tape like an instrument. Abercrombie’s reference lands as both admiration and a raised eyebrow. Gould’s “perfect versions” are a fascinating ambition, but they also hint at a trade-off: when you can redo a phrase forever, you can start chasing an ideal that no human body could reliably deliver in a single pass.

Coming from a jazz guitarist, the context matters. Jazz culture prizes the unrepeatable moment, the tiny imperfections that prove you were there and making choices under pressure. Abercrombie isn’t romanticizing sloppiness; he’s defending a different kind of truth. His intent is to name how classical recording aesthetics can reshape our expectations - training listeners to hear music less as an event and more as a polished artifact, where “great” quietly becomes synonymous with “edited.”