Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ray Brown

Ray Brown’s line lands like a bassist’s walking line: simple on the surface, quietly radical underneath. He’s describing taste as a living organism, not a trophy shelf. The point isn’t that he gets bored easily; it’s that devotion in music doesn’t have to mean permanence. Loving a song “for a couple of months” reframes infatuation as a valid, even necessary, mode of listening. In jazz culture especially, where standards get replayed until they harden into “repertoire,” Brown is defending the listener’s right to move on.

The subtext is craft. A working musician hears differently than a fan: a song becomes a site to study phrasing, harmony, groove, the way time sits in the pocket. You can fall in love with a tune because it’s teaching you something, then leave once you’ve absorbed its lesson. That’s not fickleness; it’s practice.

Then comes the twist: returning to an old song “that I haven’t heard for a long time.” Nostalgia here isn’t sentimental. It’s a stress test. When you come back, you’re not the same person, and the song isn’t either - not because the recording changed, but because your ears did. Brown, who made his name anchoring bands with relentless steadiness, gives himself permission to be changeable. It’s an ethos for a culture that fetishizes “classics”: the healthiest relationship to art is cyclical, not curatorial.