Ted Gioia How to Listen to Jazz Review
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"As you develop your listening skills, [answer this question]: Are the musicians playing the notes with precision, nearly every bit if they are reading music from some Ideal ideal score, or are they handling them roughly, torturing them to make them speak the truth?"
I see [Billie Vacation] more as a diagnostician of the soul, whose music reaches into those vulnerabilities and emotional risks that many of united states of america avoid or actively repress.
Ted Gioia, How To Listen to Jazz
It is somewhere between hither and there that one can grasp the essence of music listening. Music listening is a contact sport that can take you lot to rewarding and often uncomfortable places. Ted Gioia encourages us to go forth mindfully. It is how all art is to exist handled.
How to Listen to Jazz
Ted Gioia
272 Pages
ISBN: # 978-0465060894805706
Basic Books
2016
Music critic and historian, Ted Gioia's How to Listen to Jazz is non the outset in the jazz primer genre. In 1966, esteemed jazz writer Martin Williams published Where'southward The Melody: A Listener's Introduction to Jazz (Pantheon Books). Reading it, 50 years later on, in concert with Gioia'due south fine updating, is both illuminating and delightful. Gioia and Williams have much in common and the half century between their corresponding books is glaringly and necessarily apparent. It is worth noting that when Williams published his book, Louis Armstrong , Duke Ellington , Count Basie , Miles Davis , John Coltrane , and Ornette Coleman were all living. Mindful of this, Gioia calibrates his focus more sharply when considering the past while opening his interpretive aperture on the future of jazz.
How to Heed to Jazz is written with the same economy Gioia used in his previous books, including his four essential histories: West Declension Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960 (Oxford Academy Press, 1992), The History of Jazz The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press,1997), Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (West.West. Norton & Co., 2009) and The Nascence (And the Death) of the Cool (Speck Printing, 2009). Gioia is masterful at squeezing every unneeded adverb and describing word until they squeal and run away. His writing is academic without being pedantic and always focused to the point.
In this slim, 250-page primer, Gioia first addresses that most elusive of jazz terms, swing which he describes as a synergistic pulse in the music that reveals a certain threshold empathy reached by ring members. Farther he posits that swing may best exist heard or understood past listening to its lack in a operation compared to master performances. Gioia's view overlaps my own, more physics-based estimation. In Newtonian Mechanics momentum is defined as the mathematical production of mass and velocity. Velocity may be easily plenty understood as tempo, while mass tin be seen as the interaction of several subatomic particles, including the recently discovered Higgs Boson, the particle that imparts mass to its higher constituent. Swing is the Higgs Boson of jazz.
Gioia begins to build his presentation from the sub-atomic signal of swing into its requisite higher orders. He first breaks down jazz performance, in terms of tone and colour, into: phrasing, Pitch and timbre, dynamics, personality, and spontaneity, with lengthy descriptions of each. Adjacent, the author addresses the construction of jazz with examples of the blues, ragtime, and jazz standard (32-bar) structures. These descriptions provide the bones tools to assist the listener ameliorate understand what he or she is hearing.
Next, Gioia hits his celebrated pace with a tightly-crafted presentation of the origins of jazz, followed past its evolution to the present mean solar day. He is thoughtful and brief in his recommendations of what to listen to from each milestone in jazz history. Earlier leaving the past, Gioia gives brief descriptions of the well-nigh important jazz artists in the fine art'south innovation and development. These include (and there are no surprises): Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins , Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday , Charlie Parker , Thelonious Monk , Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman . After 30 years of listening, who am I to argue. If pressed for the highpoints, I would cite this aforementioned, august grouping.
The author devotes much needed attention to jazz as it is performed today citing globalization (no longer just an American art form), hybridization (each culture adds its own spin), professionalization (the academy looms large), and rejuvenation (there will e'er be those who look backward and forward) as being the catalysts sending the music forth into its certain, rich hereafter. And, co-ordinate to the author, this future is bright.
Gioia concludes his discussion with how he approaches, ..."every new tape, every operation, with optimism and (borrowing the words of lyricist Sammy Cahn) high hopes...Perhaps this sounds naïve, the breathless enthusiasm of a fan, non the sober reflections of a future critic and music historian, but I still can't imagine budgeted jazz any other way." This very thing is what 25 years of music writing has washed for me, only universally. I can never wait to see what will happen next: what new music I will hear, new books I will read, new people I will meet. I love it when I am surprised and delighted (no simple feeling) at something new I learn or experience. And I always greet this new with the wonder of a kid, built low to the basis, discovering something new and fascinating. In that, I suppose St. Matthew (and Ted Gioia) to exist correct in proverb, "unless you are converted and become like children, you lot will not enter the kingdom of heaven." The "kingdom of sky" beingness enlightenment, personal growth, and the experiencing of what is good.
Source: https://www.allaboutjazz.com/how-to-listen-to-jazz-by-ted-gioia-ted-gioia-by-c-michael-bailey
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