How to Listen to Jazz – Ted Gioia

Basic Books | Music, Culture

There is a particular kind of book that does not simply describe its subject but transforms your relationship to it. Ted Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz is that kind of book. Read it on a Tuesday evening and by Wednesday morning you will hear music differently… more attentively, more historically, more alive to what is actually happening in the space between the notes.

Gioia’s premise is generous rather than gatekeeping. He is not interested in telling you what jazz is correct or which recordings you must own. He is interested in something more fundamental: what is actually happening when a jazz musician plays, and how do you train your ear to follow it? What is improvisation, really? What is swing? What does it mean for a musician to have a voice?

The book moves through the essential elements, rhythm, melody, harmony, structure, with the clarity of a born teacher. Gioia has written about jazz for decades and has the rare gift of someone who knows a subject so thoroughly that he can explain it without condescension. He writes about Miles Davis and John Coltrane, about the blues and bebop, about why jazz is fundamentally a conversation between musicians and why that conversation rewards a listener who knows how to follow it.

What makes this a Slow Pleasure read is its insistence on attentiveness. Jazz, Gioia argues, cannot be heard properly as background music. It requires presence, the same quality of attention that a great meal or a beautiful book demands. Put on a record. Sit down. Listen.

How to Listen to Jazz is, in the end, a book about how to pay attention. Which is, perhaps, what all the best books are about.