How to Listen to Jazz; a Q&A

In How to Listen to Jazz, Ted Gioia has tasked himself with writing a book that asks people to drop their musical prejudices and open up their ears. The challenge in writing a book like is to find a middle path between, as Gioia says, "those who pretend that music is objective science and those who insist it is "subjective whimsy…" For my money, he has succeeded; talking about the nuts and bolts of melody, harmony and rhythm in a clear, comprehensible, knowing way, while finding myriad ways to communicate the joy ("jouissance") in the music.

Ted was kind enough to respond to some questions I sent him.

One of the foundations of the book is that there are standards that are inherent in the music. Talk about the process of teasing these out.

If you want to grasp the dangers of imposing external standards on the music, just look at the long, sad history of warring camps in the jazz world. In the 1940s, traditional jazz musicians complained about bop because it didn’t sound like Louis Armstrong.  And modernists dismissed traditionalists who didn’t know the bop licks. A few years later, a similar battle erupted over the merits of West Coast jazz versus East Coast jazz. This was followed by protracted controversies over free jazz, fusion, the new traditionalists of the 1980s, etc.—indeed almost every new style led to diatribes and confrontations, and a strange situation in which listeners were told they had to choose between the combatants.

Finally, the jazz wars seem to have ended. Okay, we have a few skirmishes on the border—I saw an exchange of fire a few days ago on the Kamasi Washington front—but this is all child’s play compared with the full-scale battles of days gone by. And I will be the first to celebrate the cessation of hostilities. Let’s enjoy the peace dividend.

But there’s a larger lesson at stake here. Different genres and subgenres bring with them their own standards, and make different demands on us. My enjoyment of the music—and my understanding of it—have been enhanced by trying to live up to these demands.  Our response to the music comes with a responsibility—two words that derive from the same etymological root. And part of that responsibility is to enter into the distinctive worldview and templates that come embedded into the music.

Why was it important for you to bring in your own experience in learning how to play this music?

This book is more autobiographical than anything I’ve ever written. I felt that the best way to teach readers how to listen to jazz is to share the path by which I learned to listen deeply to the music. Between the ages of 15 and 25, I spent around 10,000 hours at the piano, and many more hours studying the performances of the best musicians I could find, in person or on record. My subsequent work as a music critic and historian is built on this foundation.

What did I learn from that apprenticeship? Sad to say, I learned to appreciate the greatness of the masters through my own mistakes, and through all the slow, hard work I put into gaining fluency with the basic building blocks of the music. I struggled and fought my way through every aspect of jazz, from how to start and end a phrase to how to how to create rhythmic misdirection and float over the beat. I really didn’t possess a mature grasp of jazz until I was in my late twenties and, in retrospect, I’ve often wished I had been a more precocious learner, or had had access to skilled teachers. I really taught myself, and a day at a time. It’s no exaggeration to say that I had to invent my own pedagogy. But this slow path brought some advantages—I developed analytical and methodological tools that have proven invaluable in helping me conceptualize and articulate what’s going on in the music. I draw on these hard-won learnings in How to Listen to Jazz, and I feel that I have dealt with a number of key issues in a way that hasn’t been done in other books on the subject. 

Can you flesh out this quote a bit: "We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists [your emphasis] our subjectivity."

Some people will tell you that our responses to music are purely subjective. But everything I’ve learned about music runs counter to that claim. My previous book on love songs describes in great specificity quasi-universal qualities in music that cut across cultural and individual differences. The same is true in my books on work songs and healing music. Music critics and historians ignore these factors at their own risk. They undermine their work to the extent that they believe they can impose their whims or ideologies on the music. 

In the course of reading jazz and blues history, I've never encountered your interesting points that statistics used to track diseases can also tell us about the spread of jazz and that looking at African-American farming plots can help trace the genesis of the blues. Why do you suppose more of this cross-discipline work hasn't been done-or have I simply missed it?

I learned these analytical techniques through sheer happenstance. In my early twenties I studied the diffusion of innovations at Stanford Business School. My professors had no intention of teaching me skills I could use in writing music history books, but I later saw how these predictive models could answer key questions in my research into early blues or traditional love songs.

By the way, my readers would probably be surprised by how much my analysis of music has been enhanced by studying microeconomics, game theory, statistics, business strategy and other issues outside the typical purview of music critics. This is true of both my writings on music history but also my writings and talks on the current music industry.

I love that you call those who deconstruct and recombine musical memes "the gene splicers of jazz." Why did you choose that metaphor rather than alluding to the idea of "influences"?

The notion of influence tends to promote linear and static thinking. But when we apply the metaphor of DNA and genetics to our discussions of musical evolution, we can grasp the dynamic and complex nature of these processes with more insight.

Take for example, saxophonist Lester Young. A static lineage model would tell you that he was a major influence on Stan Getz and a handful of other postwar saxophonists. End of story. But a better way of understanding his impact is to look at how his expansion of a ‘cool’ vocabulary, with its emphasis on melodicism and understatement, entered into the global music DNA—and could be adapted by anyone seeking a certain kind of aesthetic experience. Once you view Lester Young in that way, you start hearing how he shaped movie soundtracks, bossa nova, pop music, a cappella vocal arrangements, even classical works such as John Adams’ recent sax concerto. You understand Young better by viewing his innovations—which were essentially genetic mutations in the sphere of music—in this wider context.

You have a definite brief against "global entertainment corporations." Tell us why and what you think might be done to ameliorate their negative influence.

I listened to more than one thousand new releases last year, and I am on track to do the same this year. I cast a very wide net in my listening—I check out all music genres, and though I pay attention to highly-promoted commercial releases from the major labels, I also listen closely to little-known projects from small indie labels and self-produced albums.

This is a large investment of time, but it gives me valuable insights into the priorities of the global entertainment corporations. I can see what they are choosing to promote, and compare it against the projects they turn down or ignore.

And what do I learn from this? My conclusions are depressing ones. First let me share the good news: there is more outstanding music recorded today than at any point in history. But here’s the bad news: it’s harder to find than ever before. The big entertainment corporations are doing a terrible job of scouting talent, nurturing it, and giving it a platform to reach a large audience. There’s a crisis in the music business. And this isn’t just my personal opinion—just look at sales figures and financial statements, or talk to the talented musicians who are trying to build careers in this environment. 

Why are labels making such bad decisions? We can speculate on the causes. I would love to give an ear test to folks making decisions at the major labels. How skilled are they at actually hearing what’s happening on a recording, and grasping what the musicians are doing? And then I’d like to give them a polygraph test to see which is more important to them, promoting artistry or making money? And, then, I’d like to have a test to gauge their degree of commitment to musical values, and their courage in pushing against the groupthink and conformity of the huge corporations that employ them. Finally, I would like to compare these results against those of the visionary label execs from today and the past—people like John Hammond or Manfred Eicher or George Martin. I have a hunch we would find some answers to our questions, no?

Do you have a specific idea who the audience will be for this book?  Do you hope it will work its way into the educational market?

I’ve been blessed with great readers. I hear from them all the time—especially in the last few years, with the rise of social media and worldwide connectivity. And I learn from them too.

Many of my readers are musicians, some of them absolute masters of their instruments. Others played in bands in the past and have transitioned to other careers, yet still have big ears and trained sensibilities. Some have never had musical training, but care deeply about the music. This very smart audience keeps me honest. I have them in mind while I write, and that helps me avoid glib and facile treatment of the subjects at hand.

I try to write in such a way that every one of these readers is served by the book. My goal with How to Listen to Jazz was a simple one, but also challenging: I wanted to provide an entry point into jazz for newcomers, but do it in such a way that even a very knowledgeable fan would find something useful or insightful on every page. I’ll leave it to others to judge whether I live up to that goal.

This reader says he does.

Talking "Love Songs" with Author Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a prolific writer and a good one. Readers of this blog probably know him through his books and articles about jazz, but Mr. Gioia is a polymath and writes on a wide range of subjects. 

In this Q&A, he talks about his recently released book, Love Songs: The Hidden History.  I'm confident that what he says will inspire many of you to pick up a copy of this fascinating book.

SP: In your introduction, you link the word “cantare” and the word “incantation.” As a reader, I had the sense that your search is not just for a hidden history, but for a hidden linkage between the song and the power of the song.

TG: As a music writer, I am forced to deal with songs as a product of the entertainment industry. But for many years, I’ve been dissatisfied with this narrow way of viewing music. In one of my favorite passages, Aristotle describes the various capabilities of song. He mentions that it refreshes us, strengthens our soul, builds our characters, enlivens the toils of everyday life, and then he mentions—almost as an afterthought—that it also provides entertainment. Nowadays society has forgotten everything except that last item on his list. As a result, our musical culture is weak and shallow.

I would like to use my work as a music historian to call attention to the power of song in transforming and enchanting our lives. Music is more than a diversion or entertainment, it is also a change agent, with more power than we realize. We all feel this almost instinctively, yet the history of music, as it is commonly told, tends to ignore these deeper powers of song.

In the 1990s, I began work on an alternative way of telling the history of music—developing a theory and practice that would focus attention on these deeper capabilities of song. I published the first results of this research almost a decade ago, in two volumes called Work Songs and Healing Songs. But I promised at the time to follow up with a book on the history of the love song. This has proven to be a difficult endeavor, since most of our songs are about love. But completing this project was essential to my goal of charting this hidden, alternative history of music. It is with some relief that I finally finished my research, and was able to publish Love Songs: The Hidden History. I’ve been writing about music for more than thirty years, but this has been the most challenging project I’ve ever attempted.

SP: I would say that this phrase from your book is at the core of your approach to the love song: “We feel compelled to sing about love but are deeply embarrassed by this compulsion. We need the outsider to extricate us from our shame. That’s just as true today as two thousand years ago” (p.201). What did you find that supported this idea?

TG: The historical records are fairly clear on this account. Among the ancient Romans, love songs were considered shameful and unmanly. But the outsider—in this instance, the slave entertainer—was allowed to perform them. In an uncanny echoing of this process, innovations in love songs in the United States also came from the marginalized, namely the African-American population. And the very same thing happened in the medieval era, when female slave singers from the Islamic world anticipated the troubadour revolution. 

In fact, at almost every stage in history, we have turned to outsiders—usually from the poorest classes of society—to teach us new ways of singing about love song. In the 1960s, it was lads from Liverpool. In the 1980s, it was rappers in the inner city. Who knows where the next breakthrough in love songs will come from? But I am confident that it won’t be invented by the ruling class or social elites. 

We need the outsider, because our love lives are always circumscribed by tradition, ritual and strict moral injunctions. A new way of singing about love almost always involves breaking the rules and regulations that control our romantic yearnings. The outsider, who by definition does not follow the rules, is typically the best person to show us how this is done. 

SP: We’re used to thinking of music as a cultural adornment, not something that shapes history. Yet, you believe the suppression of love songs stems from the threat they posed to those in power. Can you expand on this?

TG: Most people see the love song as soft and sentimental. It is considered wimpy music. Even I thought this was true before I embarked upon the research for my book. 

At first I was puzzled when I encountered all the examples of repression and social unrest caused by love songs. Why would lovey-dovey music create such consternation, and sometimes even lead to bloodshed? I only gradually realized that the love song has served throughout history as a force for expanding personal autonomy, individual freedom and human rights.

When we think of basic liberties we tend to think of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other elements in the Bill of Rights. But what about freedom to control our own love life? This has never been taken for granted in society. The younger generation has always had to battle with parents, church leaders and patriarchal institutions in order to achieve freedom of romance. The love song has inevitably been a vehicle in this battle. That is why it has been feared by parents and other authority figures, but embraced by the young and disenfranchised. 


By the way, my research shows the love song always wins in the end. It is more powerful than kings and legal bodies. It represents a kind of soft revolution. 

SP: One of the consistent themes here is of religion trying to infuse the love song with “the divine.” To what degree would you say this was also about power? To what degree did it reflect other, more personal struggles to rectify romance with spirituality?

TG: Church leaders tried to eradicate the love song from Western society during the first one thousand years of Christianity. When this attempt failed, after the rise of the troubadours, the Church pursued a very clever alternate strategy. They decided to allow the love song, but aimed to purify it first—taking out the dirty parts, so to speak. They believed that they could turn the love song into a type of spiritual music. If I can borrow the words of John Coltrane, they aimed to focus the music of romance on a “love supreme.”  

This obviously was a battle for power over the hearts and minds—but especially the hearts—of the populace. But it also reflected the belief, among religious leaders, that Christianity had special expertise in the matter of love. After all, when Jesus was asked which were the most important commandments, he replied that the first rule was to love God, and the second rule was to love your neighbor. Given this precedent, the Church felt that it had every right to define the essence of love, even within the context of a love song. 


By the way, the idea that religion might try to control the love lyric seems oppressive to most of us. But this very attempt to mix spirituality and romance spurred the masterworks of Dante, Rumi and other visionary artists. 


SP: Purveyors of love songs were often cut a great deal of moral slack because of the acceptance of the “artistic temperament.” This seems to me scape-goating turned on its head (to the benefit of the artist). Why did this happen? What relationship does it have to other aspects of our relationship to love songs?

TG: In studying the history of prohibitions and censorship, I am struck by the inconsistent rules applied to love songs. Some people are allowed to sing love songs, while others are threatened with punishments and excommunication. But the rules constantly change over times, and are filled with loopholes and exceptions. In medieval times, nobles had much more freedom than commoners. But in the early twentieth century, the opposite happened. African-American musicians were allowed to sing about erotic subjects, but performers addressing the mainstream white market were discouraged from doing the same. 

If you look at sheet music from the turn-of-the-century, you see visual proof of the hypocrisy. Any song that hinted at sexual matters would have a picture of a black person or a blackface entertainer on the cover. You see this with hit songs such as “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey” and “Frankie and Johnny.” A few years later, Cole Porter found that critics of his sexually-charged song “Love for Sale” were satisfied after he reassigned the piece to a black singer. Even in the 1950s, broadcasters refused to play Dean Martin’s “Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma’am!” on the radio, but much more explicit fare was acceptable on R&B records targeted at black audiences.  

   

SP: In talking about songs of love in 20th century America, you say that music caused attitudes toward romance to shift. Why do you think that music was responsible for the shift and was not simply responding to broader and/or deeper cultural movements?

TG: This is the classic chicken-and-egg question. Do our songs merely reflect changes that have already taken place in our love lives? Or does music actually alter our romantic practices?

I’m forced to conclude that the songs have much more power than most commentators realize. You simply need to look closely at how people practice courtship and romance to grasp this. At every stage of history, music is enlisted as a tool of romance. This was true in Jane Austen’s day, when people met their future spouses at dances, and parents trained daughters to play the piano to help them snag a husband. This was true in my father’s day, when he always took his girlfriends to the ballroom to dance to his favorite jazz bands. And it’s true in the present day, when people agonize over what mood music to play when bringing a hot date back to the apartment. 

By the way, just consider the importance of the automobile radio on the history of modern romance. The car is the most frequent place for marriage proposals in the United States, and I suspect that a romantic song on the radio played a key role in many of those relationships. Many of us wouldn’t be here today if our parents hadn’t had access to the right love song to seal the deal. 

This relates to my earlier point about music as entertainment. The corporate world wants to turn us into passive consumers of music. But in the real world, people take an active role in constructing the soundtrack of their lives. They use songs to achieve very specific goals. Music is an active ingredient at every stage in our courtship, from the first date to the wedding celebrations.  

SP: You say: “Just as jazz had played a key role in ending segregation in earlier years, rock performers now took the lead in introducing mainstream society to outside the mainstream conceptions of gender and sexual self-definition” (p.240). I often refer to early mixing of the races within jazz-well before Goodman’s overt integration-as well as after. I’m just not sure it played a KEY role in ending segregation. Perhaps you can speak to that. Also, do you think that the diminished popularity of jazz is due, to some extent, because it represents more traditional, or at least less outsider, values?

TG: Music was the first sphere of integration in American public life. Long before Jackie Robinson crossed the color line in baseball, black and white musicians were making records together. Long before the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in schools, jazz bandleaders had already ruled against it on the bandstand. Music, on its own, couldn’t change centuries of entrenched bias and institutional privilege, but it served as an invaluable role model. When jazz became the popular music of the younger generation, back during the Swing Era, it helped pave the way for a host of social changes during the 1950s and 1960s.

As you note, jazz no longer has the same degree of influence or popularity nowadays. We shouldn’t be surprised to see the public’s musical tastes change over the decades. New styles come and go. But I must admit that I am still shocked when I hear young listeners describe jazz as old-fashioned, or treat it like a museum piece. As someone who listens to lots of new music in all genres—I spend 2-3 hours every day listening to new releases—I feel compelled to tell them that some of the freshest and most innovative music in the current day is coming from the jazz world. Why isn’t this better known? Maybe those of us who love jazz need to do a better job of letting the world know about all the great new artists and albums out there. Of course, it would help if the mainstream media gave us a platform for doing this.  

Let me put this differently. The jazz world faces a challenge over who gets to frame the narrative. Just like politics, no? Right now, vested interests are trying to redefine jazz in a way that allows them to maximize their income. A jazz festival makes more money if it hires a rock or pop act, so it has a financial interest in changing the definition of jazz. Or take the case of the famous jazz record label that now wants to switch its focus to R&B albums, because they sell better than hard bop. But they pretend that they are upholding their jazz heritage, even as they chase the big bucks. Meanwhile some of the jazz insiders who are best situated to respond to this land grab are ambivalent about the term ‘jazz’. Although they have the best intentions, they contribute to a quietism that allows outsiders to reshape the jazz narrative to suit dubious corporate goals. In such an environment, it is hardly surprising that many listeners have little idea of what is actually happening in the jazz idiom. 

Gioia's Jazz Standards

I have only dipped into The Jazz Standards, but this book is such a kick that I'll write this in blatant disregard for my policy of reading first and writing second.

You feel in good hands from the top, lightly guided by Gioia, a seasoned pro, with no odd axes to grind, no academic shtick to flog. The feeling is like spending a night among friends, talking about which tunes you think are important and which versions of the tunes stand out. Just as you might now reach for Brian Rust to settle arguments about who was on a certain Trumbauer date or Leonard Feather to look up where Ike Quebec was born, you'll be able to turn to "The Jazz Standards" to get a quick look at the history of a tune and a memory jog to help lead you back to a certain recording you couldn't quite remember.

New facts abound. Guy Wood, composer of "My One and Only Love" wrote music for Captain Kangaroo? Sigmund Romberg worked in a pencil factory? Prez had a top 10 juke box hit with "Just You, Just Me"?

Of course, there will be disagreements among invested jazz people-Jon Hendricks' "Airegin" lyrics rate a mention, but not King Pleasure's for "All of Me." Maybe Kenny Dorham's "Prince Albert," an alternative melody for "All the things You Are," should have gotten a citation. Will jazz fans really "have a hard time enjoying Bird's outing ["Bird with Strings" playing "Just Friends"] given the mood music ambience of the arrangement?" Maybe a case can be made that other tunes, like "Up Jumped Spring" or "Moanin'" should be here...

But you can accept and even relish these disagreements, because you can tell by what the author put in that he knew he had to leave a lot out. It's a big book-over 500 pages-and I bet the author and the publisher had some long conversations about how long it could or should be. You could, for example, do an entire tome on "I Got Rhythm."

OK, enough. I like it. I'm glad it's on my shelf.