Can You Hear It?

His latest is a how-to book, a packed and useful introduction to the medium with suggestions and aids for the listener who wants to gain entrance to a rich and complicated body of work. Gioia aspires to “bare my own process of listening” by, among other things, proposing various strategies for making the music more available. He is convinced that careful listening can “demystify virtually all of the intricacies and marvels of jazz,” and to that end, his seven chapters, crammed with key figures and some of their best recordings, are usefully and engagingly directed. Before getting very far in this little book, you feel you are in good hands—in touch with someone who has very good ears indeed.

Accordingly, he presumes that his readers have (or can develop) comparably good ears so that they can get inside the music by first attending to the “mystery of rhythm”—the “pulse” or “swing” that differentiates the good performer or group from the mediocre one. Listening to a jazz solo by a trumpet or tenor saxophone demands that you register how phrasing across the bar that separates one four-beat measure from the next results in satisfying musical patterns. “Syncopation,” a word central to the jazz performance, Gioia calls a “deliberate disruption in the flow of the music.” In a blues song, the performer “both plays the note and refuses to play it,” disrupting any too-firm reliance on an unvaried pitch. He quotes from the great saxophone player Sidney Bechet, whose way of teaching was to provide the learner with one single note to practice on:

Gioia recommends “slow listening” and says that, in his own case, such listening was facilitated by playing a recording at half-speed, a pace at which phrasing, variations in dynamics, and tonal coloring can be more sharply brought out.

As a person who plays piano well enough to show some musical credentials, I was pleased to hear Gioia speak of “the metric structure” of jazz, which for the most part has consisted of units of four-beat bars, a meter persisting since the 1930s, whether in New Orleans, swing, or bebop. Here there is a clear analogy with the way a student should be introduced to poetry; that is, through listening to it rather than struggling to find out what it “really means.” The authority on such listening is Robert Frost, who declared that the ear is “the only true writer and the only true reader” and proposed that “the possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless.”

Gioia would applaud Frost’s notion of rhythm in poetry coming out of the tension between the way one intones, or “says,” a verse line and the iambic pentameter (or whatever the meter is) against which it plays. The tunes that capture us in a jazz performance are similarly born out of something like that tension. Gioia’s “close listening” brought to mind the teacher who introduced me to poetry, Reuben Brower (with Frost somewhere behind him), who extolled the virtues of “slow reading.”

Another interesting piece of advice is Gioia’s suggestion that we sing along with the music. His case in point is Charlie Parker, the alto sax player and, along with Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet, the central figure in 1940s bop. Gioia mentions a number of Parker recordings, ranging from not-so-hard- to hard-to-vocalize, in which the “tune” (with a little practice) can be followed. What might be the upshot of such listening and singing?

Himself a teacher, Ted Gioia vows that it works. I thought of it the other morning at breakfast when there turned up in my mind a recording by the great clarinetist Pee Wee Russell of “Rose of Washington Square.” I hadn’t heard the recording in years, but managed to do a pretty good job on my own at vocalizing Russell’s exquisite performance of the tune, with all its twists, wriggles, tonal whines, and pitch flattings that made him such an inimitable musician. Somehow or other, through repeated listenings and probably singings, I had internalized it so that my morning attempt came off pretty well.

Another of Gioia’s useful teaching devices is to break down a small group recording, such as Jelly Roll Morton’s “Sidewalk Blues” or an arrangement of Duke Ellington’s great 1940s band, “Sepia Panorama.” We’re not provided with anything complicated by way of musicological technicalities, simply a chart showing what happens in the first four measures of “Sidewalk Blues” (after some prefatory car horns and whistles): “A theme (12 bars) comprised of 2-bar introductions for each of the main instruments: piano (2 bars), trombone (2 bars), cornet (2 bars), clarinet (2 bars) and finally the entire band (2 bars).”

I have long been delighted by that introduction, but to have it broken down, and be reminded of what instruments are playing and for how long I’m hearing them, was extremely satisfying. Nice to have someone else do for you what you’re too lazy to do for yourself.

The longest chapter is 61 pages, “The Evolution of Jazz Styles,” surveying schools from New Orleans to the present. For each school there is a recommended short list of pieces for listening. I was most interested in the section devoted to Big Band swing, since that’s where my jazz listening got its start: Ellington, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw—above all, for me, Woody Herman (though Gioia doesn’t mention him). Beginning in the mid-’30s, this meeting place between swinging jazz and popular song was brief and all but dead by the end of World War II. But it proved, in Gioia’s words, that “two sensibilities could coincide,” and some of us never got over it.

The term “moldy fig” used to be scornfully directed at those who kept on listening to New Orleans/Dixieland after the swing, bebop, and cool jazz eras succeeded to their short reigns. Moving back from swing bands, I grew to love Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Jelly Roll Morton, and the marvelous Kid Ory, but have now, myself, turned into a moldy fig when it comes to keeping up with (much less appreciating) what’s happened to jazz over the last few decades. Gioia’s classificatory terms for latter-day music—”Jazz/Rock Fusion,” “World Music,” “Postmodernism and Neo-Classical Jazz”—may suggest the difficulty. As a listener to classical music, that music, for me, essentially drew to a close early in the last century, with Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky. This happened to some brands of literature as well: Where, now, are the epics, the satires in heroic couplets, the poetic dramas that once thrived? When Gioia, maintaining the continuing aliveness of jazz, writes that the jazz world has turned into “a type of musical buffet, in which every taste and curiosity would be satisfied,” I have to answer: not mine—and I suspect the buffet image does not attract listeners whose preference for one type of jazz excludes welcoming all other types.

My only criticism of this enlightened and enlightening condensation of jazz history, and its various peaks, is that Ted Gioia has to be an equal-opportunity critic. If one finds it difficult to enjoy contemporary “free jazz,” whatever that means, it may be that we’re weighted down with too much “conceptual baggage,” and to get rid of that baggage, one must “open yourself up to the experiential quality of the music.” But jazz, in its great decades, didn’t need help from a word like “experiential” to earn its keep. Maybe—and this is your moldy fig talking—if you like one sort of jazz better than another, your partisan stance makes that preference even stronger.

If this verges on sentimentality—that, in a line from a Randall Jarrell poem, “In those days everything was better”—still there’s some truth in the sentiment. So crack open the jug and let’s listen once more to Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues.”

William H. Pritchard is the author, most recently, of  Writing to Live: Commentaries on Literature and Music.