How to Listen to Jazz

by Ted Gioia

I find that the neuroscientists and biologists often overstate their claims and that colorful discussions about “your brain on music” do little to enhance our appreciation of any given work. As soon as they try to assess something concrete and specific—for example, a Miles Davis solo or a Billie Holiday performance—the scientists offer few insights. The masterpiece will never be encompassed by neural analysis.

“Mediocrity which claims to be intense has a peculiarly repulsive effect.”

In fact, the deepest aspect of jazz music has absolutely nothing to do with music theory. Zero. Zilch. This bedrock layer of improvisation, almost beyond the scope of musicology, is the psychology or personality of the individual musician.

He couldn’t have made that body of music if he didn’t possess, at the deepest level, a predisposition to tenderness and vulnerability.

Jazz, in contrast, is for those who want to be in attendance when the miracle happens.

I’ve come to the conclusion that an art form built on improvisation and spontaneous decisions will attract a disproportionate percentage of unpredictable characters into the ranks of its practitioners. But I feel even more passionately that the reason why we still care about these individuals is their artistry, not their addictions or capricious behavior off the bandstand.

The late French literary critic Roland Barthes sometimes used the term jouissance to describe his personal response to his favorite texts, and the word, which lacks a precise equivalent in English, conveys a strange hybrid sense of joy that possesses both sexual and aesthetic overtones. I want to encourage you to seek out this jouissance of jazz.11