How to Listen to Jazz

by Ted Gioia

And Nazi fears were not without justification: after “La Marseillaise” was banned, Reinhardt’s jazz song “Nuages” was adopted as an alternative song of rebellion by the French resistance movement. Among the citizenry, jazz stood as the antithesis of repressive rules.

Listen to Coltrane as if you were going on a spiritual retreat or a five-day cleanse.

But most of the things I love in life, starting with the wife and kids and moving outward, don’t have good metrics. Their value can’t be reduced to dollars and cents, or a ranking of what’s trending in some target demographic.