How to Listen to Jazz

by Ted Gioia

Yet we do well to remember that the people who first gave us jazz did so without much formal study—and, in some instances, with none at all. But they knew how to listen.

In a similar manner, we do well to recall that the African musical traditions at the root of jazz rarely distinguished between performers and audiences.

In this tradition, there are no outsiders. Everyone has the capability to grasp the music at its most essential level. But there is one inescapable requirement: they must listen, and listen deeply.

body respond so powerfully to the beat? Why don’t dogs, for example, match their body movements to external rhythms? Why don’t chimpanzees or cats or horses dance to the beat? They don’t, and you can’t train them to do so. Yet every human society and community provides an outlet for this irresistible response to rhythm—sometimes even relying on it as a pathway to the divine.

The single biggest limitation of these groups is the awkwardness with which they blend together. You can hear the tension in their playing. You can feel viscerally the sluggishness in their swing.

If you are seeking out the secret source of swing, a good place to start is with the locking together of the bass and drums. This may be the single most satisfying sound in all of jazz, at least when it’s done by premier artists.

By the way, I am not overly concerned if a jazz band gradually changes its tempo during a song—although my experience tells me that acceleration is more acceptable to the listener than deceleration. If you pick up speed as you go along, the listeners may even find it exhilarating, but slowing down is usually painful to hear.

Here’s a final tip on how to tell if a band is in synch. When a group is working together effectively, the individual musicians don’t need to play so many notes. A soloist can toss off casual phrases, and each one seems to hit the mark.

Yet during this same period, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, cognitive psychologists, and other researchers have adopted a diametrically opposed position. They have produced stacks of research supporting the view that our responses to music and the other arts are embedded in biological universals, inescapable and ever-present in human society.

Every member of the human species draws, to some extent, on a common musical ethos.

This doesn’t mean it needs to be loud and boisterous—in fact, sometimes it can be a mere musical moan or whisper—but it possesses an ineffable rightness about it. In contrast, when I hear musicians playing practice-room patterns on the bandstand, or constructing facile phrases with their fingers that don’t seem to involve their hearts and ears, I start to lose interest. The music conveys no strong sense of intentionality, perhaps even sounds rote.

it. You can especially hear it in how an improviser starts and ends a phrase. Dizzy Gillespie once claimed that the first thing that came into his mind when improvising was the rhythmic structure of the line, and only later would he choose the notes to play in the phrase.

You will sense their power at the starting point and finish line of their phrases, and you will also hear how this isn’t a matter of loudness or energy, but rather a sense of clear intention and personal agency embodied in the melodic lines.

Of course, the best way to open up your ears to phrasing is by listening to the top tier of jazz vocalists. Hear how Billie Holiday lingers behind the beat, and achieves an almost conversational intimacy in her delivery.

“I’m going to give you one note”? Playing it is “like talking”? Could this really be how one learns to play jazz? The mind boggles at such pedagogy.

They mentioned that Eric would sometimes devote an entire day to playing a single note.2 The more things change, the more they stay the same!

Back in the days of Pythagoras, Western musicians had to choose between creating sounds and playing notes—and they opted for the latter. But African musicians never got enlightened (or is corrupted the better word?) by Pythagorean thinking. They followed the other path—creating a music that drew on infinite gradations of sound, and not just twelve notes in a scale.

Are musicians playing the notes with precision, almost as if they are reading music from some Platonic ideal score, or are they handling them roughly, torturing them to make them speak the truth?

So I don’t expect (or even want) a jazz band to emulate the approach of most classical ensembles. But I do want to hear jazz musicians make an attempt to control the dynamics, rather than letting the dynamics control the music. As part of your musical education, you should listen to jazz bands that have risen to the challenge and actively use dynamics

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. The mathematical ratios that underpin music are the same for every player, yet each one will approach a jazz solo differently.

Improv is personality?

Even before you grasp the technical complexities, you can hear this element of self-expression. When I praise the artistry of, say, a Charles Mingus or a Lester Young or a Bill Evans, it is in large part due to the fact that their music has brought me into some kind of relationship with them. I never met them, but I feel I know them—and with an unshakeable certainty that is, to some degree, a measure of their greatness as jazz artists.

The most obvious reason why musicians fail to put a personal stamp on a jazz performance is technical limitation: they simply lack the effortless mastery of the idiom that is necessary for self-expression. Their solos show them wrestling with the demands of the song rather than turning it into a platform for their personal vision. But I’ve also encountered the opposite extreme: musicians who are so skilled at mimicking different styles and idioms that they never find their own voice.

Trendy critics have developed a whole vocabulary to express this point—cumbersome terminology that conveys their “anti-foundationalism,” or their antagonism to “privileged” interpretations, or their insistence that works of art are mere simulacra, a kind of representation drained of authenticity or connection back to an originating impulse.

The work of art always requires us to adapt to it—and in this manner can be distinguished from escapism or shallow entertainment, which instead aims to adapt to the audience, to give the public exactly what it wants.

We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists our subjectivity.

Yet this frame of mind, the openness to the creative possibilities of the present moment, is perhaps the defining aspect of the jazz idiom.

“Don’t do that again” may well be the most potent jazz mantra, a guidepost for the musician who seeks the highest peaks of artistic transcendence.

The sense of liberation in this music is so palpable that jazz has often been embraced or censored as a symbol of political freedom and human rights. We are all familiar with lyrics getting banned because they broached some taboo subject, but how can instrumental music serve as an ideological rallying cry? Yet the Nazi leaders feared the influence of jazz music, as did the overseers in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. During the German occupation of France in World War II, jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt needed to get approval from the Propaganda-Staffel before each performance for the songs he planned to play.

First, the musicians play the melody (or theme). Second, they improvise over the harmonies of the song—with some or all of the performers taking solos (these are the variations). Third, the musicians return to the melody for a final restatement of the theme.

but more than 95 percent of the jazz music you will encounter in recordings or live concert will adhere to this theme-and-variations structure.

The themes are of set duration. Frequently, they are thirty-two bars long with four beats in each bar, especially when the piece in question is a jazz standard drawn from the classic American song repertoire of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and other mid-twentieth-century tunesmiths.

Twelve-bar forms are especially popular, most notably in blues songs (we will lear...

You have Thomas Edison to thank for all of this. It’s hard to envision jazz flourishing without Edison’s invention of sound recording technology, which made it possible to preserve and disseminate musical improvisations for the first time in history. But this same technology also imposed severe structural constraints on jazz compositions. Musicians turned to simpler structures because recordings in the early days couldn’t capture more than about three minutes of music.

A few renegades resisted this process of simplification—most notably Duke Ellington, who continued to work with elaborate structures even when his contemporaries were embracing simple riff tunes. But he was a rare exception.

The most common thirty-two-bar song form in American twentieth-century popular music and jazz is AABA. The two themes—A and B—are each eight bars long. The B theme, which offers a countermelody in a contrasting key, is sometimes called the “bridge” or “release.” It provides a dose of aural variety before returning to the final eight-bar A theme restatement.

Another familiar thirty-two-bar structure features a sixteen-bar single melody played twice, but with a slight variation between the first ending and second ending.

These are child’s play compared with the typical form for a Scott Joplin ragtime piece from the early 1900s, which presents four different sections in the sequence AABBACCDD.

Each of the recordings considered so far is played in 4/4 meter—in other words, it proceeds in units of four beats, and listeners who want to follow the structure can count along in time with the musicians. This meter has dominated the jazz world since the 1930s, and shows no sign of falling out of favor.

Almost every jazz band nowadays performs some jazz waltzes—in 3/4 time (or, in other words, with three beats per bar)—in its repertoire.

Perhaps seventy or eighty years ago, this would have been a smart listening strategy. But the drums in jazz have evolved away from timekeeping—in truth, much of the action in jazz percussion these days happens between the beats—and thus can serve as a confusing guide to those seeking something akin to a metronome for their listening sessions. Bassists in jazz are hardly immune to this evolution away from timekeeping, but they tend to be more straightforward in signaling the pulse in a song.

For this reason, listeners can benefit from trying to conceptualize many jazz performances as an unfolding of four-bar units. At a certain point in your listening you will stop thinking about the individual beats and bars, and begin to feel these larger building blocks. You know you have reached this point when you instinctively sense when the four bars have concluded without having to count the individual beats.

The combination of these two seemingly incompatible factors—the heroic quality of the music and the systematic ill treatment of the people who made it—imparted particular resonance to the egalitarian elements in jazz, turning it into a powerful engine for social change. An understanding of these wider ramifications of the jazz experience is an essential part of grasping the essence and ethos of this music—even its twenty-first-century manifestations.

From the blues, jazz musicians learned how to bend notes, how to play dirty, how to break away from the tyranny of the pure and ideal written notes that have dominated so much of Western music since the time of Pythagoras.

From ragtime, jazz borrowed syncopation, that exhilarating sense of displacement and momentum created by putting rhythmic emphasis between the beats.

Strange to say, new art forms are similar to the plague or a virulent flu in how they spread. Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both. Densely packed populations, many individuals coming and going via land and waterways, an overheated mixture of people recently arrived from different locales, informal settings where they intermingle in close contact, a culture and environment that emphasize communal activities and get-togethers—these are nightmare conditions for anyone trying to stop an epidemic, but they are the same ingredients that can spur world-changing artistic revolutions.

Jazz followed the same formula. New Orleans, at the time when jazz first appeared, was one of the unhealthiest cities in the world. Buddy Bolden, lauded as the originator of the jazz idiom, was born in New Orleans right before the devastating 1878 yellow fever epidemic raged through the city. Black infant mortality in New Orleans at the time was 45 percent, and the typical life span of an African American a mere thirty-six years.

New Orleans was the melting pot within the larger melting pot of American life. And when vibrant cultural traditions are forced into such close interaction and exposed to so many disparate influences, exciting new hybrids invariably emerge from the mix.

Of the many ingredients that contributed to the birth of jazz, the most important was the blues. This is especially surprising when one considers that blues music was virtually unknown to the American public at this time. The recording industry didn’t discover the blues until 1920, when Mamie Smith’s recording of “Crazy Blues”

The twelve-bar blues song structure itself was a striking deviation from the norm, but even more remarkable were the bent notes, those tones that wavered and swooped and refused to accept the constraints of conventional musical notation. For almost 2,500 years, Western music had prided itself on staying in tune, on working within the structures of carefully defined scales and intervals, the do-re-mi-fa-so building blocks that underpinned every song.

Children find it satisfying to clap along with this syncopated rhythm, and so do grown-ups. This sound draws listeners to the bandstand and dancers to the floor, and even in a digital age, when many music fans are jaded and think they’ve heard it all before, a song that smartly incorporates syncopation can use it as a hook to climb the charts.