How to Listen to Jazz

by Ted Gioia

In 1959, the modal sounds of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album captured a fresh, different vibe and pushed the art form forward into a new direction. This project showed how jazz improvisation could be based on tightly defined scales (or modes) and thus achieve effects not possible via the expansive chord-based improvisations of earlier jazz ensembles.

Back in the 1920s, Louis Armstrong literally invented new musical phrases and an approach to improvisation that still can be heard today all over the world.

In both these instances, the improvisation still blends in with the sound of the other instruments. Jazz at this time is still mostly a group effort. But now compare these with Louis Armstrong’s solo on “Potato Head Blues” from 1927 or “West End Blues” from 1928. Remember my claim above that jazz revolutions took place every five years, more or less? Well, here is a perfect example. By the late 1920s, we have arrived at the heroic age of the jazz soloist, and at this moment in time Louis Armstrong is ahead of everyone else in the inventiveness of his improvisations and the ease with which he executes his musical ideas.

But even though jazz refused to remain static—indeed, was destined to evolve beyond the stylistic tendencies of the New Orleans pioneers—many fans still prefer these sounds from the music’s earliest days.

Over the course of the decade, the banjo is replaced by the guitar; the tuba disappears from most jazz bands, and its functional role is taken over by the string bass.

Chicago jazz resides at the midpoint between these two sensibilities: it still retains hints of the oom-pah, oom-pah strut that jazz inherited from marching bands and ragtime, but this back-and-forth swaying rhythm is far less pronounced than we heard in the early New Orleans bands. The musicians clearly have new notions about the essence of swing, and as a result the music unabashedly moves ahead in discrete four-beat measures.

Chicago jazz musicians of this period played many of the same songs that the New Orleans performers favored, but they also diverged from these predecessors in important ways. You can still hear twelve-bar blues among the Chicagoans, but not as often as with the New Orleans bands.

The biggest breakthrough came with the birth of the slow jazz ballad. Except for the occasional slow blues, jazz had been a finger-snapping, foot-stomping music up until this point. Most tempos were medium fast, more a trot than a sprint—we don’t encounter ridiculously fast songs in jazz until the 1940s—but still spirited enough to get the audiences energized and shaking their bodies to the music.

The origins of stride style can be traced back to the ragtime piano fad that swept through the United States at the turn of the century. The stride players adopted a similarly extroverted and energetic approach to the instrument. The left hand almost always plays on the beat in Harlem stride, but is constantly in motion with its back-and-forth ‘striding’ between the low and middle registers of the keyboard.

Fats Waller, the most famous of these, ranks among the most skilled entertainers of the first half of the twentieth century, but his boisterous singing and patter never make you miss his keyboard skills. He could mix impressionistic elements drawn from classical music into his playing, or score a hit with a finely crafted pop song, but the stride aesthetic is always at the heart of his music—especially in solo piano works such as “Viper’s Drag” and “Alligator Crawl.”

The term laid-back didn’t exist during the Great Depression, but if it did, it could have described this new jazz movement. Each instrument in the band had to change to create this new sound. Listen to drummer Jo Jones, long-standing member of the Count Basie band,

Jones sometimes even puts aside his sticks and plays with brushes, creating a gentle rhythmic momentum unknown to the jazz idiom’s earliest practitioners.

No one grasped this new potential for the keyboard with more insight than Basie, who now uses the piano to tinkle and interject, and offers crisp rhythmic asides or sometimes even falls silent—his efforts more in response to the beat rather than stoking the fire.

Bandleader Bennie Moten might have emerged as the leader of this movement: the tracks he recorded for the Victor label in December 1932 serve as classic examples of the new sounds brewing in Kansas City. But Moten died in April 1935 as the result of a botched tonsillectomy, and many of his musicians migrated to a new band formed by his pianist, Count Basie.

Above all, they wanted to broaden the vocabulary of jazz, and were willing to take chances to do so, even if that meant they would never achieve the crossover fame of a Goodman or Ellington. Fans started referring to this new, strident sound as modern jazz—with the implication that it was akin to the modern painting of a Picasso or the modern architecture of a Frank Lloyd Wright.

The leading exponents of bebop—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and their colleagues—had new ideas about jazz melody, phrasing, harmony, and rhythm.

These were so startling that their music faced a backlash from other jazz musicians as well as from fans whose expectations had been shaped by the conventions of Swing Era dance bands.

Almost everything else in the music was new and different. Melody lines and improvised phrases got longer, faster, and more intricate. They are often filled with color tones, chromatic notes that would cause a dissonance if held for more than a fraction of a second, but when used appropriately in the middle of a phrase impart a pleasing balance between tension and release.

Stan Getz, the most successful of the cool school saxophonists, never hid his admiration for Lester Young, that stalwart of the Kansas City sound whose horn stylings now influenced a generation of younger players.

This avant-garde movement, dubbed “free” jazz, asserted its proud independence from all traditions that had previously imparted structure to the music and ensured its commercial viability.

For its most fervent advocates, the music was not just another style but the inescapable destiny of the art form—or, in the words of one of the most influential albums of the day: The Shape of Jazz to Come.

but they laid the groundwork for their successors by the very boldness with which they questioned aural hierarchies and disrupted conventional ways.

This music was often dismissed by purists as a sellout at the time of its initial release, and some feared that jazz was, for the first time in its history, backing away from its mandate to move forward, to experiment, to embrace the most progressive currents.

Pianist Keith Jarrett might perform most of a concert obeying the strict rules of tonal-centered music, but then dip into atonal free jazz for shorter or longer interludes, or even compose his own orchestral works.

To some extent, the jazz world was simply following along with the broader currents of postmodernism sweeping through other art forms. In almost every creative field, a sense of end-of-history ennui had set in.

Old bric-a-brac could be dusted off and reconfigured into new mosaics, perhaps infused with new meanings, especially when approached with a sufficiently ironic or provocative attitude.

these classic Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, so often considered old-fashioned examples of traditional jazz, represented the most progressive, forward-looking music of their day. At this juncture in the art form’s history, Armstrong literally introduced hundreds of new phrases into the jazz vocabulary.

Like many of my favorite jazz performances, this track operates at two levels, making a visceral appeal to casual fans while offering hidden riches to those willing to take the time and trouble to listen deeply.

“Yes, I am the world’s greatest listener,” he announced in his autobiography. He made the same point in other settings, reinforcing the centrality of listening to the jazz experience—even to the creative process underpinning the art form. “The only thing I do in music is listen,” he told critic Ralph Gleason in a television interview in 1960. Then he added, “Listening is the most important thing in music.”

This started with a technological innovation, namely the introduction of microphones and electrical amplification into popular music during the 1920s. For the first time, vocalists no longer needed to bellow and shout to reach the back rows; instead they could adopt a conversational stance or even coo and whisper to the audience.

Cap off your Holiday excursion by going to YouTube to watch the clip of her 1957 television rendition of “Fine and Mellow” for CBS, which I rank as my favorite jazz moment on film.

In between he served as the leading exponent of cool jazz, invented modal jazz, redefined the big band sound, and helped launch the jazz-rock fusion revolution. If the twentieth century was the most restless age in the history of music, Miles Davis was its emblematic figure.

Yet you can just as easily look for the opposite, sublimation rather than showmanship. In fact, the whole body of Coltrane’s work exhibits—like the artist himself—a surprising degree of self-control, a willingness to submerge the ego into something larger,

Let me emphasize my point by resorting to italics: every jazz style described in this book is still alive and flourishing on the bandstand.

On the other hand, if you judge jazz by the music itself—and the purpose of this entire book is to encourage you in that attitude—and not as a cultural meme ranked by clicks and views, you will reach a very different conclusion. The music is in great shape. The level of musicianship is higher than ever.

You can’t reduce the current jazz scene to two or three representative names. But is that a sign of decline, or an indication of vitality?

bluegrass, it will be a banjo, and so forth. That won’t change anytime soon. Such assertions don’t take much forecasting skill: some futures can be anticipated with pinpoint accuracy. But jazz isn’t like that. Even as we consider the major forces at play in the current moment, we can hardly imagine which scenario for its future evolution is most likely. Like any living organism, jazz is still shaping its destiny.