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dwrs 's review for:
How to Listen to Jazz
by Ted Gioia
Fine—the beginning makes a big deal of how the author intends to be explicit about what makes jazz good—but then no such effort is in fact made, or at least communicated. Much of the book is recommendations for listening which, while welcome, were not lacking. There is some good material on structure and I liked the chapter(s?) on history. TG—as in his Substack—is a strange kind of writer... I can't put my finger on it, but maybe something like: He writes in a simple, accessible way, with (seemingly) artificially simple metaphors? There is something 19th-century-advertisement about it... He is not a dumb or even a simple writer, although the writing may be simple... normally people who write this way are dumb or make mistakes? I can't tell....
I liked that he vouched for the connection between musical personality and real-life personality; although not dwelt on, the distinction between the Pythagorean abstraction of note and the jazz (African-influenced) experience of sound interested me (jazz is a "hot" artform, in the McLuhanesque way, TG informs us) and I gained a new, Nietzschean respect for it as a more vital artform (do I need such pretentiousness for such a simple idea?), put into new perspective the sniveling classical music snob (a type who I feel sympathy and defensiveness for). Although it made romanticism in classical music newly incoherent, or at least confusing.... (It put a serious dent in a kind of classical-supremacism that had been growing half-consciously in me.) Anyway, that idea alone—and that I mostly found myself interested in the history in this book, made me want to read TG's other books, strange prose notwithstanding.
Three more things—
1. Curse of knowledge/academic
2. Threatening image of the sociopathic player (disguised)
3. Do we bend ourselves to the music, or does it bend to us?
I liked that he vouched for the connection between musical personality and real-life personality; although not dwelt on, the distinction between the Pythagorean abstraction of note and the jazz (African-influenced) experience of sound interested me (jazz is a "hot" artform, in the McLuhanesque way, TG informs us) and I gained a new, Nietzschean respect for it as a more vital artform (do I need such pretentiousness for such a simple idea?), put into new perspective the sniveling classical music snob (a type who I feel sympathy and defensiveness for). Although it made romanticism in classical music newly incoherent, or at least confusing.... (It put a serious dent in a kind of classical-supremacism that had been growing half-consciously in me.) Anyway, that idea alone—and that I mostly found myself interested in the history in this book, made me want to read TG's other books, strange prose notwithstanding.
Three more things—
1. Curse of knowledge/academic
2. Threatening image of the sociopathic player (disguised)
3. Do we bend ourselves to the music, or does it bend to us?