
How to Listen to Jazz
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Narrated by:
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Peter Ganim
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By:
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Ted Gioia
About this listen
A "radiantly accomplished" music scholar presents an accessible introduction to the art of listening to jazz (Wall Street Journal).
In How to Listen to Jazz, award-winning music scholar Ted Gioia presents a lively introduction to one of America's premier art forms. He tells us what to listen for in a performance and includes a guide to today's leading jazz musicians. From Louis Armstrong's innovative sounds to the jazz-rock fusion of Miles Davis, Gioia covers the music's history and reveals the building blocks of improvisation. A true love letter to jazz by a foremost expert, How to Listen to Jazz is a must-listen for anyone who's ever wanted to understand and better appreciate America's greatest contribution to music.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
©2017 Ted Gioia (P)2017 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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Critic reviews
"Mr. Gioia could not have done a better job. Through him, jazz might even find new devotees." (Economist)
People who viewed this also viewed...
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- Narrated by: Bob Souer
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- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a classic - acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world. Now Gioia brings his magnificent work completely up-to-date, drawing on the latest research and revisiting virtually every aspect of the music, past and present. Gioia tells the story of jazz as it had never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history.
-
-
An Exciting Opportunity Missed
- By Kindle Customer on 02-02-15
By: Ted Gioia
-
The Jazz Standards
- A Guide to the Repertoire
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 21 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written by award-winning jazz historian Ted Gioia, this comprehensive guide offers an illuminating look at more than 250 seminal jazz compositions. In this comprehensive and unique survey, here are the songs that sit at the heart of the jazz repertoire, ranging from "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Autumn in New York" to "God Bless the Child," "How High the Moon," and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." Gioia includes Broadway show tunes written by such greats as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and classics by such famed jazz musicians as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane.
-
-
Great info, but not ideal in audio format
- By Patrick on 08-30-14
By: Ted Gioia
-
Music
- A Subversive History
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell
- Length: 17 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs. Gioia tells a 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval.
-
-
Squeezing cherry-picked facts into a simplistic narrative
- By Erik A. Ritland on 11-24-20
By: Ted Gioia
-
Jazz
- A History of America's Music
- By: Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns
- Narrated by: LeVar Burton
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of cities, and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium. If you haven't already, download the accompanying audio to Ken Burns' remarkable documentary!
-
-
Good content but reading not clear
- By Ken on 02-07-03
By: Geoffrey C. Ward, and others
-
Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion
- By: Bill Messenger, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Bill Messenger
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation. Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself.
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- The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music
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Overall
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.
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Well Organized and Themed
- By unhae campbell on 05-23-24
By: Larry Tye
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Chaos Monkeys - Revised Edition
- Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
- By: Antonio Garcia Martinez
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez. After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. In Chaos Monkeys, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future.
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Best Non-fiction (and entertaining frolic) I’ve listened to in years!
- By Martha Mangan on 09-22-19
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The Angry Therapist
- By: John Kim
- Narrated by: John Kim
- Length: 4 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Tackling relationships, career, and family issues, John Kim, LMFT, thinks of himself as a life-style designer, not a therapist. His radical new approach, that he sometimes calls “self-help in a shot glass” is easy, real, and to the point. He helps people make changes to their lives so that personal growth happens organically, just by living.
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Great Book. a must listen audio book
- By John Butcher on 03-26-21
By: John Kim
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Playing Changes
- Jazz for the New Century
- By: Nate Chinen
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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“Playing changes”, in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes - ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical - that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music.
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Jazz happens
- By álvaro castro on 02-11-19
By: Nate Chinen
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Great Music of the 20th Century
- By: The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Professor Robert Greenberg PhD
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Original Recording
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The 20th century was a hotbed of musical exploration, innovation, and transformation unlike any other epoch in history. Ranging across the century in its entirety, these 24 lectures present a musical cornucopia of astounding dimensions - a major presentation and exploration of the incredible brilliance and diversity of musical art across a turbulent century. Far more than simply a series of lectures, the program comprises a huge and many-sided resource for discovering the endless riches of 20th-century concert music across the globe.
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Disappointment
- By MAdison on 03-11-18
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Saxophone Colossus
- The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins
- By: Aidan Levy
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 31 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Known as the "Saxophone Colossus," he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called "the only jazz recluse" has gone largely untold—until now. Based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins himself, family members, friends, and collaborators, as well as Rollins' personal archive, Saxophone Colossus is the comprehensive portrait of this legendary saxophonist and composer, civil rights activist and environmentalist.
By: Aidan Levy
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3 Shades of Blue
- Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
- By: James Kaplan
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most.
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Great deep dive into a pinnacle of jazz, marred by author bias against later jazz years
- By Michael J. Anderson on 04-08-24
By: James Kaplan
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Listen to This
- Miles Davis and Bitches Brew
- By: Victor Svorinich
- Narrated by: John Gagnepain
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Listen to This stands out as the first book exclusively dedicated to Davis' watershed 1969 album, Bitches Brew. Victor Svorinich traces its incarnations and inspirations for 10-plus years before its release. The album arrived as the jazz scene waned beneath the rise of rock and roll and as Davis faced large changes in social conditions affecting the African-American consciousness.
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Very thorough
- By Dave McElfresh on 04-06-19
By: Victor Svorinich
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Thelonious Monk
- The Life and Times of an American Original
- By: Robin DG Kelley
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 25 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the 20th century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers.
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The definitive bio of Monk
- By ricardo on 12-27-17
By: Robin DG Kelley
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Cult of the Dead Cow
- How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
- By: Joseph Menn
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism. Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and battling to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow shows how governments, corporations, and criminals came to hold immense power over individuals and how we can fight back against them.
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Liberal Bias Rife and Unchecked
- By Sam Kopp on 12-18-19
By: Joseph Menn
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All Things Are Full of Gods
- The Mysteries of Mind and Life
- By: David Bentley Hart
- Narrated by: Rachael Beresford
- Length: 22 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In a blossoming garden located far outside all worlds, a group of aging Greek gods have gathered to discuss the nature of existence, the mystery of mind, and whether there is a transcendent God from whom all things come. Turning to Eros, Psyche asks, "Do you see this flower, my love?"
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It's all in the mind
- By Owen Kelly on 08-30-24
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Bach's Musical Universe
- The Composer and His Work
- By: Christoph Wolff
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A concentrated study of Johann Sebastian Bach's creative output and greatest pieces, capturing the essence of his art.
By: Christoph Wolff
A great book
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Not really a "how to"
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Excellent work
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Solid Introduction
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Love Jazz, now I understand why!
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Excellent!
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Loved everything about the material in this book!
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In this regard, I gained far more understanding of the concepts by watching a 23-minute YouTube video ("Jazz Rhythm - Beginners Guide: Swing 8ths, Syncopation, and Rhythmic Phrasing" by Kent Hewitt—whom I have no affiliation with other than being a viewer) than by listening to this book for several hours. This limitation is clearly due to the format of this audiobook, which is a reading of a paper book. Unfortunately, it fails to leverage the potential of the audiobook format by incorporating actual music samples into the content.
If someone wants to learn to enjoy jazz without formal music training, I would recommend watching a few good YouTube videos first.
My hope in providing this review is to encourage the author to enhance this audiobook by addressing the lack of live music samples.
Informative but Not Effective
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Excellent content, annoying reading
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