Quotes from Ted Gioia

Jazz at this time is still mostly a group effort.

When dealing with music, the personal is the political, and always has been.

The role of these New Orleans Creoles in the development of jazz remains one of the least understood and most commonly mis-represented issues in the history of this music.

And the two colleagues are still hanging out together: Van Heusen is buried in the Sinatra family plot in Cathedral City, California.

I know why the best blues artist comes from Mississippi," Hooker told an interviewer from Melody Maker in 1964. "Because it's the worst state. You have the blues all right if you're down in Mississippi.

In America, music was the first sphere of social interaction in which racial barriers were challenged and overturned. And the challenge went both ways: by the mid-1920s, white bands were playing for all-black audiences at Lincoln Theater and elsewhere. These intermediate steps between segregation and integration represented, for all their problems, progress of sorts.

As recently as the twentieth century, some cultures retained religious prohibitions asserting the "uncleanliness" of believers eating at the same table as musicians.

When stealing from other players, an older musician wisely advised me, choose a different instrument from your own, and people won't notice the theft.

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 subjectivity.

In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue and a blessing.

Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both.

Listening, not jargon, is the path into the heart of music. And if we listen at a deep enough level, we enter into the magic of the song—no degrees or formal credentials required.

Before taking an analytical approach, you should immerse yourself in the sheer visceral intensity of these performances, which capture the ethos of

Listening, not jargon, is the path into the heart of music. And if we listen at a deep enough level, we enter into the magic of the song - no degrees or formal credentials required. [...] [C]areful listening can demystify virtually all of the intricacies and marvels of jazz. [...] [T]he 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.

Like the New Orleans tradition that preceded it, and the Swing Era offerings that followed it, Chicago jazz was not just the music of a time and place, but also a timeless style of performance - and for its exponents, very much a way of life - one that continues to reverberate to this day in the works of countless Dixieland and traditional jazz bands around the world. For many listeners, the Chicago style remains nothing less than the quintessential sound of jazz.

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.

Looking back at the first century of jazz's history, its most identifiable trademark may simply be this unwillingness to sit still, this mandate to absorb other sounds and influences, this destiny as a music of flux and fusion.

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.

Given this long and murky lineage, any inquiry into the origin of hunting songs is tantamount to a search for the birth of music itself.

the most powerful and forgotten aspect of music is its role as a change agent; its potential as a transformative force for individuals and groups; its quasi-magical efficacy in ameliorating conditions, softening attitudes, recharging or redirecting energies, fueling or channeling emotions, its capability of purifying or refining or augmenting, and making our day-to-day existence better than it would be otherwise.

Growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it.

inquiries. You will feel it in the music and cherish it as the most magical part of the jazz idiom. If you don't, you can always leave the jazz club and check out a rock or pop covers band. That's perfect entertainment for people who want to live in the realm of perfect replication. Jazz, in

Maybe we need an injection of Africanized soundscapes—let's even call it a new jazz revolution!—all over again.

The Delta region of Mississippi is an expansive alluvial plain, shaped like the leaf of a pecan tree hanging lazily over the rest of the state. Stretching some 220 miles from Vicksburg to Memphis, it is bounded on the west by the Mississippi River, and extends eastward for an average of 65 miles, terminating in hill country, with its poorer soil and different ways of life, and the Yazoo River, which eventually joins the Mississippi at Vicksburg. For blues fans, this is the Delta...