How to Listen to Jazz

A few renegades resisted this process of simplification—most notably Duke Ellington,

Artie Shaw,

insistent earthiness.

the band’s collective pulse—or perhaps I should call it the group’s metabolism—is the first thing I listen for in a jazz performance,

Put another way, music has its own chemistry, and sometimes we need to apply a microscope and peer into its atomic (or even subatomic) structures to grasp its impact on a macro level.

increasingly I encounter bands that change meters at multiple junctures during a single song or, in extreme cases, in every bar.

Morton is equally ingenious in coordinating the accompaniment, relying on breaks (short two-bar solo statements with the band playing on the first beat of the first bar) and stop-time (a complete solo with the band supporting only on certain beats, in this instance on beats 2 and 4 of each bar).

In theory, software should be able to re-create all the nuances of analog Africanized sound, but judging by the pop records I hear, we are still a long way from realizing that goal. Maybe we need an injection of Africanized soundscapes—let’s even call it a new jazz revolution!—all over again.

Strange to say, new art forms are similar to the plague or a virulent flu in how they spread.