How to Listen to Jazz

Perhaps all of us seek this kind of intimate revelation when we listen to music. I dwell on it here at some length because I want to urge newcomers to jazz to use this element of expression as an inviting entry point into the music.

motto—“the most beautiful sound next to silence”—

More an attitude than a technique, the element of spontaneity in the music rebels against codification and museum-like canonization. Indeed, the instant you try to hold onto it—to re-create the tones and phrases that spontaneity has imparted to a jazz performance—is the very second when it disappears. Yet this frame of mind, the openness to the cre

Don’t just listen to the notes; listen to what the great jazz artists do to them.