Ted Gioia

An acclaimed music scholar presents an accessible introduction to the art of listening to jazz

How to Listen to Jazz

A panoramic history of the genre brings to life the diverse places in which jazz evolved, traces the origins of its various styles, and offers commentary on the music itself

The History of Jazz

A preeminent music historian and critic presents a global history of music from the bottom up 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, historian Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs. Gioia tells a four-thousand-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval. He shows how social outcasts have repeatedly become trailblazers of musical expression: slaves and their descendants, for instance, have repeatedly reinvented music, from ancient times all the way to the jazz, reggae, and hip-hop sounds of the current day. Music: A Subversive History is essential reading for anyone interested in the meaning of music, from Sappho to the Sex Pistols to Spotify.

A Subversive History

Music

This essential book for music lovers tells the story of more than 250 key jazz songs

A Guide to the Repertoire

The Jazz Standards

An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's universally acclaimed history of jazz, with a wealth of new insight on this music's past, present, and future. Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz has been universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time. Acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work is now available in an up-to-date third edition that covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the music. Gioia's story of jazz brilliantly portrays the most legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the scenes in which they evolved. From Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Miles Davis's legendary 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality to current innovators such as Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding, Gioia takes readers on a sweeping journey through the history of jazz. As he traces the music through the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the red light district of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago, and other key locales of jazz history, Gioia also makes the social contexts in which the music was born come alive. This new edition finally brings the often overlooked women who shaped the genre into the spotlight and traces the recent developments that have led to an upswing of jazz in contemporary mainstream culture. As it chronicles jazz from its beginnings and most iconic figures to its latest dialogues with popular music, the developments of the digital age, and new commercial successes, Gioia's History of Jazz reasserts its status as the most authoritative survey of this fascinating music.

Cómo escuchar jazz

An analysis of the influence of Mississippi Delta music traces its rise from the plantation songs of the nineteenth century through the achievements of modern performers, in a tribute that cites the accomplishments of such contributors as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and B. B. King. 20,000 first printing.

The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters who Revolutionized American Music

Delta Blues

Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (Portable Stanford Book Series)

The Imperfect Art

Analyzes the influence of Mississippi Delta music, tracing its rise from the plantation songs of the nineteenth century through the achievements of modern performers.

Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music

An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's acclaimed compendium of jazz standards, featuring 15 additional selections, hundreds of additional recommended tracks, and enhancements and additions on almost every page. Since the first edition of The Jazz Standards was published in 2012, author Ted Gioia has received almost non-stop feedback and suggestions from the passionate global community of jazz enthusiasts and performers requesting crucial additions and corrections to the book. In this second edition, Gioia expands the scope of the book to include more songs, and features new recordings by rising contemporary artists. The Jazz Standards is an essential comprehensive guide to some of the most important jazz compositions, telling the story of more than 250 key jazz songs and providing a listening guide to more than 2,000 recordings. The fan who wants to know more about a tune heard at the club or on the radio will find this book indispensable. Musicians who play these songs night after night will find it to be a handy guide, as it outlines the standards' history and significance and tells how they have been performed by different generations of jazz artists. Students learning about jazz standards will find it to be a go-to reference work for these cornerstones of the repertoire. This book is a unique resource, a browser's companion, and an invaluable introduction to the art form.

The love song is timeless. From its beginnings, it has been shaped by bohemians and renegades, slaves and oppressed minorities, prostitutes, immigrants and other excluded groups. But what do we really know about the origins of these intimate expressions of the heart? And how have our changing perceptions about topics such as sexuality and gender roles changed our attitudes towards these songs? In Love Songs: The Hidden History, Ted Gioia uncovers the unexplored story of the love song for the first time. Drawing on two decades of research, Gioia presents the full range of love songs, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day. The book traces the battles over each new insurgency in the music of love--whether spurred by wandering scholars of medieval days or by four lads from Liverpool in more recent times. In these pages, Gioia reveals that the tenderest music has, in different eras, driven many of the most heated cultural conflicts, and how the humble love song has played a key role in expanding the sphere of individualism and personal autonomy in societies around the world. Gioia forefronts the conflicts, controversies, and the battles over censorship and suppression spurred by such music, revealing the outsiders and marginalized groups that have played a decisive role in shaping our songs of romance and courtship, and the ways their innovations have led to reprisals and strife. And he describes the surprising paths by which the love song has triumphed over these obstacles, and emerged as the dominant form of musical expression in modern society.

The Hidden History

Love Songs

El canon del jazz : los 250 temas imprescindibles

TED. GIOIA

An introduction for new fans, a useful handbook for jazz enthusiasts and performers, and an important reference for students and educators, this second edition of Ted Gioia's The Jazz Standards--now updated by popular demand-- belongs on the shelf of every serious jazz lover or musician.

Si alguien puede hablar de música con la documentación de un investigador, la pasión de un novelista y el amor por la anécdota de un fan, ése es Ted Gioia. Tras su monumental Historia del Jazz (1977), ahora invita al lector a un viaje desde las plantaciones del Mississippi, donde nació el blues, para irse “a husmear un tiempo por Memphis y establecerse al fin en Chicago” (Peter Guralnick). Veremos cómo el blues “tuvo un hijo al que le llamaron rock and roll” (Muddy Waters), y cómo dejó sentir su influencia sobre varias generaciones de músicos, empezando por Elvis Presley. El meticuloso trabajo de campo del autor (“para entender no sólo a los músicos, sino a su música”, Boston Globe) le permite además trazar con pulso firme el entorno económico, social y racial de unos músicos que conquistaron el mundo desde el peldaño más bajo. Ted Gioia, músico, compositor, crítico, historiador, profesor, pianista y productor de jazz, se crió en California, y comenzó a dar clases de jazz en la Universidad de Stanford antes incluso de licenciarse. Es autor de más libros sobre este género: "The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture", ganador del premio ASCAP-Deems Taylor, y West Coast Jazz, publicado en 1998.

La música del Delta del Mississippi

Blues

La prima guida completa alle grandi canzoni e composizioni che costituiscono la struttura portante della musica jazz e la lingua comune degli interpreti di questo genere di tutti i paesi e di tutte le epoche. La storia, le caratteristiche, le versioni più celebri di oltre 250 successi che spaziano dai grandi classici di Broadway alle più famose melodie di jazzisti del calibro di Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington e John Coltrane

Una guida al repertorio

Gli standard del jazz

It's hard to imagine that "the cool" could ever go out of style. After all, cool is style. Isn't it? And it may be harder to imagine a world where people no longer aspire to coolness. In this intriguing cultural history, nationally acclaimed author Ted Gioia shows why cool is not a timeless concept and how it has begun to lose meaning and fade into history. Gioia deftly argues that what began in the Jazz Age and became iconic in the 1950s with Miles Davis, James Dean, and others has been manipulated, stretched, and pushed to a breaking point--not just in our media, entertainment, and fashion industries, but also by corporations, political leaders, and social institutions. Tolling the death knell for the cool, this thought-provoking book reveals how and why a new cultural tone is emerging, one marked by sincerity, earnestness, and a quest for authenticity.

The Birth (and Death) of the Cool

Taking a wide-ranging approach rare in jazz criticism, Ted Gioia's brilliant volume draws upon fields as disparate as literary criticism, art history, sociology, and aesthetic philosophy in order to place jazz within the turbulent cultural environment of the twentieth century. He argues that because improvisation--the essence of jazz--must often fail under the pressure of on-the-spot creativity, we should view jazz as an "imperfect art" and base our judgments of it on an "aesthetics of imperfection." Incorporating the thought of such seminal thinkers as Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, and Roland Barthes, The Imperfect Art offers vivid portraits of the giants of jazz and startling insights into this vital musical form and the interaction of society and art.

Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture

DIVThe place of music in different forms of work from the earliest hunting and planting to the contemporary office./div

Work Songs

Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960

West Coast Jazz

While the first healers were musicians who relied on rhythm and song to help cure the sick, over time Western thinkers and doctors lost touch with these traditions. In the West, for almost two millennia, the roles of the healer and the musician have been strictly separated. Until recently, that is. Over the past few decades there has been a resurgence of interest in healing music. In the midst of this nascent revival, Ted Gioia, a musician, composer, and widely praised author, offers the first detailed exploration of the uses of music for curative purposes from ancient times to the present. Gioia’s inquiry into the restorative powers of sound moves effortlessly from the history of shamanism to the role of Orpheus as a mythical figure linking Eastern and Western ideas about therapeutic music, and from Native American healing ceremonies to what clinical studies can reveal about the efficacy of contemporary methods of sonic healing. Gioia considers a broad range of therapies, providing a thoughtful, impartial guide to their histories and claims, their successes and failures. He examines a host of New Age practices, including toning, Cymatics, drumming circles, and the Tomatis method. And he explores how the medical establishment has begun to recognize and incorporate the therapeutic power of song. Acknowledging that the drumming circle will not—and should not—replace the emergency room, nor the shaman the cardiologist, Gioia suggests that the most promising path is one in which both the latest medical science and music—with its capacity to transform attitudes and bring people together—are brought to bear on the multifaceted healing process. In Healing Songs, as in its companion volume Work Songs, Gioia moves beyond studies of music centered on specific performers, time periods, or genres to illuminate how music enters into and transforms the experiences of everyday life.

Ted Gioia

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