MESSIN' AROUND:

Can anyone learn how to listen to any kind of music by reading about it, even from someone as knowledgeable as Gioia? (Especially without the help of a CD, and none is included with this book.) Count me as sceptical going in. As Fats Waller is said to have warned, "If you have to ask, don't mess with it."

Gioia's early chapters, on rhythm and phrasing - the swing and pulse of jazz - and on self-expression are the least helpful and the most self-evident. "This intensely personal quality to improvisation, its tendency to mirror the psyche," he writes, "may be the most enchanting aspect of jazz." For some of us, it's the only aspect of jazz.

But starting with the chapter on structure, the book really begins to swing. There is no musical notation here - not that I could have read it - and jazz, a music of nuance, is notoriously difficult to transcribe anyway. But there are detailed analyses of three jazz standards: Duke Ellington's Sepia Panorama, Sidewalk Blues by Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers, and Charlie Parker's Night in Tunisia.

For each, the author lays bare the basic structure. For example, Night begins with a 12-bar intro, first four guitar, next four adding bass and drums, the final four adding horns. Then on to the A theme, B theme, and so forth to the final repetition of the A theme, then the coda.

Complicated? Not at all. Fortunately each piece is available on YouTube, and with the book in my lap and my computer at my side I listened and counted my way through the labyrinth, bar by bar. It's helpful to at least know what a bar is, but gradually I began to understand something I had only dimly sensed.

Gioia offers other hints and nudges: if lost follow the bass player, not the drummer. Soloists tend to trade off phrases in four-bar chunks. Sing or hum along as you listen. 

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