One can not travel in the list

Any additional comments?

The author is great, so is the audiobook, but how can one go to a specific music? Where is the index Audible?

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8 people found this helpful

A true compendium for beginners and skilled fans

Hello once again to my readers! Happy new year to one and all! Now my first audio review of the new year will be something somewhat unexpected and a little unorthodox from me.

You see I am something of a curious casual fan of jazz music. Be it Bebop, Swing jazz, Afro-Cuban, Jazz Fusion or the members of the Cool Jazz school, I want to learn more about it all. I want to expand my collection and my appreciation of all things jazz. My knowledge of music performance and notation is minimal be it counterpoint, modal structure or whatever else you care to name. However I do have an appreciation of good music and a well-done performance as much as anyone. Once I had obtained a small collection of recordings (and purchased and watched the Ken Burns documentary on the history of jazz), I decided to see if there were any audiobooks available about famous performers or the medium of jazz itself.

Before long I soon found myself listening to our subject today. Ted Gioia is a skilled music historian and critic, having written many books such as The History of Jazz(2011, 2021), Music: A Subversive History(2019) and The Birth (and Death) of the Cool (2009). He is also a skilled jazz performer in his own right, having released some known albums in the genre and collaborated with some very highly regarded musicians. He specialises in jazz history and one of his most highly regarded books is today’s subject.

The Jazz Standards: A Guide To The Repertoire is a very interesting refrence book to adapt to audio. The concept of the jazz standard is that of any piece of jazz music that aspiring jazz musicians are expected to know or to be able to play at the drop of a hat in a jam session with other performers or on stage in a well-known jazz club show such as Birdland or the Village Vanguard.

Some standards are classic songs even someone like me had heard in a non-jazz setting while others are extremely well known to jazz musicians but obscure to the general public from obscure Broadway shows or songs so old they’ve been around in some form since during World War One.

Several of them were standardised by the so called ‘Real Book’, a compendium made by anonymous authors in the 1970s while others found popularity in more recent years and retroactively joined the illustrious hall of jazz classics.

This particular audiobook by Ted Gioia is intended as something of an audio refrence guide for beginners to the appeal of jazz or skilled jazz performers and knowledgeable collectors. One that both talks about the history of each standard – both how it came to be and stories of versions well known to the public or how a song became a standard – as well as a list of recordings recommended by the author who is well known for his extremely extensive collection. There is a short introduction where Gioia discusses the need for such a book to exist and individual alphabetical sections for all standards listed in the compendium.

The audiobook in question is very appealingly written. The way the author talks about jazz as a medium and the various recordings and performers mentioned is duly respectful for a man who clearly spent a very long time – if not most of his life – gathering the information included and losing himself in the recordings listed but at the same time the author has a habit of making the completed book easily understandable by a relative newcomer and not the kind of text that would require a college level qualification in musicology to be understood.

Some terms exclusive to the world of jazz are used now and again – as befits a refrence text such as this one – however the jazz exclusive terms are explained to the listener so the audiobook is relatively easy to follow when discussing these terms as long as the listener is being attentive.

The audiobook is very extensive, covering around 200 to 250 of the jazz standards ranging from several selections from the Gershwin siblings and their classic show tunes to some masterpieces from The Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk and Count Basie. From Basie’s swinging One O’ Clock Jump and the eternal Gershwin showpiece I Got Rhythm to Monk’s Round About Midnight and The MJQ’s Cool Jazz standard-bearer Concorde and quite a wide selection beyond, the standards selected all have quite an extensive history.

Some come from unexpected sources with a few coming from France – thanks to Django Reinhardt and his compatriots in the Hot Club De France – and at least one potentially tracing its name to an old hospital back in England from hundreds of years prior. The recordings Gioia discusses in his recommendations are uniformly truly enveloping from my listens to some that caught my interest in particular (Sidenote and recommendation from your writer: If he recommends a modern recording from any member of the Marsalis family? Track it down. They are considered modern jazz royalty for a reason and I could not recommend them higher myself) with most standards having quite an extensive list of recommended recordings unless they are relatively modern additions to the repertoire.

There is however one area in which I will more than happily critique the audiobook and that is in the narration. The narration by Bob Souer – a man with a prolific history of audiobook narration including amongst others various versions of the Bible, a book on the history of the Peloponnesian War and a biography of American sports superstar Michael Jordan – is not necessarily bad narration but it is slow. Pointedly slow.

Souer is a perfectly enjoyable reader who to the best of my knowledge pronounces all the awkward terms or names that may come up in a book about jazz well. The main criticism I have of him is he is so slow he sometimes sounds like he is either slightly tired or like he is moving slow as molasses through a desert. It might seem unfair of me to criticise this aspect but when a listener is hearing this for the full length of an audiobook that goes beyond twenty-one hours? It does begin to grate. As such when I listened to the audiobook I had to speed up the narration considerably. Not all listeners will want to do that but it did help me. Perhaps the book was intended to be a ‘search and find’ kind of book where you only listen to certain sections one or two at a time but the criticism stands all the same.

Another more minor critique is that on the version available on Audible, the book is split into chapters which are mostly set along alphabetical lines with a few exceptions. That is normally honestly fine but the inner pedant in me wishes they had split each standard into their own named section, so audio enjoyers could hunt down and listen to the sections about their favourite standards – be that Stella by Starlight, Ain’t Misbehavin’ or whatever else comes to mind – rather than the entire chapter. I understand that would have definitely meant a lot of extra work though so I completely understand why things are the way they are.

Since the audiobook came out some years ago, a second edition of this book is now available in print and ebook with additional standards included so if that is your preference I would highly recommend this book once again regardless of format. Even with my relatively minor criticisms this book is an absolute godsend to fans of jazz of all stripes and any book that is actively endorsed by Sonny Rollins and Dave Brubeck is good enough for someone like me. Also fingers crossed there will be an audio version of the second edition at some point in the future. Hopefully with the help of Mr Gioia and other scholars like him, I can widen my knowledge and appreciation of all things jazz and pull a few of my readers along for the ride with me!

Thanks for reading and fingers crossed you’ll hear from me before long.


Sayonara!

Nephrite

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