The Jazz Ear

An intimate exploration into the musical genius of fifteen living jazz legends, from the longtime New York Times jazz critic Jazz is conducted almost wordlessly: John Coltrane rarely told his quartet what to do, and Miles Davis famously gave his group only the barest instructions before recording his masterpiece "Kind of Blue." Musicians are often loath to discuss their craft for fear of destroying its improvisational essence, rendering jazz among the most ephemeral and least transparent of the performing arts. In The Jazz Ear, the acclaimed music critic Ben Ratliff sits down with jazz greats to discuss recordings by the musicians who most influenced them. In the process, he skillfully coaxes out a profound understanding of the men and women themselves, the context of their work, and how jazz—from horn blare to drum riff—is created conceptually. Expanding on his popular interviews for The New York Times, Ratliff speaks with Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Branford Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, Joshua Redman, and others about the subtle variations in generation, training, and attitude that define their music. Playful and keenly insightful, The Jazz Ear is a revelatory exploration of a unique way of making and hearing music.

Jamey Aebersold's Jazz Ear Training is a no-nonsense approach consisting of two hours of recorded ear training exercises with aural instructions before each. It starts very simply, with intervals and gradually increases in difficulty until you are hearing chord changes and progressions. All answers are listed in the book, and contains transposed parts for C, B-flat, and E-flat instruments to allow playing along. Beginning to advanced levels.

Jazz Ear Training: Learning to Hear Your Way Through Music, focuses the student on developing the ability to hear and react to harmonic structures common to the modern Jazz idiom, while adhering to specific melodic phrases. the book and recording include a variety of exercises derived from the major, harmonic minor, melodic minor and harmonic major scales and suggestions on how to play by ear. It was designed with the intermediate to advanced Jazz student in mind who needs to enhance the connection between his inner voice and instrument. It will also help the student hear what he may intellectually know. Though intended for guitarists, this book can serve the needs of any aspiring Jazz improviser. A basic understanding of Jazz theory is recommended before using this book. Companion CD included.

(Jazz Book). From Thom Mason comes a fun and interesting guide to help you develop aural skills. This book focuses on improving your technique in hearing pitches, rhythms, melodies, and chord progressions, as directly applied to actual music in the jazz repertoire. The text will help you to hear music in your head from the written page, transcribe, and sight sing, all the while making it musical through appropriate jazz phrasing and articulations. The valuable lessons learned can be applied to any instrument or voice, with skills that transcend jazz, useful in all styles of music.

This book is a study of chord progressions found in the jazz musician's repertoire. Through the tunes, the chord progressions are compared to one another, linked together by commonalities, and harmonic traits are codified, aiding in memorization and identification by ear.

In jazz circles, players and listeners with “big ears” hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz’s film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture. Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of “female hysteria” by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz. Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas

All great musicians have one thing in common---to a great extent they know what the harmony of a song is as they hear it. Do you? If not, here is a practical guide to get you up to speed. Written by Berklee professor Roberta Radley, it uses contemporary music to help you see how ear training is invaluable for your own musical needs.

The emergence of jazz out of New Orleans is part of the American story, but the creation of this music was more than a regional phenomenon: it also crossed geographical, cultural, and technological lines. Court Carney takes a new look at the spread and acceptance of jazz in America, going beyond the familiar accounts of music historians and documentarians to show how jazz paralleled and propelled the broader changes taking place in America's economy, society, politics, and culture. Cuttin' Up takes readers back to the 1920s and early 1930s to describe how jazz musicians navigated the rocky racial terrain of the music business-and how new media like the phonograph, radio, and film accelerated its diffusion and contributed to variations in its styles. The first history of jazz to emphasize the connections between these disseminating technologies and specific locales, it describes the distinctive styles that developed in four cities and tells how the opportunities of each influenced both musicians' choices and the marketing of their music. Carney begins his journey in New Orleans, where pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden set the tone for the new music, then takes readers up the river to Chicago, where Joe Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, featuring a young Louis Armstrong, first put jazz on record. The genre received a major boost in New York through radio's live broadcasts from venues like the Cotton Club, then came to a national audience when Los Angeles put it in the movies, starting with the appearance of Duke Ellington's orchestra in Check and Double Check. As Carney shows, the journey of jazz had its racial component as well, ranging from New Orleans' melting pot to Chicago's segregated music culture, from Harlem clubs catering to white clienteles to Hollywood's reinforcement of stereotypes. And by pinpointing specific cultural turns in the process of bringing jazz to a national audience, he shows how jazz opens a window on the creation of a modernist spirit in America. A 1930 tune called "Cuttin' Up" captured the freewheeling spirit of this new music-an expression that also reflects the impact jazz and its diffusion had on the nation as it crossed geographic and social boundaries and integrated an array of styles into an exciting new hybrid. Deftly blending music history, urban history, and race studies, Cuttin' Up recaptures the essence of jazz in its earliest days.