The Jazz Ear (Conversations over Music)
by Ben Ratliff
ISBN: 9780805090864
Read: 3 May 2011

In my honest opinion, this is a great book. The renowned New York Times writer and music critic Ben Ratliff finds a new way to get inside some great artists, including Wayne Shorter, Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, Pat Metheny, Ornette Coleman, Maria Schneider and more, simply by listening to and discussing their favorite recordings with them. Not much else to say: if you have time to read, just buy it.

Let me just quote something from the chapter on Pat Metheny. While reading it, I was struck that he mentioned the school I attended this semester (the New School, in Manhattan), and it blew my mind, because it reflects exactly what I experienced and what I think about studying jazz in so-called "jazz schools."

Speaking about the Miles Davis Quintet's recording of "Seven Steps to Heaven," he said:

"This is the kind of tune that, if we go down to the New School now, we're going to find fifty guys who can just eat this tune alive, in the way that the jazz education movement has evolved toward."

(He meant they could play it precisely and even fast, to the point of glibness.)

"But there is not one second in what Miles plays in his solo that has anything to do with any of that. It's this completely invented language that happens to line up perfectly with all the things we now have quantified in jazz in terms of its language and grammar. It wasn't quantified then, as it is now, that if you see this kind of chord, you're going to play this set of notes."

Awesome.