11 Quotes by Ted Gioia

The work of art always requires us to adapt to it—and in this manner can be distinguished from escapism or shallow entertainment, which instead aims to adapt to the audience, to give the public exactly what it wants. We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists subjectivity.

When dealing with music, the personal is the political, and always has been.

In America, music was the first sphere of social interaction in which racial barriers were challenged and overturned. And the challenge went both ways: by the mid-1920s, white bands were playing for all-black audiences at Lincoln Theater and elsewhere. These intermediate steps between segregation and integration represented, for all their problems, progress of sorts.

In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue and a blessing.

Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both.

When stealing from other players, an older musician wisely advised me, choose a different instrument from your own, and people won’t notice the theft.

Listening, not jargon, is the path into the heart of music. And if we listen at a deep enough level, we enter into the magic of the song - no degrees or formal credentials required. [...] [C]areful listening can demystify virtually all of the intricacies and marvels of jazz. [...] [T]he people who first gave us jazz did so without much formal study - and, in some instances, with none at all. But they knew how to listen.

As recently as the twentieth century, some cultures retained religious prohibitions asserting the “uncleanliness” of believers eating at the same table as musicians.

The role of these New Orleans Creoles in the development of jazz remains one of the least understood and most commonly mis-represented issues in the history of this music.