A Conversation with

TOM PIAZZA

Author of UNDESTANDING JAZZ: Ways to Listen

Produced by JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTRE

Available at Random House

Q: What are some of the ways one can learn to "understand" jazz?

The key to understanding jazz, or anything else, is the ability to recognize patterns, as well as variations on those patterns. In Understanding Jazz, using the examples on the accompanying compact disc, I try to show how most jazz, no matter how complex it may sound, is based on rather simple repeated forms, within which the musicians make their variations. Once you begin to hear the underlying form, you can begin to appreciate more deeply what the musicians are saying when they improvise.

I also try to give the reader a basic understanding, in layman's terms, of some of the harmonic and rhythmic elements that allow a group of jazz musicians to make sense while they all improvise on the same form at the same time. Most of the excitement and sense of discovery in a jazz performance comes from the musicians and the listeners having the same flash of understanding at the same moment. There are few things more interesting or exciting.

Q: Do you think trying to "understand" jazz actually improves the experience of listening to it? Isn't jazz just improvised anyway?

Different people have different ways of enjoying their experience. For some listeners a purely passive experience of art is enough; others like to have a more active grasp of the framework. I guess it would be possible to enjoy a baseball game without knowing anything about what an inning is, what a strike is, how the pressure of two outs increases pressure on a batter, but it enriches your experience of the game to have a grasp of the mutual understandings that govern the play. "Just" improvised? Improvisation is the highest expression of an artist's comfort level with his of her materials. It means being able to make intelligent spontaneous choices based on knowledge, experience, and - hopefully - imagination. To say that jazz is "just improvised" is like complaining that every baseball game, or tennis match, or basketball game, is different. Or every run down a ski trail. It is as silly as complaining that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is "just" written out. Beethoven, by the way, was said to be a great improviser on piano. So were Bach and Mozart and many of the other European masters. Anyway, a jazz musician, even to be merely adequate, must be able to grasp principles, and not just follow directions!

Q: When studying jazz, what lessons are learned that can be applied for life?

1. Use the materials you have at hand. Use what is - the musicians, the acoustics in the room, the song you are given to play - and make something great out of that, rather that getting hung up on an abstract ideal.
2. Nothing lasts forever, so make sense now.
3. Sometimes your mistakes are as valuable as the things you intended. They may open up avenues of perception or expression that you hadn't anticipated.
4. In the realm of creativity, there is no single right way to do anything.
5. Be who you are
6. The material is never the important thing - what you do with it is what is important. Some of the greatest jazz performances are based on banal material.
7. Twenty seconds of music can summon an entire world and shape your life forever, It's not about quantity, or size; it's about clarity an depth.
8. I'm sure there are many more lessons; those are the ones that occur to me now. Accepting that nothing is the final word about anything is itself one of the most important lessons, in jazz as in the rest of life.

Q: Why do you think people often feel intimidated when listening to jazz?

I don't know that they do, but if they do it may be for the same reason people will often feel intimidated when introduced to anything powerful and not immediately explainable. It might be hard for some people to get used to the idea that enduring aesthetic statements can be made on the spur of the moment. Or they may feel ill-at-ease because they have trouble getting oriented, trouble knowing where they are in the form of the music. The point of Understanding Jazz is to give listeners some tools to get oriented, to understand the game being played.

Q: What can jazz teach us about being American? Some have said it's a "democratic" art form - how so?

I don't believe in using art to bolster a sense of nationalism. Jazz came into being in the United States about a hundred years ago - could only have come into being here - but at this point it is the property of everyone in the world, just like Shakespeare's plays and Picasso's paintings and Mahler's symphonies. To conscript it into nationalistic scenario is to reduce it, in my opinion.

Q: In what ways has jazz changed over time? Which artists had the greatest impact on jazz, in your opinion?

All jazz musicians have made a contribution to the music. There are some musicians who are, obviously, almost godlike in their influence on the music and other musicians - Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and a handful of others at most. Others are irreplaceable stylists, from whom just a couple of notes can summon their entire sensibility, who always have something unique and meaningful to say - Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollings, Stan Gets, Jack Teagarden, Billie Holiday, Ornette Coleman, Red Allen, Jackie McLean... that particular list can go on and on. And then there are the countless musicians who filled the ranks of big bands and small combos over the years, who were not particularly individualistic and who never made it to the national spotlight, but who populated the landscape of jazz and practiced it at a high level, so to speak. All musicians who play jazz are important to the music - not just the geniuses and innovators, but everyone who learns to speak the language.

Q: Some say "old" jazz is best; some think current jazz is most exciting and innovative. What do you think?

Art, in my view, doesn't really concern itself with "old" and "new". These terms are important to people who buy and sell art for a profit, but not to artists themselves. If something is really good it will stand up over time and feel new for centuries to come. It may go in and out of fashion, just as Bach's music went into an eclipse for decades after his death, and Melville's novels lay unread for decades after his death, but those with ears and eyes will rediscover it later. When you go back to listen to Bach today, or read Moby Dick, you have an experience that is immediate and that has nothing to do with "old" and "new" Most serious artists - and especially the innovators - are very preoccupied with seeming "new". True innovators, like Dante, or Picasso, or Arnold Schoenberg, are obsessed with the history of the art form they practice, and their work can be read, in one way, as a series of arguments with the work that came before. Of course, arguing with something is not the same thing as disregarding it. You can't have a meaningful argument with something that doesn't exist for you.

Jazz at the Lincoln Center