You got to be original, man Book

An old friend of mine used to say he didn't like listening to jazz because it was too much like doing calculus problems. I know what he means. Jazz is at the musical intersection of math and linguistics. And yet despite, or because of, these problems, I've long been lured by jazz. I can tell it's a foreign language, or many foreign languages, but I can't make out the words. This book from my local public library seemed the best bet to start breaking me into the jazz world.

It is a good starter in some ways, and yet I must say that it's frustrating because in the first two-thirds it's trying to set into words what can only be taken in through the ears, and rather than providing specific illustrations, say specific illustrative tracks on albums, Johnny King spends most of his space on these pages listing the names of Jazz players or of bands: he's talking about sounds such as so-and-so's band could make in the late '50s. Unfortunately, this is the least helpful you can be if you're trying to explain jazz to a newbie.

In the last third of the book King takes ten jazz songs, not really greatest hits, and uses them finally to try to illustrate his points. That's nice, but I wish he'd done so in the first 88 pages as well. This book is not really what I'd hoped or expected it would be.

Occasionally helpful, but not really terribly useful for understanding and listening to jazz. I guess I'll try Ken Burns' 10-volume DVD collection and see if that works.