Ted Gioia
Ted Gioia is a musician and author who has published ten non-fiction books, most recently the acclaimed How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books). "Mr Gioia could not have done a better job." writes The Economist. "Through him, jazz might even find new devotees." This book "fills an important and obvious gap by offering a sensible and jargon-free introduction," according to the Washington Post, and "deserves a place alongside....classic works of jazz criticism."
Gioia has been called "one of the outstanding music historians in America" by the Dallas Morning News. He has served on the faculty of Stanford University, and published in many of the leading newspapers, periodicals and websites, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, Music Quarterly, Bookforum, Salon, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, Popular Music, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Atlantic Monthly, City Journal, The Threepenny Review, PopMatters, and The Hudson Review. He is currently columnist for The Daily Beast.
Gioia's previous book, Love Songs: The Hidden History (Oxford University Press) has been one of the most influential music history books of recent years. This path-breaking book represents the first complete survey of 5,000 years of the music of romance, courtship and sexuality. "Gioia’s book covers a tremendous amount of ground and gives you something to remember on almost every page," declares The New Yorker. "He invites the critic’s cliché 'wonderfully erudite', and earns it, not to mention the even cheaper critical term 'provocative', though he earns that, too." The Atlantic Monthly calls Love Songs "a mind-expanding, deep-focus piece of scholarship... Gioia’s book achieves intellectual liftoff, high learning combining with high imagination."
Gioia is perhaps best known as the author of The History of Jazz, which has sold more than 100,000 copies and ranks as the bestselling survey of jazz published during the last quarter century. The History of Jazz was selected as one of the twenty best books of the year by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post, and was chosen as a notable book of the year in the New York Times. In 2012, Gioia released the bestselling The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire, published by Oxford University Press. The book received early praise from Dave Brubeck and Sonny Rollins, and was lauded by the Wall Street Journal as "the first general-interest, wide-ranging and authoritative guide to the basic contemporary jazz canon."
From 2007 until 2010, Gioia served as founding president, editor and resident blogger for www.jazz.com, a popular web music media portal. In 2006, Gioia published two books simultaneously, Work Songs and Healing Songs, the result of more a decade of research into traditional music, and both works were honored with a special ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Gioia’s 2008 book, Delta Blues, published by W.W. Norton, was also selected by The New York Times as one of the 100 most notable of the year, and was picked as one of the best books of
the year by The Economist. Gioia has also written extensively on popular culture, most notably in his 2009 book, The Birth (and the Death) of Cool, a work of cultural criticism and a historical survey of hipness—his concept of post-cool, outlined in this work, was highlighted as one of the "ideas of the year" by Adbusters. "The prose is so strong, simple and evocative that it brings the reader almost to tears with longing," The Washington Post has written of this book. "It will force you to think about making connections you haven't made before.”
Gioia was raised in a Sicilian-Mexican household in Hawthorne, California, a working class neighborhood in the South-Central area of Los Angeles. Gioia was valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar at Hawthorne High School, and attended Stanford University. There he received a degree in English (graduating with honors and distinction), served as editor of Stanford’s literary magazine, Sequoia, and wrote regularly for the Stanford Daily. He was a member of Stanford’s College Bowl team, which was featured on television, and defeated Yale in the
national finals. Gioia also worked extensively as a jazz pianist during this period, and designed and taught a class on jazz at Stanford while still an undergraduate.
After graduation, Gioia received a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, where he graduated with first class honors. He then received an MBA from Stanford University.
Gioia has enjoyed successes in the worlds of music, writing and business. In the business world, Gioia has consulted to Fortune 500 companies while working for McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group. He helped Sola International complete an LBO and IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1990s. He has undertaken business projects in 25 countries on five continents, and has managed large businesses (up to $200 million in revenues).
But Gioia is best known for his activities in the jazz world. He worked with Stanford's Department of Music in the 1980s to establish a formal jazz studies program, and served on the faculty alongside artist-in-residence Stan Getz, for several years. Around this time, Gioia's first book was published by Oxford University Press, The Imperfect Art, which was awarded the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and was named a “Jazz Book of the Century” by Jazz Educators Journal. Gioia released his first recording as a jazz pianist a few months later -- The End of the
Open Road, a trio recording with Eddie Moore and Larry Grenadier – and received airplay on more than 500 radio stations in the US. Gioia also produced a series of recordings featuring other West Coast jazz musicians. Gioia has since recorded two more CDs, Tango Cool and The City is a Chinese Vase.
Gioia’s follow-up book for Oxford University Press, West Coast Jazz, is frequently acknowledged as one of the classics of the jazz literature. West Coast Jazz was re-issued in an expanded edition by University of California Press in 1998 and remains the definitive work on the subject.
Gioia's current interests cover a wide range of areas. He is composing a series of solo piano pieces that draw both from jazz and classical music traditions. He also reviews contemporary fiction for various periodicals and his writing on books can be found at his web sites
www.greatbooksguide.com, www.fractiousfiction.com, www.thenewcanon.com, www.postmodernmystery.com and
www.conceptualfiction.com.
Sponsored by the Department of Music, and the Honors Program
Sources:
http://tedgioia.com/TedGioiaBio.html
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Songs-History-Ted-Gioia/dp/0199357579
Published on February 23, 2017