The Imperfect Art Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture

Taking a wide-ranging approach rare in jazz criticism, Ted Gioia's brilliant volume draws upon fields as disparate as literary criticism, art history, sociology, and aesthetic philosophy in order to place jazz within the turbulent cultural environment of the twentieth century. He argues that because improvisation--the essence of jazz--must often fail under the pressure of on-the-spot creativity, we should view jazz as an "imperfect art" and base our judgments of it on an "aesthetics of imperfection."
Incorporating the thought of such seminal thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Roland Barthes, The Imperfect Art offers vivid portraits of the giants of jazz and startling insights into this vital musical form and the interaction of society and art.

This stimulating and perceptive study of jazz relates the work of jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman to such subjects as primitivism in the arts, neoclassicism, good and bad taste, improvisation and recordings and the imperfection of art, and aesthetics in general.

Ted Gioia is Lecturer in Jazz Studies at the University of Stanford