NONFICTION - June 18, 1995

THINKING IN JAZZ The Infinite Art of Improvisation by Paul Berliner (University of Chicago Press: 902 pp.; $85.00 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Writing about how to improvize in jazz is a bit like trying to explain how to breathe. Your immediate reaction is that if you need to explain improvisation, you’ve probably never played a horn or listened to what musicians do with a simple melody line. But Paul F. Berliner, an associate professor of ethnomusicology at Northwestern University (seen above playing the horn of a Kudu gazelle), has a way of drawing even the moderately aware listener into a serious discussion of the sort that musicians like to have among themselves. Through personal stories and anecdotes, he plots the learning paths of more than 50 professional musicians in a way that teaches, guides and can sharpen the enjoyment of listening. For those more musically inclined, he includes notation and examples of how these musicians went about the task of learning when to bend notes, alter chordal progressions or otherwise create unique lyric lines from a set of preset notes. Berliner, a trumpet player himself, spent several years interviewing jazz musicians, including several with whom he studied. The book is serious musicological research, but it reads like fun.