Ted Gioia
Ted Gioia ( born 1957 in Palo Alto) is an American jazz and blues author, a jazz pianist, composer and musicologist.
Life and work
Gioia grew up as the son of Mexican- Sicilian parents in Hawthorne in the Los Angeles area. He studied English literature at Stanford University ( completion 1979) and Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford ( Bachelor's degree ) and earned his MBA in 1983 at Stanford. While studying at Stanford, he joined as a jazz pianist, taught while still a student, a jazz class at Stanford and wrote for the Stanford Daily. He then worked as an economic adviser, inter alia, McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group. He was involved for example in the 1990s at the LBO and IPO of the optics company Sola International in Menlo Park. Currently (2008) he lives in Plano (Texas), where he works for a management consulting company.
In the 1980s he developed at Stanford, a jazz studies program, in part related to " Artist in Residence" Stan Getz.
Gioia is the author of several jazz books, including a general jazz history and a history of the West Coast Jazz, which is considered the standard work. For "The Imperfect Art", he received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP. He is one of the two chief editors of the Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians. In the 1990s, he increasingly devoted himself to the study of traditional folk music from around the world ( "Work Song" and "Healing Songs" also received the Deems Taylor Award in 2007, a book " Love Songs " in 2008 in preparation). In 2008 his book was published about the Delta blues.
He also writes, inter alia, for the Los Angeles Times in which he was the first published the FBI documents about Alan Lomax in 2006.
As a jazz pianist, he has released three albums, including his debut album "The End of the Open Road " with Larry Grenadier and Eddie Moore.
He is the younger brother of the poet and critic ( and ex- manager of General Foods and chairman of the NEA) Dana Gioia (* 1950).
Writings
- The History of Jazz. Oxford University Press, New York 1997, ISBN 0-19-509081-0.
- The Imperfect Art Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. Oxford University Press, New York, 1988, ISBN 0-19-506328-7.
- West Coast jazz. Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960. Improved remake. University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif. 1998, ISBN 0-520-21729-2.
- Work songs. Duke University Press, Durham 2006, ISBN 0-8223-3726-6.
- Healing songs. Duke University Press, Durham, 2006, ISBN 0-8223-3702-9.
- Delta blues. The life and times of the Mississippi Masters who Revolutionized American music. WWNorton, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-393-06258-8.
- The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the repertoire Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 2012 ISBN 9780199937394.