Featured Book: The Jazz Ear by Ben Ratliff

Copy at Case Memorial Library
"Next we heard 'Seven Steps to Heaven,' performed live by the Miles Davis Quintet — including Herbie Hancock, George Coleman, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams — in 1964. It is fast and confident, even in its improvised coda; Williams's drum solo crackles like gunfire, and Davis's solo is coolly imperious. 'This is the first record I ever got,' [Pat] Metheny said, as a prologue. 'I got this when I was eleven. My older brother Mike, who's a great trumpet player, had a couple of friends who were starting to get interested in jazz. He brought this record home. I always hear "jazz is something you really have to learn about, and you develop a taste for it, and da da da," that whole rap. But for me, as an eleven-year-old, within thirty seconds of hearing this record' — he snapped his fingers — 'I was down for life. … I know Herbie really well and I know Tony very well too, and I've talked with them about what was actually going down that night. They thought it was one of the worst gigs they'd ever done. But I was listening to Tony here. … It's such an incredibly fresh way of thinking of time. It sums up so much of what that period was" (p. 20).