Ted Gioia: Biography
Ted Gioia is a leading public intellectual, well known for his influential views on music, literature, entertainment, media, and culture. He is the author of 12 books, translated into 11 languages, and writes the popular Substack newsletter The Honest Broker—the most widely-read music newsletter on the platform.
Gioia is especially well known for his efforts in the jazz world—where he has worked as a critic, historian, pianist, composer, educator, and record producer. His book The History of Jazz is the bestselling book on the subject of the 21st century, and is now in its third edition. He is also author of The Jazz Standards, the leading guide to repertoire in the genre.
Gioia has served on the faculty of Stanford University, and is a frequent guest on podcasts, TV, and radio, as well as his own YouTube videos. He has published in many leading newspapers, periodicals, and websites, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Atlantic Lapham's Quarterly, Bookforum, Salon, The Quietus, Smithsonian, The American Scholar, Music Quarterly, and The Hudson Review.
Gioia is recipient of numerous honors, including the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, the Virgil Thomson Award, the Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Journalists Association. Gioia has been called "one of the outstanding music historians in America" by the Dallas Morning News.
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Early Years
Ted Gioia was raised in a Sicilian-Mexican household in Hawthorne, California, a working class neighborhood on the cusp of South-Central Los Angeles. Gioia was valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar at Hawthorne High School, and attended Stanford University as a scholarship student.
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 also a member of Stanford’s College Bowl quiz team, featured on television in the US and overseas, 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 barely out of his teens.
After graduation, Gioia received a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, where he graduated with first class honors. “The year I took a first,” Gioia notes, “there were a dozen Rhodes Scholars in my program who only got a second.” During this period in the UK, Gioia supplemented his scholarship income with money he earned as a jazz pianist. After finishing his Oxford program, Gioia returned to California, where he received an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
Although best known for his music projects, Gioia’s activities have also been notably wide-ranging in the Silicon Valley community, where he is widely recognized as a leading futurist. He 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, negotiated dozens of multimillion dollar deals, and has managed large businesses (up to $200 million in revenues). While working amidst the venture capital community on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, Gioia stood out from the crowd as the “guy with the piano in his office.”
Teaching, Writing & Recording
Gioia joined Stanford's Department of Music in the 1980s, where he worked to establish a formal jazz studies program. During that period, he served on the faculty alongside artist-in-residence Stan Getz. 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’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 reissued in an expanded edition by University of California Press in 1998 and remains the definitive work on the subject.
Gioia also released his first recording as a jazz pianist a few months after the publication of The Imperfect Art. This project, The End of the Open Road, was a trio recording with Eddie Moore and Larry Grenadier, which received airplay on more than 500 radio stations in the US. Gioia also produced a series of recordings featuring other West Coast jazz musicians, including John Handy and Bobby Hutcherson.
Gioia has since recorded two more albums, Tango Cool and The City is a Chinese Vase. His music has an international following, and one of his compositions, “A Sunday Waltz,” was featured in the final season of the popular TV series Better Call Saul.
Music as a Change Agent and Source of Enchantment
At the start of the 1990s, Gioia expanded the scope of his musical activities—declaring that his future work would focus on “the role of music as a source of enchantment and a change agent in human life.”
“This new vision of the life-changing power of music took me on an entirely new course,” Gioia explains. “I needed to dig deeply into primary sources and neglected traditions—and eventually devoted more than 25 years to studying aspects of musicology and music history that are virtually unknown in music academia.”
“Although my focus was music, this work demanded intense research into neuroscience, cognitive psychology, folklore, sociology, anthropology, mythology, spirituality and scriptural traditions, epic and lyrical literature, medieval and Renaissance studies, and the wisdom literature of all the leading ancient cultures, as well as other disciplines. These studies branched off into other fields, and I found myself doing extensive work in, for example, everything from ornithology to shamanism.”
“The end result was extraordinary,” he adds. “I gained, over the course of many years, a totally recalibrated sense of music history—very different from how it is practiced and written about by others.”
This massive research project resulted in the publication of Gioia’s influential ‘song cycle’—namely three books on key areas in which music has transformed human culture: Work Songs (2006), Healing Songs (2006), and Love Songs (2015). Each of these books was honored with the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award.
Gioia’s efforts in redefining the role of music in human life culminated in the publication of his seminal book Music: A Subversive History in 2019. “This is not a survey book, like most other books of the sort,” Gioia emphasizes—“It is a complete reinvention of the field of music history, almost a manifesto.”
“I can't speak highly enough about Music: A Subversive History” writes critic Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. The book has been praised by Robert Christgau, in the Los Angeles Times as “a dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched work of cultural provocation.” Composer Terry Riley calls Gioia “one of the most perceptive writers on music” and praises his new book as “a mind opening and totally engaging read.”
The Honest Broker
With the launch of his popular Substack newsletter The Honest Broker in 2021, Gioia continues to expand both his range and audience. This widely-read online periodical deals expansively with music, media, literature, and contemporary culture.
Today Gioia’s readership is larger than ever, and his goals are also amplified. “I started out as a critic and historian, he explains, “but my priorities are different now. More than anything, I want to have a positive impact on our culture.”