06/09/2025

The Art of Soulful Listening

Deep attention to listening can boost your relationships

As a teenager, I listened to jazz so deeply that an outsider looking in might have thought that my life depended on it. Looking back, I now realize that the music was nourishment for my very soul.

In my sophomore year of high school in 1979, I had an epiphany while witnessing my peers playing their hearts out at a year-end concert. I had been exposed to jazz through my parents' record collections, but what ignited a spark of musical obsession was being moved by my high school stage band performing a range of sounds and styles, from the fusion of Weather Report to the sophisticated soft-rock-pop of Steely Dan as well as classics by Count Basie and Duke Ellington. After playing alto sax in that very band senior year, I matriculated at Hamilton College, where I minored in Music and for three years hosted a jazz radio show on campus. My life was transformed in April 1984 by the good fortune of playing Duke’s “Squeeze Me But Please Don’t Tease Me” with Ellington alumnus Clark Terry.

Yet the foundation for those pivotal in-person experiences was laid by hours upon hours of listening to jazz on records and the radio in high school. Waking up to the music on WRVR, or listening to cassette tapes with songs like Chick Corea’s “High Wire – The Aerialist,” with a soulfully fluid solo by Joe Farrell ringing in my ears as I walked to the bus stop, I would end the day by tuning into WBGO, where, say, a take of Charlie Parker’s rendition of “Embraceable You” gently transported me into a chromatic dreamland.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Tune Into Leadership.