‘Music is the Healing Force of the Universe’; Exploring Aesthetic Attachments and Transformative Listening Practices among Spiritual Jazz Listeners

Sociological inquiry into matters of taste, following the dominant legacy of Bourdieu, has long prioritized the social construction of preferences over the aesthetic qualities of cultural objects – effectively neglecting peoples’ aesthetic experiences. Drawing on insights from the sociology of music, aesthetic theory and musicology, this article examines how listeners relate, or ‘attach themselves’ to aesthetic objects, specifically spiritual jazz. Adopting a practice-theoretical perspective, it examines which conditions are (not) helpful in achieving these attachments, and which meanings and practices characterize them. The core of this approach is synthesized in Antoine Hennion’s statement that ‘beautiful things only offer themselves to those who offer themselves to beautiful things’. Through eight semi-structured interviews with listeners of spiritual jazz, this article distils two distinct listening modes: calm listening and transformative listening. While calm listening is embedded in habitual practices and a conscious and controlled mode, transformative listening pulls listeners out of their engagement with the everyday and renders intense visceral, affective and deeply meaningful experiences. The meaning of these experiences lies in subjecting oneself to the intense sonic structures of spiritual jazz. A crucial precondition to ‘opening oneself up’ to these transformative experiences is the ability of participants to deeply empathize with the music; to perceive and decode an intentionality within it.