Returning to Charlie Haden, Jazz and Transcendence

TODAY I have been trying to move on to other things, but can’t get the memory of last night’s Charlie Haden/ Liberation Music Orchestra concert out of my mind. There are too many things to contemplate here, but let me offer a few stray thoughts.

Overall: While this night was by no means perfect – there were minor technical problems early on, the musician most of us had come to see was in such poor health he only played one song, there was a point or two where I was not sure ANYONE was going to play anything – it was also as powerful a jazz show as I’ve seen in almost 25 years of eagerly attending them.

The concert, which included only a few pieces, including a long “America” medley accidentally chopped into two pieces, offered great songs, great solos, and perhaps the finest arrangements I have ever seen at a jazz show. (These, with a full range of horns, were by Carla Bley, who sadly did not attend.) It was a show in which almost every note was played by someone you’d never heard of – the group was made up of students and alums from the jazz program Haden founded at CalArts – but nearly all of his was moving and persuasive. Some of it truly kicked ass.

Soon after I moved to Los Angeles in 1997, I attended a show at the old Jazz Bakery. I’m not sure who the artist was, maybe Brad Mehldau. In any case, I saw Haden casually standing around the audience that night and thought, Wow, I have really arrived at a major cultural center. (I was too cowed to introduce myself.) My friend the jazz critic Ted Gioia had a similar experience a few decades before. “I still recall the first time I heard him, when I was a college freshman,” Ted told me. “He was playing with Keith Jarrett at Oakland's Paramount Theater.  I thought then (and still believe it): Haden has the most beautiful bass tone in the history of jazz.”

It’s impossible, of course, to separate musical performances from the circumstances around them, and that goes double for last night’s gig. Live shows are always “you had to be there” events; this sense of the fleeting moment is amplified when you have a major artist who we may never see perform again, as may be the case with Haden. When I said as much yesterday, he tweeted back, Thanks 4 the nod Scott,but  I'm gonna make sure it's not my last hurrah but another hurrah in a long life! Hope u'll b there. Of course, this is a prediction about which I will very happily be proven wrong. But Haden’s health problems – a return of his childhood polio – are serious. (He has neither performed live nor eaten solid food in two years, I think.)

Haden came out at the beginning of the show, along with his young group. There was a bit of fussing with mic placement and other things. His cherubic smile is still there, and his storytelling is undiminished. (I meant this both to his anecdotes and his ability to “tell my story,” as he described it, on his double bass.) He walks with a cane, conducted the pieces rather than played them, and seemed to lose his place while speaking a few times. Nonetheless, we got a sense of a very strong personality, and someone whose love of music burns as strong as ever. He spoke about his friendship with Scott LaFaro, the Bill Evans Trio bassist who died very young in a car accident (one of very few bassists whose solos could be as lyrical as Haden’s) and Jim Hall, the graceful and understated guitarist who had died earlier in the day, and the difficulty of making sense of death. He also described his condition a bit, offering “Fuck polio!”

Chris Barton of the LA Times wrote in his review that it was "a night so fraught with the shadow of that unwelcome guest artist who can sit in at any moment: Time."

There is another aspect to the legacy of Charlie Haden: When he moved out to Los Angeles in the 1950s to seek out the jazz pianist Hampton Hawes, he made a permanent difference in the musical life of this city. CalArts jazz program is part of it. But the whole Haden clan adds up to about as substantial a musical family as we’ve ever seen. Haden’s kids – Rachel, Tanya, Petra and Josh – have, between them been part of That Dog, The Decemberists, the Rentals, Spain, and a good number of solo projects. (There are probably only a handful of us who listen with equal ardor to Haden’s playing with Ornette Coleman, Petra’s all-vocal reimagining of the early Who, Josh’s “slowcore” band Spain, and so on, but I am glad to have them all part of Southland musical life. Let me add: Spain, which recently reformed, shows how the aesthetics of jazz and a certain kind of nuanced, VU-ish rock can be combined in a way far richer than most over-emphatic, jive-ass fusion: They remain gripping and majorly underrated.)

The night, in short, left me feeling that jazz has a future, a subject I go back and forth on. The Liberation Music Orchestra organized for the show should stay together and, if possible, tour. Any kind of big band, perhaps especially an unconventional one, is hard to sustain economically. The show also reminded me how conducive a space to acoustic jazz REDCAT can be – with great acoustics and 230 or so seats, it’s the perfect size. The numbers are hard when you have a dozen or so people onstage and only a few hundred in the audience. But musically it was pure heaven.

The concert opened with the anthem of the African National Congress (in honor of Mandela), included the Bowie/Metheny “This is Not America” (which has never sounded so good), Coleman’s “Skies of America,” “Amazing Grace,” and closed with an encore of the Miles/Evans tune “Blue in Green.” For the final tune, Haden picked up his bass – we’d been told not to expect this – and played as deep and soulful a bass part as I can imagine. Despite being physically rickety, the music is still coursing through him and seemed to give him new strength.

Despite having listened to many Haden performances from the last half-century, and having seen him play a bunch of times, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him speak. Given my genial image of him, it was startling to hear his political rants – he’s a longtime lefty and anti-racist -- onstage anecdotes and thoughts on nature and music: He came across like a ‘50s Beat crossed with an ornery mountain man, appropriately enough for a guy from the Ozarks. His vocal chords are paralyzed, so at times it was hard to make out what he was saying, but I hope Haden has been taking notes on his life and music. There is clearly much fight left in this country boy.

Let me close with a rant of my own, or rather, by an art critic I admire. Jed Perl’s recent piece in The New Republic describes a process that is reshaping the world of visual art, or at least, its meaning during the market boom. It is not the neglect of the art, but rather the wrong kind of attention. As he writes:

Among the most revolting sports favored by the super-rich is the devaluation of any reasonable sense of value. At Christie’s and Sotheby’s some of the wealthiest members of society, the people who can’t believe in anything until it’s been monetized, are trashing one of our last hopes for transcendence. They don’t know the difference between avidity and avarice. Why drink an excellent $30 or $50 bottle of wine when you can pour a $500 or $1000 bottle down your throat? Why buy a magnificent $20,000 or $1 million painting when you can spend $50 or $100 million and really impress friends and enemies alike?

I think Perl is right, by the way, and my book, Creative Destruction, which comes out next year, concerns itself with some of these matters. And it’s not just the plutocracy: The cultural left, which is where I usually find myself, has run down the possibility of the arts as a holy space at least as far back as Warhol and Derrida. The irrelevance or “complicity” of culture has become an unexpected spot where right and left often meet.

But I must also add: Whether this is the last time any of us see Charlie Haden pick up the bass, or if he plays for another decade, and whatever the concert’s little rough spots, last night was quite clearly -- for many of us assembled -- a night of transcendence achieved.

(Photo credits: First by Steve Hochman, others by Steve Gunther, all REDCAT 10 December 2013)

Celebrating Charlie Haden

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TUESDAY night in Los Angeles will see both a celebratory and a sad occasion: The jazz titan Charlie Haden – the lyrical bass player, free-jazz pioneer, crucial collaborator to Ornette Coleman and others, father to a four Los Angeles indie rockers, founder of CalArts jazz program – will lead his Liberation Music Orchestra at REDCAT. It has special music since this group – which Haden began in 1969 – was dedicated to music of the Spanish Civil War, Latin American independence and South Africa’s fight for justice. The REDCAT show’s arrangements were made by the jazz composer Carla Bley, who played a major role in the original group.

The bad news is that this may be the last-ever public appearance by Haden, whohas been very sick. He will pay with the group if he is physically able, but he may simply appear for a last hurrah from the Southland’s jazz community.

I’ve been listening to Haden – first, I think, on Coleman’s Change of the Century, then on dates he led, like his Quartet West LPs and his Montreal dates – since I got into jazz two decades ago. He’s collaborated with more of my favorite artists – Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau, Paul Motian, Lee Konitz, Hank Jones, Kenny Barron, many others – than just about anyone I can think of. He’s taught a number of young musicians I know and admire, and the Haden triplets and Josh Haden (leader of the ethereal band Spain) are among the cream of LA’s rock subculture.

Haden, who grew up in a country-music family in the Ozark Mountains, and whose basslines still offer songlike lines and a country twang, contracted polio as a teenager, and he is now suffering, in his 70s, from post-polio syndrome.

At this point, it’s hard for me to contemplate the Southland jazzworld without Charlie Haden. So I won’t. I urge everyone who loves Haden’s music, and the numerous traditions that intersect in his work and life, to come out to REDCAT tomorrow and blow the roof off the place.

The Genius of James Booker

IT'S long been something of a cliché to talk about what a head-spinning musical and cultural melting pot New Orleans is. But there’s no other way to frame the protean New Orleans pianist James Booker (1939-‘83), who is very near the top of my list of most individual/ accomplished musician who very few people know about. His musical vocabulary was an odd blend of bordello and concert hall: He didn’t sit squarely in any tradition but drew from the blues, gospel, funk, jazz and classical piano (especially Chopin; an 18-year-old Booker met Arthur Rubinstein and knocked him out with his playing). Booker’s long, improvised piece went in all kinds of directions and reminds me of the old phrase, “the sound of surprise.”

My all-time favorite of his is a solo live album recorded at his hometown's Maple Club in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s called Resurrection of the Bayou Maharajah. (If I may sound 20th century for a moment, I looked for that record in half the store -- in blues, R&B, jazz, etc. -- before a helpful clerk told me it was in the "New Orleans" section.)

But nearly as good – and to some, the great Booker album – is the 1982 studio release Classified, which Rounder has just reissued with a bunch of lost material.

Classified: Remixed and Expanded is not quite as rambling and ornery as the live stuff, but he shows off his tremendous range and the weird melange he made of it all. You get Doc Pomus’ “Lonely Avenue,” Allen Toussaint’s “All These Things,” a (new) medley that includes “Papa Was a Rascal,” a lovely interpretation of the jazz standard “Angel Eyes,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” and on and on. You hear his roots in Professor Longhair, and you hear how deep he went on his own trip.

Much of it is solo, with a saxophone, bass and drums on some tracks.

His life is a very long story as well, and a new documentary, Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius of James Booker, has started to appear on the festival circuit. (I’ve not seen it.) 

Booker – a homosexual who lost his eye attacked by a bodyguard he failed to pay, and whose late-‘60s heroin bust stalled what was a developing career -- generally thought of himself as an R&B musician:

“There is nothing I don’t like about rhythm and blues,” he once said. “The rhythm, makes you dance and the blues make you think.”

Here is a bit from an odd-seeming documentary (note the early-'80s fonts.)

What I hear when I listen to Booker is an unbridled and kind of boundless musical imagination, one in a push-pull of creative tension with his training and discipline. Long may his flag fly.

The End of Jazz?

THIS year -- soon drawing to a close -- has gotten me thinking about the American songbook in a major way. Part of this is because of the publication of Ted Gioia's wonderful The Jazz Standards -- which has shown up on a number of year's best lists, and through which I have whiled away many hours.

Another is the notorious Atlantic article, "The End of Jazz," which is both a review of the book and a larger essay -- intelligently argued, albeit not entirely convincing, I don't think -- about how the disconnection between jazz and the songbook has left them both dead.

The third, perhaps, is my own progress (if you heard me play, you'd know that this is probably the wrong word) as an amateur jazz guitarist, learning various numbers such as "All the Things You Are," "Autumn Leaves," "Chitlins Con Carne," "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," "Blue Bossa," and so on. I've been struck by how inventive, ingenious and musically bottomless these great songs, whether by Jerome Kern or Charles Mingus, remain. How far can you stretch 'em before they break?

And how does the shrinking of the jazz audience connect to my ideas about the crisis of the creative class?

For my latest piece for Salon, I've looked at some of the issues, and crossed them with a look back at jazz over the last year or so. My understanding of some of this mix of good and bad was bolstered by another very fine new book, Marc Myers' social history Why Jazz Happened.

I spoke to Myers, Sonny Rollins, jazz scribe Gary Giddins, head of Nonesuch Records Bob Hurwitz, and others. The question of how jazz can thrive in the future is important to me and I hope I've taken a step into understanding it.

Happy holidays to my readers from The Misread City.

Why Jazz Happened

THE history of an art form is more than just the biography of its exemplars. But you wouldn’t know it by reading most histories of jazz. (I’m speaking here of some books I really like, by the way.) A fresh, engaging new book by Marc Myers, a Wall Street Journal contributor, tells the story so differently than the way we normally hear jazz history that reading it is a kind of unfolding revelation. Even if you know the overall story pretty well.

Why Jazz Happened, published this month on the University of California Press, calls itself the first social history of jazz; it concentrates on structural factors – economic developments, demographic shifts, changes in technology, and so on. We get appearances from Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, but we get recording bans, suburbanization and race riots as well. And it’s told smoothly and often briskly.

Unlike most cultural histories, this one doesn’t overlook the role of the West Coast. (Speaking of the West Coast, RIP to Concord, CA native Dave Brubeck.)

Here’s my exchange with Myers, whose award-winning blog JazzWax is well worth a look as well.

Part of me wonders why it took so long for someone to do this. But: What made you want to write this kind of atypical, outside-in musical history? Did you have a specific historian or historical school in mind as a model?

Most jazz histories have been written from the inside out—meaning the writer’s perspective and conclusions were based largely on the artists and the albums they recorded. Such books don’t often account for external forces or the economic, business, cultural and technological events that took place and had an impact on artists and how they thought and created.

When I was studying history in Columbia University’s graduate program in the 1980s, social history was hot. “What” was important but so was “why,” and “why” was often much more interesting in explaining timelines and outcomes. So whether you were researching the Civil War, Imperialism or the Depression, the facts themselves were essential but so were the socio-economic issues that enabled such events to take place when they did.

I wanted to approach jazz the same way. Instead of treating it as a string of musicians and recordings, I wanted to see what forces outside of jazz caused jazz styles to change so rapidly between 1942 and 1972. By forces, I mean the opportunities that musicians faced and he pressures they faced. What I discovered is that the 10 major styles that surfaced between 1942 and 1972 did so for reasons that went beyond the genius of the artists.

You concentrate mostly on the years 1945 to ’72 – less than three decades across the century-long span of jazz as a distinct musical form.  What made those the key years?

Before 1942, jazz was largely dance and folk music. From the start in 1917—when jazz was first recorded in New York—the music had a practical purpose. Its fast pace and steady tempo was background for those spending a night out in restaurants or ballrooms. And if you liked the music you heard there or on the radio, you bought a phonograph and records. Or jazz was the blues—a folk form imported from the South and interpreted by ever-larger orchestras. There was some jazz improvisation during the period, but not much. 

 

After 1972, jazz becomes a repertory form and remains so today. Musicians specialize in one or more established jazz styles—bebop, hard bop and jazz-fusion, for example. And audiences attend clubs and concerts to hear music that was once played by musicians in their record collections.

But between 1942 and 1972—what I call jazz’s golden three decades—you see the rise of improvisation, composing, arranging and artists with socio-political statements to make. This trend doesn’t happen out of thin air. Unlikely events outside of jazz create opportunities for changes to occur and put economic and social pressures on musicians to re-invent jazz repeatedly.

One of your best chapters, “Suburbia and West Coast Jazz,” is primarily about L.A. in the ‘50s. Why did that time and place seem crucial to the music’s story?

West Coast jazz has long been thought of as a movement led by white musicians who left big bands and settled in California. The laid-back contrapuntal, sound of sextets, septets and octets at the time has been viewed as a byproduct of Gerry Mulligan’s influence after he arrived in Los Angeles in 1952 and formed his piano-less quartet.  

All of this is true to some extent but it doesn’t tell the full story. The suburbs of Los Angeles developed faster than any other part of the country after World War II, resulting in millions of new homes, wider freeways, bigger shopping centers and a white society completely detached from the inner city. With new homes came phonographs and an interest in high fidelity and LPs, which were relatively new. 

Economic segregation was enforced by local police and real estate covenants, which kept blacks grounded in South Central Los Angeles. The result was a white mass culture existing in ever-growing suburban rings around the older city. The expanse of Southern California had little in common with the density and diversity of New York. So the music came out of a different culture and experience fed largely by bliss. Interestingly, widespread drug use in California by jazz musicians at the time didn’t intensify the music.

West Coast jazz isn’t bad or good. It’s just another style that emerged from a different set of environmental factors—like the jazz that came out of New Orleans, Chicago or Kansas City. Certain factors contributed to its development and success. Interestingly, the sound of West Coast jazz owes a great deal to the surf, the longer sunsets and the unbridled optimism that many musicians, particularly white ones, felt at the time.

Your book feels especially fresh on the issue of race. Did the civil rights movement help assemble the coalition of the jazz audience during the good years, and drive it apart – or at least destabilize it – later on?

It’s impossible to study the development of jazz in the second half of the 1950s without considering the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. From the 1920s through the mid-1950s, black musicians who toured the U.S. faced unspeakable indignities, harassment and racial terrorism. Even though many of these artists and bands played in black communities, they had to travel long distances through a racially charged landscape, often at their own peril.

By the late 1940s, the climate started to change rapidly. Baseball starts to become integrated in 1947, the U.S. Armed Forces is integrated in 1948 and music becomes a unifier among teens in the early 1950s with the rise of the 45-rpm and independent radio. The Supreme Court decision made government segregation laws unconstitutional. Which sounded great on paper until it became clear that many parts of the country were continuing their segregationist practices as though nothing had changed. Those who had been assumed racial equality would take place overnight found the civil rights struggle dragging, particularly in the South. 

Throughout the ‘50s, what you hear in the music of Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Horace Silver and virtually all jazz musicians—black and white—is growing frustration with the status quo and a need to express how they felt as individual artists. While not every track recorded during this period is a political statement, the spiritual urgency that surfaced along with the celebration of Africa and other homelands has much to do with the need to be heard.

By the 1960s, racial injustice is still an important issue for many black musicians. But for millions of white and black teens, the Beatles and Motown become more important. Jazz during this period grows increasingly avant-garde—partly a result of jazz musicians’ frustration with shrinking opportunities in clubs and recording studios and the rise of pop-rock and soul, which they found aggravating. Jazz in the 1960s becomes disenfranchised, leaving musicians despondent and angry, which creates schisms between black and white artists and audiences.

The usual critique of a work of social history is that it is somehow deterministic. So I’ll ask: Given all these outside factors – technology, economic and demographic shifts, cultural trends, and so on – could things, with a different cast of characters on the artistic side, ended up differently for jazz?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that someone like Charlie Parker existed in the 15th century and someone like him exists today. What I mean by this is that if recording technology, records, radio, the jukebox and all of the other factors that existed in the 1940s had been around in 1045 and consumers could afford them, someone with a saxophone might have invented bebop back then. 

We know about Parker only because his music was documented, and that was possible only because smaller record labels emerged in the mid-‘40s to capture him. We’re just lucky that Parker was up to speed artistically when these events took place.  

So, it’s my belief that jazz history—like all history—is 50% individuals and 50% conditions. The telephone would not have made any sense in the 1700s. If Alexander Bell invented it then, the phone would likely have been used to hold horseshoes in place or weigh down broadsheets. Artists have nothing to say if no one is listening, and people only listen if the artists’ works are accessible and meaningful. 

The same is true of jazz. Parker, Hawkins, Silver, Clifford Brown and Hank Mobley were motivated to create and recreate the music they make because there were economic incentives and technological developments to do so. Count Basie led quite a few bands from the 1930s through the early 1980s. Each was different because Basie shrewdly re-invented his sound to suit commercial needs. The fundamentals were there—the piano, the swing and soloists. But the arrangers changed as did the soloists, and they were recording what would sell to new audiences.

Your book closes with guarded optimism on how jazz has survived all these decades of tumultuous changes without losing its soul. What are some of the great careers or albums since 1972 – what we might call, borrowing from Arthur Danto on art, jazz after the era of jazz?

Jazz continues today but the re-invention of new jazz styles has pretty much ground to a halt. It’s not that jazz musicians have run out of ideas. There’s just less of an economic incentive to take risks. There’s also nothing to prove by inventing new forms of the music. I suspect that dozens of new jazz styles have surfaced and evaporated since 1972—largely because none of them excited audiences or record labels, or other forms of music were a better investment.

I doubt jazz will ever change at the same rate it did between 1942 and 1972, when roughly 10 major styles surfaced, each one topping the one before it. Why not? First, concert audiences now expect a visual component. Rock and pop concerts deliver music and performance to stimulate excitement. Jazz, like classical, is largely static—musicians on stage playing. Second, universities aren’t putting a premium on teaching jazz and exciting young minds. 

Young music fans have little interest in jazz because they haven’t been exposed to it in schools. I constantly hear of students who don’t really care for jazz because the professors they had were nasty or boring.

Unless jazz musicians today recognizes that they must do what jazz musicians have always done—integrating other contemporary forms of music and re-inventing jazz to say something more exciting and relevant—musicians will always be standing on stage playing the music of someone who died 30 years ago. And unless schools hire teachers and professors who are excited by the social history of jazz—the dramatic story of how jazz came to be and evolved—jazz will remain a classroom elective in which students use the time to text friends. For jazz to reach younger generations, it must be positioned as a dramatic story, not a series of albums.

The Roots of a Jazz Pianist

EVEN as a lover of the jazz standards, when a solo piano disc arrives with all the obvious, shopworn numbers -- "Round Midnight," "All the Things You Are" -- I'm not in a rush to play the damn thing. (Unless it's by, say, Thelonious Monk or Randy Weston.)

So I was knocked out by the nuance and mystery the pianist Kenny Warner summons in his new recording -- called Me, Myself and I -- of mostly long, stretched out solo excursions. They're not as freaky as Keith Jarrett, but have a similar sense of adventure, and played with a Bill Evans-style sensitivity.

Werner and I corresponded for my Influences column in the LA Times. Turns out Joni Mitchell is a bigger force for him than Bill! Here's the story. He's in town this Sunday at the Hollywood Hills salon Jazz @ the A Frame.

UPDATE: Very fine concert at cool series yesterday. Werner was incredible as expected, playing a lot of standards and making some raga-inflected magic on Abbey Lincoln's "Throw it Away."

The surprise for me was drummer Joe LaBarbera, who played with Bill Evans in the pianist's last years... Wow. Sometimes the group got close to the kind of telepathy that the early Evans trio was known for. In any case, Jazz @ the A Frame is a series every music fan should know about. Laurel Canyon isn't just about Jackson Browne and the Doors.

The Jazz Standards

Music history looks different when you track it not by groups or musicians, eras or styles, but by the songs themselves.

That’s part of the fun of Ted Gioia’s new book, The Jazz Standards, which looks at more than 250 songs --. He pays special attention to their origins, the varied way jazz artists have interpreted each one, and a handful of the finest versions of each. (There are a few technical descriptions, but this is not for musicians only.)

This is one of the best browsing books I know, and I’ve spent more time than intended wandering from Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine” to Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” to the traditional “St. James Infirmary,” and wondering what these numbers might have in common. Part of what’s striking is how many great, enduring songs come from goofy movies or minor shows.

Of course, there are songs I would have loved to see in here:  Where’s “Daydream”? “Chitlins Con Carne”? “Born To Be Blue”? I’ve got my fingers crossed for a second volume.

(Disclosure: Ted -- who is the author of West Coast Jazz, Delta Blues, and a blogger on science-fiction and the detective novel -- is a friend and confidante of sorts, and I am named in his acknowledgements.)

Here's our exchange. 

What were your criteria for these songs? Your favorite? The most performed or taught, or some mixture of factors?

When I started work on The Jazz Standards, I knew that somewhere between 200 and 300 songs needed to be covered in the book.   These are the core songs jazz musicians are expected to know, and fans are likely to hear.  I eventually settled on 252 songs for inclusion, and listed more than 2,000 tracks in my recommended listening guide. 

So this isn’t a survey of my favorite standards—although many of these songs are personal favorites.  Nor is it a look at the bestselling jazz performances or even the most frequently recorded.  Some older jazz songs—such as “Fidgety Feet” or “Sweet Sue”—have been recorded more often than “Giant Steps” or “So What,” but aren’t really part of today’s standard repertoire.  Instead, I aimed to put together a guide to the songs that are the core of the standard repertoire in the present day.

The ‘30s was a rich period for Broadway shows, and the ‘40s saw the exploding creativity of bebop, the ‘50s great jazz songwriters like Monk, Mingus and Miles Davis.  But looking at these songs that speak to us in the 21st century, did the lid close at some point? How and why? Any kind of song that seems to succeed since that heyday?

Popular music has grown simpler and simpler over the passing decades.   You could even quantify it.  I’d love to see a statistician measure the change in hits songs since the 1930s.   You could chart the decline in chromaticism, the narrowing range of the melodies, the replacement of wide interval leaps with more predictable whole note steps and repeated notes, or the reduced pace of harmonic movement.   Music has gone on a starvation diet, and the songs often look weak and anemic as a result.

Given this state of affairs, who can be surprised that jazz musicians continue to play the old songs?  Certainly there are still interesting new songs and talented composers out there, but it’s harder and harder to find them.  I listen to new music every day—I’ve listened to more than 500 new albums so far this year—and I’m struck by how well hidden the best recordings are.  The good stuff almost never appears on major labels anymore, and almost never on the radio either.  You need to be determined and persistent to find high quality new songs nowadays.  Most jazz musicians take the path of least resistance:  they play the old standards, and write new songs of their own, but rarely draw on the broader streams of modern popular music.

This comes at a cost, however.  Jazz needs to maintain a vital dialogue with the popular music of the current day, otherwise it risks becoming a museum piece.  I applaud the jazz musicians who are trying to find a way of creating this kind of dialogue.  But can they convince others to join them in this endeavor?   And can they incorporate populist elements in their music without diluting the high standards that, even today, are the pride and joy of the jazz world? Time will tell.  I note with some concern that the list of jazz standards featured in my book isn’t much different than the list someone might have compiled ten or twenty years ago.  That can’t be healthy for the art form. 

Which composer shows up the most often? What musical quality could he summon better than anyone else?

I haven’t done a count, but clearly the great American songwriters—George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers—are well represented, as are important jazz composers such as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. 

Yet as I look at the range of the standard repertoire, I don’t notice many stylistic similarities.  You can’t study this material without marveling over the diversity of this body of work.  And even though I like some of these songs better than others, there are very few works in the standard repertoire that don’t have some redeeming quality or noteworthy hook in their construction. Jazz musicians like smart songs, and the standard repertoire mostly consists of real gems, and only a few fake jewels. 

Is there a musician who seemed to have an individualistic and intuitive sense of the possibilities of a great song – even those that others had neglected or failed to transform? Maybe you could say a word about the way Chet Baker and Sonny Rollins – two very different artists – chose their material.

People who listen to the recommended tracks I list in my book—and by the way, a great Spotify playlist compiled by Jim Higgins (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/entertainment/161618065.html) makes it easy for them to do so—will see the many different ways jazz musicians have put their own distinctive stamp on the music.   Sometimes their interpretation builds on the basic personality of the song, but in other instances a jazz performer will force a song to take on new, unexpected disguises.  Lester Young and Chet Baker might be considered masters of the former approach, building their own renditions on the lyrical ingredients inherent in the composition.  On the other hand, a Sonny Rollins or a Coleman Hawkins erect their own imposing superstructures on the original foundations, sometimes with such boldness and mastery that the original song is turned into something the composer might never have anticipated.  Both approaches are part of the jazz heritage.  In fact, part of the joy of studying this music comes from accepting that there is no one right way of playing it.

Do we learn anything technically by looking en mass at the best or most-played songs? That is, does there seem to be a key or tempo our ear likes best, or some hard-wired rule about not jumping more than a fifth in our favorite melodies, or something?

I’m not sure we can draw conclusions about songs in general based on the jazz standard repertoire.  Most of the songs in the standard repertoire are more complex than your typical pop tune, but even that isn’t a hard and fast rule.  Some standards are simple riff-tunes., not much different than a rock or R&B tune.  Sometimes the song itself is nothing special, but the chord changes serve as a good vehicle for improvisation.  

In general, this body of work tells us more about how jazz musicians can find inspiration almost anywhere—in a movie theme from a forgotten film, from a tune from a failed Broadway show, from some new twist in a song from Brazil or France or wherever.   Studying this music, you learn that jazz musicians are omnivores, able to devour and digest a surprising diversity of raw materials and adapt them to their own purposes.

Do you have a single favorite, after listening to and thinking about hundreds, maybe thousands, of songs? What makes it so perfect?

If I could have composed any standard, and put it up on the shelf like a trophy, I probably would choose Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”  The chords are exquisite and the composition is as sophisticated as any art song in the classical repertoire.  And the words are as daring as they come.  Have you ever heard a love song that presents such a savage denunciation of love?  Is there a more unexpected line in the popular song idiom than “Romance is mush stifling those who strive”?  That’s some heavy stuff.  Yet “Lush Life” also shows a soft underbelly, an extraordinary vulnerability, even as it pretends to give up on love and romance. There are many levels of meaning in this song, and even its title has a double signification. It’s hard to believe that Strayhorn wrote this piece at such a young—part of it when he was perhaps only 17 or 18.   This sounds like a song you would compose after long and painful experience of life’s many vicissitudes.

In the broadest sense: Does jazz need standards, or does a firm canon inhibit the music’s growth?

Any canon is both a blessing and a curse.  You want to hold up the best work for emulation and admiration, and formulating a canon is an essential part of this process.  You can use it as a teaching tool for the young, and an emblem of achievement for the old.  But too much reverence for a historical body of work can be stultifying.  In my book, I aimed to celebrate those who established the standard repertoire, but also acknowledge the contributions of those who tried to subvert it.  The jazz world needs both kinds of practitioners, and fortunately we are still blessed with a few of them.