Jazz Makes a "Tune" a "Standard"

The arrangements, improvisations and emotional formations of jazz transmuted the songs of Berlin, Porter, Arlen and company, creating work that continues to move, entertain and inspire us.

The reason the American Songbook became “Great,” and the songs became “standards” is because of jazz. Those tunes by Berlin, Kern, Rodgers, Arlen, Porter and company were plucked from their original Broadway or Hollywood context by jazz performers who introduced the idea that a tune could be transmuted into a musical entity that transcended its initial conception and performance and could be adapted to changing musical aesthetics.

There were three basic tools jazz used to effect the alchemy: First, rhythm. The infusion of swing was crucial. Second, updating the chord structures, along with an emphasis on harmony that allowed the freedom to play with the melodic line (not every composer was happy about this-see Richard Rodgers). Third, a kind of emotional detachment; not that emotion wasn't important in communicating the message of the song through jazz, but its use was more nuanced; there was a pulling back from the heavy-handedness that often weighed down the original versions.

The result was a free-floating musical entity, not bound by the aesthetic strictures of any one era.

There’s a website that lists the most recorded tunes in the jazz canon. [Notice these are almost all 30's and 40's tunes. In fact, in the top 300, there are only a handful that were written after 1950-but that's another story].

1. 1930 Body and Soul
2. 1939 All the Things You Are
3. 1935 Summertime
4. 1944 Round Midnight
5. 1935 I Can't Get Started
6. 1937 My FunnyValentine
7. 1942 Lover Man
8. 1930 What Is This Thing Called Love
9. 1933 Yesterdays
10.1946 Stella By Starlight

You can find tunes on the list with a jazz pedigree: 'Round Midnight,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Caravan,” and some others. However, most of the songs were written for the stage or film. In order to chart the process of transmutation, I'll take a few of these tunes and post the earliest recordings I can find in the original context and compare them with early jazz versions.

The Cole Porter song “What is This Thing Called Love” was introduced and first recorded by Elsie Carlisle in the show Wake Up and Dream. It starts right on the chorus and then goes to the verse and back to the chorus. The song has a bit of a Middle Eastern or Latin tinge and there’s a trumpet solo which simply states the melody. Carlisle is noted as a “Popular Comedienne,” and she delivers the tune in the musical comedy style of the day,

This is a jazz version, also from 1929, recorded in London with a mixed British-American group. It’s in a peppier dance tempo and there’s a fair amount of improvisation. The vocal is “crooned,” in the style of the day, but the obligattos behind the vocal and the solos explore a new area for growth and expansion.

Body and Soul, written by Johnny Green for Gertrude Lawrence, was recorded by Helen Morgan in 1930, the same year it was written. The vocal has a rubato, recitatif quality, with plenty of vibrato. It fits comfortably in the stylistic parameters of the era-post-Parlor Music, with a bit of art song harmony and the heightened emotion of European cabaret. Morgan does the verse (the first section of the song before the chorus), which most jazz versions don't include-unfortunate, from my perspective, as it’s a nice piece of writing.

Louis Armstrong also recorded Body and Soul in 1930. Right away we have the parallel universe of jazz made manifest. The Armstrong version is clearly a dance record, with a steady swing rhythm section. He approaches the tune with some measure of emotional commitment, but he completely displaces the melody rhythmically and his rendition, both vocally and on his horn, opens onto a different world than that represented by Morgan's version.

The song “All The Things You Are” was written for the musical Very Warm for May. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein wrote it as a duet for soprano and baritone, performed in an essentially operatic style, with accompaniment by a large chorus and orchestra.

The song was lovely in its fashion, but was completely rooted in one particular era and style: Broadway Musical-shading-toward Light Opera. Kern marked the chorus a "Burthen," and "cantabile," (singable). These are archaic and/or fancified terms, reflecting Kern's roots in 1910's musical theatre. The terms may also allude to the almost Baroque way the song cycles through various keys.

This is the way it would have been performed in 1939 (as produced in a later re-creation).

The history of the relationship between this tune and jazz is long. I once thought it was also perplexing, because jazz versions were released before the show opened. Apparently, though, this was not unheard of, as song pluggers sometimes got a jump start by peddling newly published music before the show had opened.

The Dorsey version, in Fox Trot tempo, starts out with a semi-symphonic opening and a new intro, not the original. Dorsey then warmly states the melody on trombone. The band plays a sweet-not hot-version, sticking close to the original. The vocalist, Jack Leonard, brings a lot of vibrato, but some rhythmic freedom to the melody. There is some clarinet obligato work, but overall, little improvisation.

The Shaw version is slightly slower. As with the Dorsey version, a new short intro was written for the arrangement with big brass chords and a low-key piano. Shaw enters on clarinet with a solo which is not a full-out improvisation, but he uses less vibrato than Dorsey and more rhythmic alteration and note bending. Vocalist Helen Forrest is more clearly coming more from the Louis Armstrong-Billie Holiday direction than Leonard-less vibrato, small shakes at the end of a phrase, just a small catch in her voice. Her chorus, along with Shaw's are great illustrations of how jazz claims source material and makes it its own.

The Bebop revolution began right after the versions above and one of the changes Bop wrought with the tune was to add an opening, also often used as a closer. Its creator is not clear. It’s the same as a slow riff in “Good Jelly Blues,” played by Billy Eckstine’s orchestra in 1944. Dizzy Gillespie was in that band and his 1945 recording with Parker of “All The Things You Are” uses a sped-up version of that riff. Here we have Charlie Parker on alto, Gillespie on trumpet, Clyde Hart, piano, Remo Palmieri, guitar, Slam Stewart, bass, Cozy Cole on drums.

Another Bop era twist was to construct new melodies on a song’s chord changes, called a contrafact, as a way of avoiding royalty payments. Through the years, jazzmen wrote new melodies for “All the Things You Are” chord changes, including "Bird of Paradise" by Charlie Parker, "Prince Albert" by Kenny Dorham and "Boston Bernie" by Dexter Gordon.

Charles Mingus retitled it "All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife was Your Mother." It brings the tune a long way from Very Warm for May.

“Summertime” was originally composed as a recurring aria by George Gershwin and lyricist DuBose Heyward for the opera "Porgy and Bess"

It is sung here by the originator of the Bess role, Anne Brown. Even though it's a later recording, it’s her singing and it’s stylistically what would have been recorded years earlier. It’s “large,” in the operatic sense, with choral background and orchestra playing a lean and sophisticated harmony behind Brown’s expressive soprano.

Jazz has taken the song in a wide variety of tempos and re-harmonized it in some pretty radical ways. Billie Holiday's lightly swinging 1936 version is night and day to Anne Brown’s version. We start with trumpet growling on plunger mute and go from there. Note that the original interpetation of the lyrics is elegiac, while Holiday's version brings out their innate optimism.

It’s interesting to note that usually jazz versions built off the original harmony of a song by changing cliched approaches and adding passing and substitute chords. Not with “Summertime.” Jazz versions almost always strip down Gershwin's augmented chords with their whole tone free-floating feeling and make the harmony fit more squarely into the category of “blues.”

One of my personal favorite versions is from the 1958 “Porgy and Bess” collaboration between Miles Davis and Gil Evans. Echoes of the original remain, while a new space is explored.