The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
Reply to Thread Bookmark Thread
Page 5 of 11 FirstFirst ... 34567 ... LastLast
Posts 101 to 125 of 262
  1. #101

    User Info Menu

    Karl Latham is trying... I like it!

    Day Tripper
    Cinnamon Girl
    Riders On The Storm
    Taxman
    Us And Them
    Low Rider
    Had To Cry Today
    Tomorrow Never Knows

  2.  

    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #102

    User Info Menu

    Interesting definition on new people have

  4. #103

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by pauln
    Karl Latham is trying... I like it!

    Day Tripper
    Cinnamon Girl
    Riders On The Storm
    Taxman
    Us And Them
    Low Rider
    Had To Cry Today
    Tomorrow Never Knows
    I tried Cinnamon Girl. It lacked everything I like about the original. Besides, there is a fine line between instrumental version and lobby music.

  5. #104

    User Info Menu

    Why doesn't anybody play the jazz standards anymore that actually preceded the Great American Song Book? When did you last hear „Rhythm King“, „Coal Black Shine“, „Long, Deep and Wide“, "Up jumped you with Love“, "Who (Stole My Heart Away)", "The Sheik of Araby", "San", or even "Sweet Georgia Brown" by any other than a Dixie band?

    See. Repertoire seems to be a function of style.

  6. #105

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by docsteve
    Why doesn't anybody play the jazz standards anymore that actually preceded the Great American Song Book? When did you last hear „Rhythm King“, „Coal Black Shine“, „Long, Deep and Wide“, "Up jumped you with Love“, "Who (Stole My Heart Away)", "The Sheik of Araby", "San", or even "Sweet Georgia Brown" by any other than a Dixie band?

    See. Repertoire seems to be a function of style.
    The only reason tradders play that stuff is to get one over on the filthy modernists. They’d all rather be playing GASB tunes once the boppers are out the way.

    SWB works great in 7.

    San is a cool tune.

  7. #106

    User Info Menu

    Actually in seriousness and as someone who does know early jazz specialists - a friend of mine has completed recording the Jelly Roll Morton ouvre - an interesting thing is that the authentic popular music of the 1920's can be pretty unfamiliar to a modern audience. People are going to recognise things like Ain't Misbehaving but beyond that there are many tunes that have just dropped out of rep. Not that many people actually listen to 20s music except devotees....

    Even the UK trad jazz fans actually want the '50s version - Midnight in Moscow etc - not the real, recreated thing.

    Which is where the seemingly endless Prohibition parties are funny, because the punters never want 20s music... maybe for 5 minutes. Then they want something much more like this:



    (Gunhild BTW is a legit actual early jazz stylist)

  8. #107

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
    There would have to be an active jazz community for a song to become a standard nowadays, it's too scattered to have a consensus anymore.
    I think this is right. I would add "large" and aslo note that lots of "jazz standards" appeal to people who are not primarily jazz fans. A standard should have appeal beyond the cognescenti.

  9. #108

    User Info Menu

    Bobby Broom

  10. #109

    User Info Menu

    This reads like a 'jazz is for jazz musicians' thread. Given the current size of the jazz audience I guess that may be about it. Putting that aside for the moment..

    There have been several albums based on Beatles songs. I like DiMeola's "All Your Life" and Connie Evingson's "Let It Be Jazz". And there is a lot going on in Joni Mitchell tunes. Herbie Hancock got a mainstream Grammy Album of the Year for "River: The Joni Letters". Of course, even that music is old now.

    There is a Gershwin quote: "True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time". Jazz has to adapt to current music. As awful as many may find current music to be. That may mean sifting through the ashes of the last decade and making arrangements people want to hear. It may mean innovation and creation. Not just blowing over stuff nobody cares about any more.

  11. #110

    User Info Menu

    I was looking at a Jerry Coker book the other day ("Hearin' the Changes" IIRC) and two tunes he mentioned were by Billy Joel: "Just The Way You Are" and "New York State of Mind."

    Not new, but interesting in that they are pop songs that some jazz musicians play. (Donald Fagen has written his share of these too.)

  12. #111

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Spook410
    This reads like a 'jazz is for jazz musicians' thread. Given the current size of the jazz audience I guess that may be about it. Putting that aside for the moment..

    There have been several albums based on Beatles songs. I like DiMeola's "All Your Life" and Connie Evingson's "Let It Be Jazz". And there is a lot going on in Joni Mitchell tunes. Herbie Hancock got a mainstream Grammy Album of the Year for "River: The Joni Letters". Of course, even that music is old now.

    There is a Gershwin quote: "True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time". Jazz has to adapt to current music. As awful as many may find current music to be. That may mean sifting through the ashes of the last decade and making arrangements people want to hear. It may mean innovation and creation. Not just blowing over stuff nobody cares about any more.
    If a musician thinks he plays "Jazz", but the audience thinks he plays something else...who's right and does it matter? Would it depend on the musician's relationship with the audience? Are listeners entitled to have reasonable expectations? When a Jazz musician knows his standards he knows what's Jazz and what's not. He's done his homework and stands on a solid foundation. He can then expand on that legacy and play jazz no one heard before.

    -What If the audience think that a musician plays Jazz, but the musician is confident he's playing something else?
    It's just a matter of expectations. If you care, If you have a contract with the audience.

    As much as I like Gershwin, he never had monopoly to define what's "true music" and what's not. I consider his music true, even though it hardly reflects our time.

    A long time ago "Jazz" was "pop". If you want to make and play contemporary pop, old pop, Rock or R&B, great. -Why would you have to call it Jazz?

    -Why do people play jazz if they don't like it? (I can play hip-hop on my archtop if that's my thing, but it obviously won't be jazz. And it won't be Jazz just because it's unplugged or instrumental or becasue there are real instruments.)

  13. #112

    User Info Menu

    I'd have thought a 'standard' was a tune of long-established popularity. So when we say 'new' standard how long must it have been around to qualify? Is, say, Yesterday a standard?

    Is Happy Birthday a standard???

  14. #113

    User Info Menu

    I think of a standard as a song that musicians will know and could be expected to play without much help.

  15. #114

    User Info Menu

    To get back to the OP question...

    Originally "Jazz" wasn't a separate genre of music. It was a style of playing that was imposed on popular songs. There were no 'jazz' songs; only songs that had been 'jazzed up'. And it was often considered by critics as an obnoxious thing to do to a perfectly good song. Jazz players were less concerned with a beautiful execution of a great song than their own extrapolation of it, and so developed a style of playing the head of the tune as it was written and getting it out of the way as quickly as possible, in order to get to the good part: Extended improvisations over the changes.

    There are probably other examples, but I'll single out Coleman Hawkins' version of Johnny Green's Body and Soul. His version mostly ignored the melody of the song and instead imposed vertical (change-based) improvisation over the changes, and his version of the tune became more popular than the original, much to Johnny Greene's chagrin. I'll bet many people here are more familiar with his 'melody' than Greene's original one, and some who probably think Hawkins' improv IS the original melody.

    The reason this particular song is important is because it was a statement that, for jazz players, the song itself was less significant, less important than their improvisations were. HUGE change, and an unprecedented one. As 'jazz' musicians stared composing 'jazz' songs, the focus was not on songwriting in the conventional, historical sense, but on crafting interesting frameworks to improvise over. Composition became far less important than execution.

    If you look at a jazz standard like "Autumn in New York", and compare it to a jazz standard like "So What" you can observe the movement that happened in 'jazz' composition as a result of the sea-change where improvisation -what a player did with a song- became more important than the song itself. "Autumn in New York" is a beautiful, expertly crafted song that stands on it's own no matter how it is played stylistically, because it's a beautiful song. "So What" is just a lick -barely a lick- over changes, and was never intended to be anything more than a vehicle for improvisation. It does not stand on it's own as a beautiful song. Without improv, it's simplistic and boring. You can go through the Real Book and see all those standards fall into two distinct categories: Songs written to be songs, and songs primarily intended as improv vehicles.

    A good song can be a good vehicle for improv, but a good vehicle for improv isn't automatically a good song.

    For a while audiences went along with this, but as jazz 'songs' became less and less song-like, and their purpose, their reason to exist was not to be a good song but simply a good vehicle, and new 'jazz songs' increasingly became more obtuse and the melodies more abstract, "jazz"; now a separate musical genre, was well on it's way to being something akin to papers on particle physics; Scholarly and deep, but also increasingly difficult for a person not intimately familiar with the subject to appreciate.

    Jazz went from being an illegitimate interpretive style, to it's own musical genre, to a musical orthodoxy which can now be studied academically alongside classical music at the Doctorate level. If Jazz Studies students spent more time studying great songwriting, and a lot less time scrutinizing, analyzing and emulating the improvisations of The Great Jazz Icons of Yesteryear, there might be a different understanding of why jazz is no longer popular music.

    Just my opinion....
    Last edited by Rhythmisking; 06-13-2019 at 07:35 PM. Reason: typos

  16. #115

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Litterick
    I think of a standard as a song that musicians will know and could be expected to play without much help.
    Like Happy Birthday :-)

  17. #116

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Rhythmisking
    To get back to the OP question...

    Originally "Jazz" wasn't a separate genre of music. It was a style of playing that was imposed on popular songs. There were no 'jazz' songs; only songs that had been 'jazzed up'. And it was often considered by critics as an obnoxious thing to do to a perfectly good song. Jazz players were less concerned with a beautiful execution of a great song than their own extrapolation of it, and so developed a style of playing the head of the tune as it was written and getting it out of the way as quickly as possible, in order to get to the good part: Extended improvisations over the changes.

    There are probably other examples, but I'll single out Coleman Hawkins' version of Johnny Green's Body and Soul. His version mostly ignored the melody of the song and instead imposed vertical (change-based) improvisation over the changes, and his version of the tune became more popular than the original, much to Johnny Greene's chagrin. I'll bet many people here are more familiar with his 'melody' than Greene's original one, and some who probably think Hawkins' improv IS the original melody.

    The reason this particular song is important is because it was a statement that, for jazz players, the song itself was less significant, less important than their improvisations were. HUGE change, and an unprecedented one. As 'jazz' musicians stared composing 'jazz' songs, the focus was not on songwriting in the conventional, historical sense, but on crafting interesting frameworks to improvise over. Composition became far less important than execution.

    If you look at a jazz standard like "Autumn in New York", and compare it to a jazz standard like "So What" you can observe the movement that happened in 'jazz' composition as a result of the sea-change where improvisation -what a player did with a song- became more important than the song itself. "Autumn in New York" is a beautiful, expertly crafted song that stands on it's own no matter how it is played stylistically, because it's a beautiful song. "So What" is just a lick -barely a lick- over changes, and was never intended to be anything more than a vehicle for improvisation. It does not stand on it's own as a beautiful song. Without improv, it's simplistic and boring. You can go through the Real Book and see all those standards fall into two distinct categories: Songs written to be songs, and songs primarily intended as improv vehicles.

    A good song can be a good vehicle for improv, but a good vehicle for improv isn't automatically a good song.

    For a while audiences went along with this, but as jazz 'songs' became less and less song-like, and their purpose, their reason to exist was not to be a good song but simply a good vehicle, and new 'jazz songs' increasingly became more obtuse and the melodies more abstract, "jazz"; now a separate musical genre, was well on it's way to being something akin to papers on particle physics; Scholarly and deep, but also increasingly difficult for a person not intimately familiar with the subject to appreciate.

    Jazz went from being an illegitimate interpretive style, to it's own musical genre, to a musical orthodoxy which can now be studied academically alongside classical music at the Doctorate level. If Jazz Studies students spent more time studying great songwriting, and a lot less time scrutinizing, analyzing and emulating the improvisations of The Great Jazz Icons of Yesteryear, there might be a different understanding of why jazz is no longer popular music.

    Just my opinion....

    Now that was excellent. Quite right. I do like things that make sense.

  18. #117

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Litterick
    I think of a standard as a song that musicians will know and could be expected to play without much help.
    Like "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC, "Mustang Sally" or "Sweet Home Alabama" etc? All cover-band standards.

    When somebody plays Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark", you'll never hear them being described as a cover band.

    Or maybe by "without much help" you mean "could be played solo on a piano or a guitar without vocals"? In that case I agree. It's one of several criterias for a "Jazz standard"

  19. #118

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Rhythmisking

    If you look at a jazz standard like "Autumn in New York", and compare it to a jazz standard like "So What" you can observe the movement that happened in 'jazz' composition as a result of the sea-change where improvisation -what a player did with a song- became more important than the song itself. "Autumn in New York" is a beautiful, expertly crafted song that stands on it's own no matter how it is played stylistically, because it's a beautiful song. "So What" is just a lick -barely a lick- over changes, and was never intended to be anything more than a vehicle for improvisation. It does not stand on it's own as a beautiful song. Without improv, it's simplistic and boring. You can go through the Real Book and see all those standards fall into two distinct categories: Songs written to be songs, and songs primarily intended as improv vehicles.

    A good song can be a good vehicle for improv, but a good vehicle for improv isn't automatically a good song.

    For a while audiences went along with this, but as jazz 'songs' became less and less song-like, and their purpose, their reason to exist was not to be a good song but simply a good vehicle, and new 'jazz songs' increasingly became more obtuse and the melodies more abstract, "jazz"; now a separate musical genre, was well on it's way to being something akin to papers on particle physics; Scholarly and deep, but also increasingly difficult for a person not intimately familiar with the subject to appreciate.

    Jazz went from being an illegitimate interpretive style, to it's own musical genre, to a musical orthodoxy which can now be studied academically alongside classical music at the Doctorate level. If Jazz Studies students spent more time studying great songwriting, and a lot less time scrutinizing, analyzing and emulating the improvisations of The Great Jazz Icons of Yesteryear, there might be a different understanding of why jazz is no longer popular music.
    Agreed 100%

  20. #119

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Rhythmisking
    To get back to the OP question...

    Originally "Jazz" wasn't a separate genre of music. It was a style of playing that was imposed on popular songs. There were no 'jazz' songs; only songs that had been 'jazzed up'. And it was often considered by critics as an obnoxious thing to do to a perfectly good song. Jazz players were less concerned with a beautiful execution of a great song than their own extrapolation of it, and so developed a style of playing the head of the tune as it was written and getting it out of the way as quickly as possible, in order to get to the good part: Extended improvisations over the changes.

    There are probably other examples, but I'll single out Coleman Hawkins' version of Johnny Green's Body and Soul. His version mostly ignored the melody of the song and instead imposed vertical (change-based) improvisation over the changes, and his version of the tune became more popular than the original, much to Johnny Greene's chagrin. I'll bet many people here are more familiar with his 'melody' than Greene's original one, and some who probably think Hawkins' improv IS the original melody.

    The reason this particular song is important is because it was a statement that, for jazz players, the song itself was less significant, less important than their improvisations were. HUGE change, and an unprecedented one. As 'jazz' musicians stared composing 'jazz' songs, the focus was not on songwriting in the conventional, historical sense, but on crafting interesting frameworks to improvise over. Composition became far less important than execution.

    If you look at a jazz standard like "Autumn in New York", and compare it to a jazz standard like "So What" you can observe the movement that happened in 'jazz' composition as a result of the sea-change where improvisation -what a player did with a song- became more important than the song itself. "Autumn in New York" is a beautiful, expertly crafted song that stands on it's own no matter how it is played stylistically, because it's a beautiful song. "So What" is just a lick -barely a lick- over changes, and was never intended to be anything more than a vehicle for improvisation. It does not stand on it's own as a beautiful song. Without improv, it's simplistic and boring. You can go through the Real Book and see all those standards fall into two distinct categories: Songs written to be songs, and songs primarily intended as improv vehicles.

    A good song can be a good vehicle for improv, but a good vehicle for improv isn't automatically a good song.

    For a while audiences went along with this, but as jazz 'songs' became less and less song-like, and their purpose, their reason to exist was not to be a good song but simply a good vehicle, and new 'jazz songs' increasingly became more obtuse and the melodies more abstract, "jazz"; now a separate musical genre, was well on it's way to being something akin to papers on particle physics; Scholarly and deep, but also increasingly difficult for a person not intimately familiar with the subject to appreciate.

    Jazz went from being an illegitimate interpretive style, to it's own musical genre, to a musical orthodoxy which can now be studied academically alongside classical music at the Doctorate level. If Jazz Studies students spent more time studying great songwriting, and a lot less time scrutinizing, analyzing and emulating the improvisations of The Great Jazz Icons of Yesteryear, there might be a different understanding of why jazz is no longer popular music.

    Just my opinion....
    Yeah I agree with this analysis except historically you are not accurate.

    There were originally such things as jazz tunes and jazz composers. Jelly Roll Morton wrote quite a few of them for instance. Of course today we tend to start with Louis Armstrong’s late 20s revolution of playing on pop songs because not many professional jazz musicians will be expected to know involved march form early jazz tunes like, say, High Society, King Porter Stomp or Fidgety Feet unless they are trad or early jazz specialists.

    So composition was always part of the tradition. More familiar to most jazzers is of course Ellington. The tradition of writing jazz originals can be found throughout the swing era and also of course, the bop era and beyond.

    However I do feel that what this era had was jazz compositions that fundamentally set up a dialog with the popular music of the time, if not forming a part of it. Swing era tunes were often bluesy riff tunes, bop tunes were sardonic and subversive takes on popular swing jam session tunes (drawn from popular music) and so on...

    Contemporary jazz musicians have done this - EST spring mind as a band that referenced the rock and dance music of the time without actually playing pop tunes. And then there are bands like Knower who seem to straddle genres and play both reworked covers and originals.

    So this whole jazz is a verb not a noun thing is a little ahistorical. It’s a useful perspective though I think.

  21. #120

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    ...composition was always part of the tradition. More familiar to most jazzers is of course Ellington. The tradition of writing jazz originals can be found throughout the swing era and also of course, the bop era and beyond.

    However I do feel that what this era had was jazz compositions that fundamentally set up a dialog with the popular music of the time, if not forming a part of it. Swing era tunes were often bluesy riff tunes, bop tunes were sardonic and subversive takes on popular swing jam session tunes (drawn from popular music) and so on...
    Absolutely. The pseudo-historical timeline I laid out wasn't intended to be absolute or even historically accurate, but to describe a general movement through time of the relationship of jazz players and audiences and the often overlooked/underappreciated role of composition.

    There was a time period where jazz was popular, and jazz music was a part of popular music. But my point is that compositions such as the Ellington/Strayhorn tunes; indisputably "jazz songs", were first and foremost beautiful compositions. The compositional intention was primarily to create a beautiful song, not quickly dash off a framework to blow over with melody almost as an afterthought.

    Great iconic jazz musicians from the bop era forward were and are celebrated (and studied) for their improvisations first, and their compositions second -if at all. Certainly exceptions (Ellington) abound; no doubt. But I'm of the opinion that the evolution of jazz as a genre ended up in the weeds (as far as it being popular music) when the importance of song composition fell away under the dazzle and sparkle of expertly executed vertical improvisation.

    I believe a large part of the reason iconic masters such as Parker, Hawkins, Young, etc are perceived as being as great as they are is because their work took place at the overlap of horizontal and vertical improv styles. They grew up and were influenced by players whose improvisations were based on a song's melody and tended to be thematic melody-like lines that moved through changes. As they started formulating their lines referencing the changes more strongly, they still had the foundation of the primacy of a cohesive melodic thread guiding them. As newer, contemporary players study them, they concentrate largely on the chord/scale elements of their playing and also view their own improvisation primarily in terms of scalar relationships to chords, and my assumption is that this is the emphasis of what is generally taught academically in jazz studies: Use the correct patterns over the individual chords as quickly and accurately as possible and bingo, you're playing jazz!

    There's a quote I really like from Herb Alpert in the June issue of Jazz Times. He's talking about his foundation and the selection process for giving out grants. He says "There are two kinds of musicians: first, the guys who play the right notes, who know where they're going and are very precise. You listen to them and you stare out the window because nothing's really happening.Then there are those other guys who are searching for the right notes. The artists we choose are not the beat of the week; they're the ones who took the road less traveled."

  22. #121

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Rhythmisking
    Absolutely. The pseudo-historical timeline I laid out wasn't intended to be absolute or even historically accurate, but to describe a general movement through time of the relationship of jazz players and audiences and the often overlooked/underappreciated role of composition.

    There was a time period where jazz was popular, and jazz music was a part of popular music. But my point is that compositions such as the Ellington/Strayhorn tunes; indisputably "jazz songs", were first and foremost beautiful compositions. The compositional intention was primarily to create a beautiful song, not quickly dash off a framework to blow over with melody almost as an afterthought.

    Great iconic jazz musicians from the bop era forward were and are celebrated (and studied) for their improvisations first, and their compositions second -if at all. Certainly exceptions (Ellington) abound; no doubt. But I'm of the opinion that the evolution of jazz as a genre ended up in the weeds (as far as it being popular music) when the importance of song composition fell away under the dazzle and sparkle of expertly executed vertical improvisation.

    I believe a large part of the reason iconic masters such as Parker, Hawkins, Young, etc are perceived as being as great as they are is because their work took place at the overlap of horizontal and vertical improv styles. They grew up and were influenced by players whose improvisations were based on a song's melody and tended to be thematic melody-like lines that moved through changes. As they started formulating their lines referencing the changes more strongly, they still had the foundation of the primacy of a cohesive melodic thread guiding them. As newer, contemporary players study them, they concentrate largely on the chord/scale elements of their playing and also view their own improvisation primarily in terms of scalar relationships to chords, and my assumption is that this is the emphasis of what is generally taught academically in jazz studies: Use the correct patterns over the individual chords as quickly and accurately as possible and bingo, you're playing jazz!

    There's a quote I really like from Herb Alpert in the June issue of Jazz Times. He's talking about his foundation and the selection process for giving out grants. He says "There are two kinds of musicians: first, the guys who play the right notes, who know where they're going and are very precise. You listen to them and you stare out the window because nothing's really happening.Then there are those other guys who are searching for the right notes. The artists we choose are not the beat of the week; they're the ones who took the road less traveled."
    Jazz became about chord charts, rather than songs.

  23. #122

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Rhythmisking
    There was a time period where jazz was popular, and jazz music was a part of popular music. But my point is that compositions such as the Ellington/Strayhorn tunes; indisputably "jazz songs", were first and foremost beautiful compositions. The compositional intention was primarily to create a beautiful song, not quickly dash off a framework to blow over with melody almost as an afterthought.

    Great iconic jazz musicians from the bop era forward were and are celebrated (and studied) for their improvisations first, and their compositions second -if at all. Certainly exceptions (Ellington) abound; no doubt. But I'm of the opinion that the evolution of jazz as a genre ended up in the weeds (as far as it being popular music) when the importance of song composition fell away under the dazzle and sparkle of expertly executed vertical improvisation.

    I believe a large part of the reason iconic masters such as Parker, Hawkins, Young, etc are perceived as being as great as they are is because their work took place at the overlap of horizontal and vertical improv styles. They grew up and were influenced by players whose improvisations were based on a song's melody and tended to be thematic melody-like lines that moved through changes. As they started formulating their lines referencing the changes more strongly, they still had the foundation of the primacy of a cohesive melodic thread guiding them. As newer, contemporary players study them, they concentrate largely on the chord/scale elements of their playing and also view their own improvisation primarily in terms of scalar relationships to chords, and my assumption is that this is the emphasis of what is generally taught academically in jazz studies: Use the correct patterns over the individual chords as quickly and accurately as possible and bingo, you're playing jazz!
    Well put, I think you are spot on.

    Maybe we could highlight the relationship "composition" vs "execution".

    I've said it before; the best composer is seldom the best instrumentalist even though there are exceptions (or used to be exceptions). The obvious reason being time. We tend to improve in the fields we practice. The more time I spend composing, the less time I have left to practice certain techniques. Also, the more time a person practice scales and patterns, the less time is left to learn new songs or write new songs. The more time I play with the DAW, mixing sounds, the better I become at certain elements of production, but the less time is left for making music as opposed to sound. It's gone so far, people can no longer distinguish sound from music. And people are producing sounds without having any instrument skills. State of the art is actually more about finding new sounds, than about writing music. And as we've already talked about in this thread; A sound can't be a standard (at least not in the context of this thread, but quite possibly in a different meaning).

    For a long, long time, the music industry has relied on specialized roles for different tasks. It was practically never a one man show. A musician has to find his niche, do his thing; Compose, arrange, play, produce etc. If I spread myself to thin, I may not get the edge required, still each and everyone is wearing all these different hats on and off...It helps us see the bigger picture. And I obviously have to develop instrument skills and learn music written by others and study theory in order to develop my own writing.

    Now what if the composer don't get paid for intellectual property? What if the only way to make a living is to execute, to perform on stage or to become some demon producer? What if composition of popular music in the 21st century is synonymous to production, where the producer is using seeds from random singer song writers to get embryos for hooks and where the ultimate goal is to produce a sound?

    What If I have to run my own independent label and wear all hats?...Then there won't be any new standards.
    Last edited by JCat; 06-15-2019 at 06:11 AM.

  24. #123

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by JCat
    Like "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC, "Mustang Sally" or "Sweet Home Alabama" etc? All cover-band standards.

    When somebody plays Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark", you'll never hear them being described as a cover band.

    Or maybe by "without much help" you mean "could be played solo on a piano or a guitar without vocals"? In that case I agree. It's one of several criterias for a "Jazz standard"
    A covers band attempts to recreate the sound the original band makes on the record. Playing a new solo or introducing new instruments probably would not be accepted by the audience, which would expect fidelity to the original. Highway to Hell is guitar music; play it on another instrument at your peril. Skylark, first published as sheet music, has had a long life independent of any one recording: Wikipedia lists twenty-nine 'charted versions'. A musician could be expected to play this song because it is part of the repertoire, it is relatively simple and it does not require specific instruments.

    I am not sure whether "could be played solo on a piano or a guitar without vocals" is one of the criteria for a jazz standard. I expect all standards could be played solo on a piano or guitar without vocals, but equally they could be played on a bassoon or a harp, or sung in Japanese or Czech. Their adaptability helps make them standards, but does not guarantee their success. Other songs, which were just as adaptable, did not catch on.

    Besides, I do not think criteria were ever established. Songs became standards because many people played them. They were published in fake books and recorded by stars, which encouraged more people to play them. Most came from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, Hollywood or the Brill Building. Almost all are American. I doubt whether Autumn Leaves, (written by Joseph Kosma with original lyrics by Jacques Prévert as Les Feuilles mortes for a 1946 French film, Les Portes de la nuit) would have become a standard, had neither Johnny Mercer written lyrics in English, nor Bing Crosby recorded Mercer's version (Roger Williams recorded a 1955 piano version, the only piano instrumental to reach number one on the Billboard chart, so it also meets your rule).

    On Radio New Zealand National, right now, Karen Carpenter is singing Ticket to Ride, accompanied by her brother and an orchestra, one of those covers which is very different from the original and so challenges my theory of standards.

  25. #124

    User Info Menu

    Well isn’t that basically what Mark Ronson did with Version and everyone flipped out?

    Yeah the progression from song to sound design, sums it up.

  26. #125

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by Rhythmisking
    There are probably other examples, but I'll single out Coleman Hawkins' version of Johnny Green's Body and Soul.
    That is indeed a great example. Huge record and Hawkins didn't play the melody straight at all. (He ignored the orchestra behind him too!) But Coleman Hawkins was one of THE greats and not even he was capable of this great a performance every time out.

    I think it was a mistake for most jazz players to think that people would be more interested in their handling of the changes of a standard---"There Will Never Be Another You", ATTYA, whatever---than they would be in hearing the tune played with feeling, followed by a solo that keep that developed that feeling without losing it.

    Here is the seminal Hawkins recording, followed by a straighter take from Monty Alexander, Herb Ellis, and Ray Brown.