The American Songbook by van der Merwe Ann;

Author:van der Merwe, Ann;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jazz and the Performance of the American Songbook

These examples highlight some of the myriad ways in which jazz and the American Songbook were intertwined in the 1930s and 1940s. There are many others, too, ranging from the relatively predictable—such as the swing-tinged yet easily recognizable version of “Blue Skies” Benny Goodman recorded early in his career—to the more experimental—such as Dizzy Gillespie’s use of the chord changes for “I Got Rhythm” as the starting point for his “Salt Peanuts,” where the familiar melody is absent. Through all of this exchange, we see how both composition and interpretation were being shaped by people on both sides of the creative coin.

The relationship between jazz and the American Songbook also led to a number of performance conventions that have shaped the recorded history of the standard. Big band instrumentation is perhaps the most obvious of these. Mainstream singers like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett spent much of their time in the recording studio along with ensembles dominated by brass and saxophones. This tradition has continued with more recent crooners such as Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Bublé. To be sure, there are plenty of performances with other kinds of instrumental accompaniment, but the prevalence of big bands in recordings of the American Songbook overall shows yet another way in which jazz and the popular standard are difficult to separate. Similarly, improvised solos have remained an important part of the recorded history of the American Songbook. This aspect of performance history comes straight out of the era when jazz had the most influence on the popular standard, and it is one that continues to link the two phenomena.

Yet the most profound results of the exchange between the world of jazz and the American Songbook may well be those that show just how unbounded these two musical spheres have proven to be. Consider, for example, the 1962 collaboration between Duke Ellington and three violinists: Frenchman Stephane Grappelli, a classically trained Dane named Svend Asmussen, and Ellington’s longtime friend Ray Nance. Finally released on LP record in 1976, their “Jazz Violin Session” includes the Ellington standards “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” This collection of songs performed by musicians from vastly different backgrounds—and featuring an instrument not especially common in the jazz idiom—reveals the true depth of the relationship between the American Songbook and jazz. Unconventional records like this one offer a remarkable testament not only to how jazz and the American Songbook have interacted but also to how their shared repertoire has brought musicians together and enabled them to experiment.

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