By Brent Wheeler
As jazz aficionados, listeners, players, composers we get hung up on popular song. We have "views". Charlie Parker was said to have and certainly plays as if he had a fascination with popular songs ("Slow Boat to China", "How High the Moon", etc). Miles took "Blackbird" - which I have seen described as pop junk - and turned into a beautiful number and a jazz standard. The same can be said for a couple of decades of "light pop" Broadway musical songs - the works of Kern, Porter, the Gershwins, Rogers and Hart.
What do they all have in common? At least this:
- They were and in many cases are popular outside of the jazz idiom
- Jazz musicians pick them up again and again - many are called standards
- Numerous brilliant jazz technicians cut their teeth on them
- Some critics believe they are insufficiently "high brow" to be true jazz
- Some critics believe those who play them are not playing jazz
- Some have only got longevity and fame because jazz "picked them up"
- Pretty much the only jazz a non-jazz listener knows is likely to be a jazz worked pop song
Is this a defense of the pop song? Not necessarily. What it suggests is that there is a healthy tension between pop songs that people know, love, recognize and listen to repeatedly and what jazz participants do. Popular songs seem to make for popular jazz. How many started listening to Coltrane through My Favorite Things and wound up saying Love Supreme was an all time favourite album and probably have a copy of Ascension.
Sneakily it works the other way too. Easy enough to dismiss Bing Crosby as a wonderful popular songster and no more - except for the talent in the John Scott Trotter Orchestra and more than a few jazz inspired works of Bing's that make us a bit cautious about that. Same with Sinartra and more than a few others.
And? Well we should be careful how we treat jazz and pop. We should be careful how we treat the ventures of jazz players into pop and back again. Many of our heroes did and do just this - and it seems to be healthy. It may be a useful way to understand the seemingly winding roads of Louis, Goodman and company, more recently the mid 50s obsession with doing versions of "Some Day My Prince Will Come" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", and most recently what a brilliant pianist like Diana Krall is doing.
