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American Popular Standards have become a vital part of our cultural heritage.
They are the show tunes of Broadway and Hollywood, which - taken up
by swing bands, jazz singers, and countless other performers of every description
- were for decades the sound of popular music.
Crafted by such talents as Berlin, Gershwin, and Porter, and given voice
by the likes of Sinatra, Holiday and Armstrong, the Standards continue to
challenge each new generation of performers and listeners to master them,
reinterpret them, and make them their own.
Max Morath, a highly acclaimed ragtime musician and recording artist for
the Vanguard and SoloArt labels, is the author of The Road to Ragtime
and contributor to Jazz: A Reader's Companion. He has been heard
on NPR's Performance Today and has appeared on a number of public
television specials.
The author of The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Popular Standards
joins us in a lively conversation and provides a concise history of the
art form commonly known as the "Standard."
Erroll Garner plays
Misty 
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JJM Who was your boyhood hero?
MM I had several heroes of different stripes. My
musical hero when I was a kid was Art Tatum, and of course along with Tatum,
my piano playing heroes were Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Billy Kyle, and by
the time I was a teenager, Nat Cole. Because I started out as a physics,
math and science maven, I was interested in people like Thomas Edison and
Marconi, the founder of radio. That was one of the directions I was going
until I got into this business.
JJM Define for me what a "standard" is.
MM It is a song, words and music, that every
professional musician and singer is supposed to know. It is not totally
generational, because the standards are not about nostalgia. The standards
are about a body of music that has become, over the years, a genre - very
much like opera or country or whatever. We can admit that the boundaries
of the genre are slippery, but we can now look back and say there was a movement
in the United States, in the mid-20th century, that produced a body of work
of an indeterminate number of songs that every musician was supposed to know.
When I was a kid, playing jazz, I would do jobs where a phone rings and on
the other end is a leader that maybe you have never even worked with, who
says , "Hey Max, can you play the Hilton hotel on Saturday night? It pays
fifty bucks. Be there at 8:00. We have six guys." So, you show up and you
don't know these people - never worked with them before. The leader gets
up and says, "Okay, lets open up with "I Got Rhythm," we'll do it in 'C',
and then if we want to do a vocal we'll bring it into 'A' flat." Now, you'd
better know the chord progression, you'd better know the melody, you'd better
know where to go, or you're not going to get called again. That's a standard.
That body of work, as we look back, was the result of not too many composers
and songwriters - maybe a couple dozen major people - the Gershwin Brothers,
Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rogers, and others.
They worked approximately from the period of 1920 to 1960, give or take a
few years on each side, creating this standard body of work that we now call
the "popular standard."
JJM How many songs do you consider to be standards?
MM I think that would have to be subjective. In
the book we limited it to 100. A lot of people have asked, "Those are the
only 100?" Of course not. Ten other musicians would write down 200 others,
and we would overlap on maybe 25 of them. There are several thousand that
could be called standards if they fit the qualifications I just described
- that is you better know them.
JJM In retrospect is there a song that you wish
you had suggested as a standard among your 100?
MM Well, I am sure there is. I am not sure I could
put my finger on it. There were some Harold Arlen songs, for instance, that
I have loved all my life and thought afterwards that maybe should have been
included. We did the book in almost two years, and I started out with about
215 of them, and in the first edit cut it to 150. When the final edit went
to print there were 100, and we just decided that it had to be somewhat
subjective. Sure, maybe there were a dozen of those that are "Max Morath
favorites" and no other musician would necessarily put them in. But there
were certainly others, too, that would be on anybody's list, "Stardust,"
"Body and Soul," "Night and Day," "Blue Skies," "Always," "Ain't Misbehavin'".
JJM These great tunes came from a variety of different
sources, notably musical theater, Broadway and movies. What is Tin Pan Alley?
MM Tin Pan Alley is one of those expressions, that
is used similarly to how we say "Wall Street." when referring to the financial
business. We say "Silicon Valley," and that means the computer business.
We say "Tin Pan Alley," and for a certain period of time from about 1890
to about 1930, it meant the New York music publishing game. The term "Tin
Pan Alley" was supposedly coined in 1905 by a songwriter who was looking
out his window on 28th street, where all the publishers were, and heard all
these lousy pianos playing different tunes on a summer afternoon . He
said the noise sounded like tin pans. I don't know whether that is true or
not, but it is a good story. Therefore, it became one of those terms that
became generic. If you said "Tin Pan Alley," you were supposed to know that
it meant the New York publishing game. "Tin Pan Alley" meant a song that
was written for the market place. It is one of the things I find very interesting
about these composers in this world. These people were pros. They were not
writing for their own voices, they were writing for the marketplace. If it
was a vaudeville act and someone asked for an uptempo tune, the composer
would write something. Or, the songwriter could have been sitting in a cubical
over here on 14th street or 42nd street, writing a tune, and he takes it
out and sells it as if he was in any business. He is selling product. |
5th Ave, New York,
at the time of Tin Pan Alley |
JJM What is a famous Tin Pan Alley song?
MM There are not very many in the book, although
there was a tremendous amount of overlap. Irving Berlin, who was a figure
on Tin Pan Alley, was also writing for reviews for musicals and later, of
course, for films. "It Had to Be You" was not from a show, from a musical
or from a film.
JJM Tin Pan Alley songs were basically manufactured
either for vaudeville or sheet music sales...
MM Yes, the marketplace. Like kids today, they
do an album, they put it on the market, and hope something happens. American
popular music is essentially a business, and one of the things I tried to
put in the book is how economics and technology have been driving the music,
theatre, print and film business since the beginning of the 20th century.
Each generation comes along and writes and composes and creates for the world
they came into. The world that these people came into was the beginning of
the phonograph, the beginning of the radio, and by the 1930's the beginning
of sound on film. Three major breakthroughs that started out as technological
breakthroughs, and then became tremendous economic forces.
JJM Popular standards and radio actually shared
"golden years," didn't they?
MM Yes, they sure did, in addition to movie musicals.
The first movie musical broke through around 1930 when sound on film began
to be perfected. The movie musicals pretty much died in the mid 1950's. Irving
Berlin and Harry Warren and those guys worked within the technology and the
economics of their own time. You look at the biographies of the New York
songwriters, and half of them, it seems, were on the Santa Fe trains headed
for Los Angeles in 1930, and they stayed there. This is what happened to
Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, and Walter Donaldson. George Gershwin hated
California, but he'd go out and do a couple of movies and then come back
and do Broadway. Berlin would go out and do a couple of Fred Astaire flicks.
It was quite a world! I can't emphasize too much that these writers were
craftsmen, this was their job. Richard Rodgers was once asked, "Why
don't you quit?" Rodgers replied, "It's my job. What else am I going to do?"
JJM You devote a chapter in your book to the
songwriters, and the likes of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and
Richard Rodgers dominate the list when it comes to standards. Was there a
"one hit wonder" composer who made the list by virtue of the strength of
his or her one famous standard?
MM Well, I think that there were several.
For instance, "Tenderly," was a massive, beautiful standard that came
along in 1946. The lyricist was Jack Lawrence, who was a pretty well known
guy, and the pianist and composer was Walter Gross, who was certainly well
known in the business, a wonderful pianist and accompanist, but he didn't
have a string of hits. This one was his big hit. Same way if you think about
it with "Fly Me to the Moon," which started out under a different title,
"In Other Words." Bart Howard, wrote that tune - words and music - in
1954. He was a pianist well known around New York as an accompanist to Mabel
Mercer who had this one big hit. But that is the exception to the rule. Most
of the others were people like Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter and Harry
Warren, who turned songs out year after year and they were blessed, most
of them, with longevity. Another tune is "When Your Lover Has Gone," which
has been done by Miles Davis, Carly Simon, Dave McKenna…It was written
by a guy named Einar Swan in 1931, and he died at the age of 36. Well, who
knows what he might have done? He was very active here in New York, he was
in the radio business, the phonograph business. Sure, there were a few
breakthroughs but basically songwriting was a life long game.
Dorothy Fields
Irving Berlin
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JJM Dorothy Fields was one of the few
female composers. How did her style differ from her male counterparts?
MM In the first place, I can certainly say
that Dorothy Fields' lyrics were frankly a hell of a lot better than many
of the others. She somehow had a feel for idiom and getting just the right
phrase in just the right place. "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," "I'm
in the Mood for Love," "The Sunny Side of the Street." Irving Berlin once
said, "If you want to write a successful song, think of a new way to say
'I love you'." When you look at the standards, 75 to 80 percent of them are
love songs. They explore the various attitudes of romantic love, about finding
it, losing it, having the blues over it, being elated over it. "On the Sunny
Side of the Street" is a way to say it. Fields was a total pro. She was writing
until the last year of her life. She and her brother, Herbert, wrote the
book for "Annie Get Your Gun," and that was towards the end of her life.
This was another professional who found good partners, worked with a number
of other composers, and had a wonderful touch. She came from a show business
family - her dad was Lou Fields, one of the great vaudevillians and producers,
and a major force in show business for 30 years. So, she grew up with it.
JJM Talk a little bit about Irving Berlin, and what
he meant to American music.
MM You have to say several things about Berlin.
One is that he was the over-arching master of the form. He changed with the
times. Many other composers of his generation who wrote for Tin Pan Alley
really couldn't change their style. Some of them were very prolific. Charles
K Harris, for example, probably wrote more songs than anybody. Who has ever
heard of any, except for "After The Ball Is Over"? They didn't change but
Berlin changed. He got into the twenties and started writing for the theaters.
He got into the thirties and wrote for Astaire and Rogers in film. In the
forties and fifties he wrote for the big musicals. So, that is the first
thing you have to say about him, that he stayed in there. He lived to be
101, and his career was a good seventy years of productivity. Another thing
you must say about Berlin is that he was the best businessman of the composers.
By the time he was 25 years old, he had a major publishing company and he
owned every word and note that he wrote. That is very unusual in this business.
Berlin owned his own work! We have all heard the horror stories about how
composers had a hit record twenty years ago and now they don't have a nickel.
Not true of Berlin, he controlled his own work. A lot of people would say,
"He must have been a tough old man." You bet he was. He wrote songs that
I know came right from his soul, from his heart. He was very opinionated,
very tough, knew exactly what he wanted to say, and he was always extremely
generous. I just think that he was the master. |
JJM How was Duke Ellington's style of composing
different from other composers of his era?
MM I am glad you are going in the direction of
jazz because that is very important. Ellington, of course, was a real renaissance
man, as a pianist and as a composer. He had immense talent. Many people
say that Ellington used his orchestra as his compositional medium. Other
people sat down and wrote vaudeville specialties or reviews or film scores,
but Ellington, for more years than most, had a working orchestra with the
same musicians. Out of all that massive body of Ellington's work, a number
of standards did emerge. "Sophisticated Lady," "Satin Doll," "Take The A
Train," and many others. I think as the years go by, we are going to look
back more and more at his non-standards and big instrumental work. They will
be compared to Gershwin's "Rhapsody Blue" or "American In Paris," - big works
for orchestra that were not standards, that did not have words, but were
marvelous compositions for that kind of orchestra and that time and place.
We will be going back to them as the years go by. "Satin Doll" and "Take
the 'A' Train," by the way, started out as band pieces, and along came some
lyricists, one of whom was Johnny Mercer, who wrote the lyrics to "Satin
Doll." This is not easy! You take a song that was written as a jump tune
and sit down and try to write words to it, and this is not easy. A lot of
Ellington's things did start out as band pieces, which is unusual. Another
song of that type is "Misty," which was composed by Errol Garner as a piano
piece, but he had a big hit on it instrumentally. Then along came Johnny
Burke, who wrote that marvelous lyric to "Misty." Ella Fitzgerald picked
it up and it became a big vocal hit. But this is highly unusual, it isn't
something that happens all the time.
| JJM What about the intersection of standards
and jazz?
MM We wouldn't have the standards if we didn't
have this music called jazz. They both surfaced in the early 1920's. The
repertoire of jazz musicians to this day is basically the standards. It was
certainly true through the thirties, forties and fifties, and if you look
closely at the tunes that are being played by this great young generation
of jazz musicians who are all in their late thirties these days - Wynton
Marsalis, Scott Hamilton, Howard Alden - they play the standards. They come
back to the standards for reasons that are identifiable but also mysterious.
Why did the great icon of trumpet players, Miles Davis, record so many standards?
The man's style was anything but the style of film music or Broadway music,
but he went back to the standards over and over because they attracted him
and they challenged him. This is what happens with a jazz musician. They
come upon a tune, and they don't care if it was in a Fred Astaire movie or
one that Judy Garland sang in 1938. They look at the tune and think about
chord progression and hear open space where they can do a riff. This is what
brought the jazz musicians to the standards. Often, Louis Armstrong is credited
with having been one of the first to take a pop tune like "I Can't Give You
Anything But Love," and not play exactly what the songwriter wrote. He stated
it maybe once, then he would go have some fun with it, and then the trombone
player is going to do it, and then the clarinet player takes half a chorus,
and then it's the pianist's turn. Then they put it back together and do an
out-chorus on the melody. |
Miles Davis
It Never Entered My Mind
photo by Lee
Tanner |
JJM Would song standards have even survived mid-century
if not for the act of collaboration of the jazz performers of the day?
MM There is no question about that. But here is
one of the things I said was mysterious and something I don't have an answer
to. When we go back to the fact that 98% of what we are calling the standards
were vocal music, how come the life that was given to them by the jazz musicians
was non-vocal but instrumental? Oscar Peterson has recorded every standard
that you have ever heard of. So has Errol Garner. Miles Davis recorded dozens
of standards. The great reed players like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young
did as well. The contemporary guys are doing the same thing. Now, there a
new things coming along, sure, but how come they went back to a body of work
that is essentially to be sung, and then used it as vehicles for instrumental
work? I don't know the answer to that, I can only say that it has something
to do with the fact that in the United States during mid-century, some very
strange and wonderful things were happening. Jazz intersected the standards,
yet with the exception of Ellington and Hoagy Carmichael and one or two others,
the composers weren't jazz musicians, they were Broadway musicians. Richard
Rodgers didn't even like jazz. Berlin was not a musician. He was a wonderful
composer but he just played a little bit of piano. He didn't have any idea
that the jazz musicians would take to his tunes but they did.
Charles Mingus
Boogie Stop Shuffle
photo by Lee
Tanner |
JJM The bassist Charles Mingus was also an
incredible composer. Yet, his jazz musician contemporaries seemed much more
willing to go back and do standards by the likes of Carmichael, Cole Porter
and Richard Rodgers. Why?
MM I would have to say in the first place that
Mingus' compositions are very difficult, very idiosyncratic, and they don't
have any words that I know of.
JJM But if you are a jazz musician, you don't
necessarily need any words, you only require a melodic theme you could then
improvise on…
MM Yes. See, Mingus' work is filled with notes
and you are supposed to play them. Now the essence of the jazz musician,
his approach to his piece of music is "I am going to do what I want to do."
You know, Mingus was great, but musicians would prefer playing a tune like
"Blue Skies" because they had a great idea for a counter melody, and they
wanted to play it their way. Jazz is all about persona. Doing what you want
to do. You have to have a matrix within which to do it. That is where I think
the standards came in and still exist, and that is one of the reasons that
they are going to be around for a long time. |
JJM Is there a standard that is recorded by the
most eclectic array of artists?
MM Well, certainly you would have to go to "Stardust,"
which has been recorded by everybody, including Willie Nelson. "Blue Skies,"
an Irving Berlin tune, has been recorded by a wide range in every discipline.
Tom Waits, Dr. John, Riders In The Sky, Ben Webster, Red Norvo, Frank Sinatra,
Ella Fitzgerald, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Crosby, Stills and Nash…On
Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek," Pete Fountain, Dick Hyman, Doris Day, Peggy Lee.
On "Georgia on My Mind," which is a great Carmichael tune, you have Michael
Bolton, Willie Nelson, Gladys Knight, Ray Charles, Floyd Cramer, and
Mildred Bailey, bless her heart, the unsung hero of the thirties, who did
so much for standards. You just touched on exactly what we are trying to
say here and that is a standard is language that everybody wants to adopt
and make their own. Did Willie Nelson sing "Blue Skies" like Crosby Still
and Nash? No of course not. He imprinted it with his own style.
JJM Given the nature of today's popular music, for
example, that it is generally lacking in melody, what special challenges
do modern day Broadway writers face? In other words, to appeal to a younger
audience who grows up with rhythmic based music and one seemingly programmed
with shorter attention spans, what kind of challenges do Broadway writers
have?
MM Well, Broadway writers are trying to sound like
Andrew Lloyd Weber. That is ok, there has always been a leader. The greatest
living Broadway composer is Stephen Sondhiem, who has set a whole new set
of parameters for what is good on Broadway. His is a very broad, extensive,
literate kind of music. Our music and our popular culture is always generational.
There is no reason why every generation should love what the last generation
did. The things that last, the separating of the weak from the strong are
good things. Nobody could even remember Scott Joplin for eighty years until
he was finally rediscovered. I think that the kids today or even in the last
twenty or thirty years have been in a different musical world. As we said
earlier, they answered to the technical and economic demands of their time.
I have always figured rock and roll would not have started without multi-track
tape and semi-conductors. It had to be a studio sound and that couldn't have
happened until we had those technological breakthroughs. The kids starting
in the sixties started to write for that market place. One of the big things
that happened, and one of the things that helped us to delineate the early
sixties as sort of the ending point of the standards, was that the next
generation - led by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, James Taylor,
and Carole King - were writing for themselves, very personal things. They
were making statements. Dylan certainly is the outstanding example of that.
They weren't writing for the market place. Bob Dylan wasn't writing for some
other act to come on and sing his song. No, they were up front with their
idea. The singer/composer became what we look back on as the music of the
last thirty to forty years. It is an entirely different kind of strategy,
nothing less or more talented by those people than the ones that preceeded
them. But they wrote for a different market. Today, the pop world is so
splintered. You look in the trade magazine and there are separate sections
for all these different splintered groups of country, hard rock, rock, soft
rock, jazz, light jazz, and all of those things. Kids starting out today,
it is tough, it has always been tough but now it is tougher.
| JJM What is the most famous standard in your
estimation?
MM Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust," just in terms
of the highest number of recordings over the longest number of years, no
question.
JJM What is your favorite standard?
MM My favorite? Oh gosh, it changes every day,
and I still sit and play them for fun. One of my favorite standards is "Over
The Rainbow." It is one of those things that you play endlessly and don't
know why. Yeah, I will go for that one, for right now.
JJM Is it hard to separate out Judy Garland's recording
of it when you play it?
MM Oh no, I don't hear her voice when I play it
at all. It is a beautiful chord progression, challenging to improvise on
partly because it has some big open spaces. |
Stardust
Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra (1940) |
JJM In your opinion, what is the ultimate recording
of a standard?
MM Gee, that is tough. I would have to say, just
pulling one out of the air, a recording which shows the nature of the standard,
I would go back to when Streisand, in about 1963, took an uptempo depression
song called "Happy Days Are Here Again," and put a jazz feel to it and slowed
it down about a factor of five-to-one, and had a hit record. I mean that
is just one, the one that first came to my mind. That helped make her career,
by the way. It was a breakthrough, it was a great idea and she delivered
it beautifully.
The
NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Popular Standards
by
Max Morath
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Sound Samples
Stardust,
Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra (1940)
Tenderly ,
Bill Evans
Body And Soul , Art Tatum (1938)
Take The 'A' Train , Duke Ellington
Sophisticated Lady , Duke Ellington
Misty,
Erroll Garner (1954)
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Max Morath products at Amazon.com
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Interview took place on June 5, 2002
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If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with conductor, composer Loren Schoenberg.
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Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
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