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photo via Wikimedia Commons
Jerome Kern, composer of “All the Things You Are” (along with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II)
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Liner Notes to All The Things You Are, a Playlist
You wouldn’t use the word cover
to describe what happens when
Gerry Mulligan on baritone and
Paul Desmond on alto play catch
with the intro of the jazz standard
“All The Things You Are.” Or when
Warne Marsh and Art Pepper take
turns slaloming their saxophones
down its famous slopes, each listening
to the other’s stunts so they can riff
on it next—all the while crisscrossing
the tracks made by previous brilliant
players, some of which also appear
on this playlist of 18 versions
of “All The Things You Are” and
nothing else. —You can play it at parties
and wait a long time before someone
says, Wait, is this the same song again? It is,
and it isn’t. Part of the disguise
is that only two versions include vocals.
Even Ella Fitzgerald can do only so much
with lyrics like “You are the promised kiss
of springtime / that makes the lonely
winter seem warm.” But she swings it, yes
she does. It becomes her song, written
for her tone and inimical scat stylings,
which is what you thought 3.18 minutes
earlier when Sonny Criss took that promised kiss
of springtime on a hair-raising luge-run
down the lonely winter. And that thrill
is about to happen again as Joe Pass picks
up his guitar (though his pace won’t raise
the eyebrows of a school crossing-guard).
—They are all just reinventing the wheel,
but in the most far out night clubs, studios
and woodsheds imaginable. —An invitation
for your own interpretation of Kern
and Hammerstein or any other musical
number or combination that will unlock
all the things you are or at least some of them.
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Click to listen to the poet’s Spotify playlist (preview version) of “All the Things You Are”
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Chuck Sweetman’s career in jazz lasted for six weeks of lessons on the sax, but jazz remains a key source of inspiration. He is senior editor for december magazine. His essays, stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in such places as Verse Daily, River Styx, Poet Lore, Black Warrior Review, and Notre Dame Review. His chapbook of poems, Incorporated, won the 2007 Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize and was consolidated into the book Enterprise, Inc. (2008)
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