The Jazz Standard

History, theory and practice

José Maria Gonçalves Pereira

Artistic Research Report

Supervisor: Dick de Graaf

Main Subject Teacher: Simon Rigter

CODARTS
June 2013
1
Index

I - Introduction

1. Motor and Motivation

2. Research Question
3. Goal

II - Media Review

II - Practice Review

Intervention Cycle 1 : “All The Things You Are”

Intervention Cycle 2: “Embraceable You”

III - Discussion Results and Outcomes

IV - Bibliography

V - Appendix list

Cover:

2
Introduction
Motor and Motivation

My musical path has led me to a deep appreciation of the music created in the twentieth
century by the fusion of western and african musical traditions, resulting in a rich
combination of rhythm, melody and harmony, in which I think there is still a lot to be done
both in deepening that language and bringing it to a larger audience in order to help rescue
our society from the universe of poor music it lives immersed in.
Indeed, in the first four to five decades of the past century, popular music became an
industry that produced one of the main ingredients to the fusion that we call jazz. Great
composers dedicated themselves to the art of writing songs that were both beautiful and
catchy to the popular ear. These songs became the main vehicle for jazz improvisation and
remain, to this day, the prime subject of mainstream jazz instruction and creation.
Paradoxically, the normal jazz student and musician doesn’t seem to know a lot about this
body of repertoire, unlike his classical counterpart.

Research Question

How can I improve my interpretation of the Standards* by researching and analysing central aspects such as
original melody, harmony, orchestration, verse, lyrics and background information including each composer’s
unique features, context for which the songs were written and their popular versions?

*Standards: Repertoire of common practice among jazz musicians, consisting of songs selected from the
American Songbook from which I will focus on All the Things You Are by Jerome Kern and Embraceable You
by George Gershwin.

Goal

• To develop a deeper understanding of the repertoire that is and will be a central part of my
musical life.
• To build my own list of repertoire including the songs that I know already, a list (informed
by my teacher and pears) of the songs I will learn.
• To gather harmonic and other theoretical knowledge and apply it to the Standards.
• To make more informed decisions in arranging and overall approach to the Standards.
• To improvise with a deeper connection to the original compositions.
• To break away from the mainstream conventions of “jam session-type” Standards playing.

3
Media Review

Becoming a Jazz musician , I eventually saw myself immersed in a musical tradition whose
fundamental aspects remained mysterious to me.
The simplest terms to which I can reduce this confusion are:

"The classical musician plays classical pieces, the rock musician plays rock tunes, hence the Jazz
musician devotes himself to the interpretation of jazz pieces".

This conclusion is at least partially wrong, as one can verify empirically by picking up any Charlie
Parker recording and listing the composers of the tunes performed. Furthermore, even the ones
authored by Charlie Parker or his peers are predominantly impositions of new melodies over older
songs. Even in later periods, the practice of including one or two standards among an LP of originals
remained, and let us keep in mind that the recorded portion of jazz music gives a limited account for
the actual jazz practice of the day.

So we are left with the puzzling notion that whereas the classical musician has no problem in
defining and researching, at least in broad terms, the body of repertoire to which he or she should
be devoted to, the jazz musician's relationship with repertoire is a less straightforward one, since, for
reasons I shall later expose, traditionally, Jazz draws much of its repertoire from an external source.
External, in the sense that most of the tunes played by jazz musicians were neither composed by or
for jazz musicians.

European African
Jazz
Harmony Rythm

Standards

A somewhat simplistic view of the role of Standards as the medium of influence of European harmony in jazz
music.

I propose that this paradox actually represents the great strength of jazz music as the great unifier of
seemingly irreconcilable paradigms: western harmony and African rhythm; erudite and popular
culture.

Understanding how Jazz musicians of the past took on the task of interpreting popular songs and
progressively turning them into the lingua Franca of their music seems to me very important in order
to assist me in my path as a jazz professional, student and lover.

Let us then begin by tracing the origins of the American Popular Song of the 20th century and
investigating its unique characteristics.

4
American Popular Song: A brief history and analisys.

Songs popular in America where, at first, an import from Europe.

However, the rise in popularity of the piano, manufactured in America from 1813 increased the
demand for songs, easy and entertaining peaces of music to be played by amateurs at home or in
public. Songwriters of this time, rather than dedicated professionals, were often performers,
publishers, agents, as the economic returns from only writing the songs were small. Copyright laws,
enacted as early as 1790, where only in 1830 extended to music, creating an incentive for the
musically gifted to take on the profession of songwriting more seriously.

The first American songwriters

Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is thought to be the first American to make a living solely from writing
songs. His hit "Oh, Susana" is not only testament to the durability of his work but of also of its novelty
in incorporating European and African elements in a song, making him a pioneer in the truly
American Popular song: the melody is pentatonic, the beat has affinities with that of the polka, it
refers to the banjo, of african origin and portrays the advent of the telegraph and steam machines, it
depicts race, a subject to which Foster later became more sensitive to, urging the performers of his
"blackface" numbers not to play them with a comedic character, but a truthful and compassionate
way.

Foster died short after the emancipation proclamation, to which followed a period of more scarce or
undocumented inovation and integration in popular music: slavery, with all its perversity, was the
established framework of coexistance between blacks and whites in America and the platform for
some cultural and musical miscigenation. With its demise, and the persistance of a racial society, the
two worlds became abruptly disconected and the African influence in popular songs, as observed in
Foster's work was, for a few decades, interrupted.
James A. Blant was the first black songwriter to see his work published, around the last years of the
1870s.

Thus, pioneers like Foster and Blant layed only the foundation of a deep musical revolution that
percipitated between 1885 and the First World War, their popularity encouraging many others to
thread the same path, leading to the rise of a unique American genre of popular song.

Music Halls and Musicals

Meanwhile, in Britain, the urban lower and middle classes found in new Popular music a more
appealing genre of entertainment, as opposed to the "highbrow" erudite genre. As Mike Read
describes "Over time, the singing of songs and the telling of musical tales have become a mainstay
of the entertainment in British drinking establisments, but by this time it was becoming decidedly
more organised, as proprietors began to realise that they could sell the music as well as the alcohol.
An industry had begun (...)", nightly, popular entertainment with Theater and Music. We now have in
place the two main channels for song output: the sheet music market and musical theater.

Alec Wilder points out that songs written for musical theatre were more inovative than the remaining
popular songs (those could also become incorporated in musical-type shows like “revues” but they
are not stage songs per-se). This could be due to the fact that a song for a musical has to deal with
plot, aid in the exposure of the story and have a distinct character that is justified by the plot
situation. For instance, the song “Have You Met Miss Jones” was written to avoid exposing the
acquaintance of two characters. These songs also tend to have a verse: an introduction that
transitions between the action on stage and the musical moment.

5
The Russians

At the end of the 19th century, more than two million Eastern European Jews had settled in the
United States, fleeing from persecution. Half of them were in New York, and while enduring a life
of hardship, kept their deep affinity to music. Irving Berlin was allegedly picked up from singing
on the streets to be a "boomer", who promoted newly written songs for theater audiences. He
would briefly start "writing" his own and became the first Jewish immigrant to achieve success as
a songwriter.
Moshe and Rosa Gershovitz arrived in the 1890s and offered their American born sons Ira and
George a piano in 1910, by the end of the First World War, George's output as a songwriter was
increasing and reaching commercial success, having before studied the classics, harmony and
composition, but also demonstrating an interest for the "modern" styles of the era.
These three pivotal figures were the elite among a vast number of songwriters that worked both
for the hit making industry and for the Broadway producers, the many thousands ( literally, since
some of them wrote many hundreds songs alone ) songs they created, some notable others
mundane, are what people heard on the radio and whistled on the street and that’s what we call
today the Great American Songbook.

I hope to have given, in the previous section, a fair account to the understanding I gained of the complex
roots of the American song and its rise to cultural relevance and ubiquity. The next question was to
investigate, less historically and more musically speaking, HOW the popular song traveled from the
composers pen to the jazz repertoire.

Musical Characteristics of the Popular Song

As previously shown, the songwriters of the first decades of the twentieth century were prolific
enough to create a new style, gradually departing from pre-existent formulas and adopting new
ones, giving it a distinct character, even before the jazz interpreters recorded those songs. Let us
then analyse some of those unique characteristics (for further reading I strongly recomend the
first few chapters of Allen Forte’s “The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Area: 1924-1950”).

Harmonic Language:

1) Assimilation of Decorative Notes The major 6th is the note of choice, regularly added to major
(and some minor) chords, gives a fuller colour to the harmonies.
2) Assimilation of Blue Notes: A very special and uniquely american characteristc, as it derives
from the African American musical tradition. Gershwin was particularly fond of blues derived
harmonies, like the IV7 chord on “Oh Lady be Good”, after the first tonic (with added 6th)
chord.
3) Mode borrowing: Utilizing harmonies from the parallel mode of a key is very common. Example:
the first chords of Night and Day are CbMaj7 (from Eb minor harmonic), Bb7 to Eb Major
(tonic).

Rhytmic Language:

1) Alla breve (duple meter) Looking at most of the original scores, we see the “Alla Breve” (cut
time) symbol. Allen Forte explains this by pointing out that fox-trot and other dances of the time
employ this two-beat bounce. However irregular and syncopated melodies the composers
wrote, they seem to be always accompained by a 1-5 bass pattern that clearly oultlines the cut-
time texture.
2) Syncopation: long strings of syncopated notes of the same value. The “big six” composers
were all masters of insterting seemingly unmusical strings of words (songs had an active role in
story- telling, thus containing an unusual amount of information and detail in the text) in their
songs.
Melodic Language:
1) Self-contained in one octave. Again, for practical purposes, these songs were not to be sung by
operatic interpreters but by broadway singers/actors. Hence, the melodies are, usually,
constrained to a relatively narrow interval, such as one octave or little more.
2) The Apex and Nadir of the melody (highest and lowest tones) are usually carefully placed in
regards to their place in structure and supporting text (good examples are All the Things You Are”
and “Embraceable You”, as we will further study.

From Popular Song to Jazz Canon - Case Studies

I think we can say that the Jazz tradition and the American Popular song are two currents that draw
heavily from each other. The historical details of more remote times are both two complex and out of
scope of this practice-based research.

Let us only refer that some authors point to the song “Careless Love” by composer W.C. Handy
being the first “standard” to be notably played by an early jazz musician, Buddy Bolden, around the
1900s.

In the early years of jazz, record companies were often eager to decide what songs were to be
recorded by their artists. This started with the first jazz recordings in 1917, when the Original
Dixieland Jass Band recorded "Darktown Strutters' Ball" and "Indiana". The white-controled recording
industry was probably the responsible for this trend in adoption of hits by the jazz recording artists
(Louis Armstrong was the first artist to be given liberty to choose his recorded repertoire).

This trend caught on and jazz, a commercial music at the time, started drawing its repertoire from
the popular hits, now standards.

Following the suggestion of the panel in my Work in Progress exam, I performed a series of case
studies of songs, researching the original version and how these songs were changed through time,
in their treatment by jazz musicians. I selected one song from one of the four major composers:
Berlin, Gershwin, Porter, Kern and substituted the costumary Arlen and Rodgers for Johnny Greene.
While Arlen and Rodgers are definately more influential composers in the popular songwriting
context, I think the compositions of Green (Body and Soul, Out of Nowhere) are more relevant to the
jazz musician.

Selected songs:

How Deep Is the Ocean - Irving Berlin

Night and Day - Cole Porter
Out of Nowhere - Johnny Greene
Embraceable You - George Gershwin
All The Things You Are - Jerome Kern

Note: the last two songs research are both included in the next section since they were object of
more expanded analysis, in my Intervention Cycles.

In these case studies, I selected cornerstone moments that are prone to cause divergence of
interpretations, and analysed them in destinct interpretations

7
How Deep Is The Ocean ( How High is the Sky ) - Irving Berlin
Composed in 1933, it achieved public notoriety through Paul Whiteman’s version.

Bassline of first bars Bridge Closing phrase Ke

y

Original Cm | G+/B | Cm7/Bb | Am7 Eb | Eb7 | Ab9 | % | Eb/Bb | Cm7 F9 | Eb

Version / P. (b5) F7b9 | % | Bb7 | Bb7 G7/B Bb7 | Eb G7
Whiteman 1933

Billie Holiday Walking Bass on Ab7 | % | Db7 | % | Ab/Eb | Bb7 | Ab

(1954) Fm | Gm7(b5) C7b9 | Fm | Bm7 E7 | % | Bbm7 Eb7 | Eb7 | Ab |
Dm7(b5) G7 | Gm7(b5) C7 |

Peter Bernstein Similar to original! Eb7sus4 | % | Ab7sus4 Eb/Bb Eb+/B |Cm7 Eb

A7#11| Ab7sus4 | F7 |
B13 | B/F | Cm F7 | B7 Bb7 | B7alt Bb7 | Ebmaj7

Paul Whiteman’s harmony is almost totally consistent with the original leadsheet, although it
modulates from the instrumental chorus to the singer’s chorus, a common practice at the
time.

On Billie Holliday’s version we observe some of the most common procedures of jazz
alteration. The linear bassline of the first bars is no longer played, in favour of a 4/4 walking
bassline in repeated minor II-V-Is and the characteristic chromatic II-Vs are inserted in the
fifth bar of the bridge, allowing Harry Sweets Edison to embellish the bars in a very idiomatic
way. The last four bars receive a slightly different treatment from the original: although they
retain the Cadential 6/4 chord, they move directly to the double dominant, harmonizing the
melody note as a major nineth: a very characteristic sound of this era.

8
Night and Day - Cole Porter

Opening bars B section Descent from Ke

#IV y

Original Version / Abmaj7 | G7 | C | % | Eb | C | F#m7(b5) | Fm7 C

Fred Astaire | Em7 | F# dim7/
1932 Eb| Dm7 | G7 | C

Joe Henderson Bbmaj7 | A7b5| Dmaj7 | F7 F | Dmaj (#11 on the G#m7(b5) | Gm7 D
1956 | solos) | F#m7 | Fm7
Bb13 | Em7 A7 |
F7 | Bbmaj7 |
A7b5

These two very different versions show a more modern interpretation of a standard that
keeps in touch with its special characteristics. Throughout the theme we observe the
composer’s intent to surprise with the harmonization of the fifth of the key as a major seventh
of bVI. The major third relationship between the key areas of C major and A flat major
reflects the idea in the lyrics that it supports: “Night and Day”, opposites that keep
something in common “You are the one...”(note that Porter authored both music and text!).
Henderson’s harmonization of the A part tonicizes the bVI by adding its secondary
dominant, augmenting its area of influence. On the descent from #IV back to the tonic, the
only change is felt on the solos, where the diminished chord is substituted by a II-V, more
prone to parallel playing.

9
Out of Nowhere - Johnny Greene

Chord on Closing Bars Key

Fourth Bar

Original Cb 7 Fm | AbmMaj7 | Eb/G Adim7/Gb | Fm7 Bb | Eb | Eb

Version / Bing
Crosby 1931

Don Byas 1945 Db 7 (9) Gm | Eb7 | Am7 Bdim/Ab* | Gm7 C7 | F F

Stan Getz Cm7 F7 Am7|Cm7 F7 |Bm7 E7 | Am7 D7 | Gmaj7 G

The very distinctive sound of this song comes largely from the sonority on the fourth bar.
Allen Forte characterizes this chord as a “blues-derived” bVI9 (consistent with the spelling in
the original sheet), but a more traditional view would be to call this an augmented sixth
chord, that normally would approach the V, but in this case reverts directly to I. That’s
consistent with the way teacher Simon Rigter views this chord, as discussed in our lessons,
a D# “double diminished chord” (F-A-C-D# hence the augmented sixth) - in the key of A.
This may seem just a question of terminology but if one views the chord as a F7, one will fail
to see the direct relationship with the key and will be tempted to add a secondary II chord
before it, creating quite an alien sound.

In the closing bars, we observe the seldom played melody note of G natural (key of Eb) over
the IV minor chord: this is another place where the costumary IIm7 - V7 substitution is
unadvisable due to the clash of F# with the melody.

Between the two versions, we see a rather carefull treatment of the “special” chords we
metioned on Byas’ and a more free and “blowing changes” approach on Getz’s.

10
Practice review
There is nowadays, among the jazz community, a group of musicians higly interested in a deep understanding
of the standards and their origins. Barry Harris, legendary pianist is one of the most respected voices in this
field and his discourse in a workshop was actually what first planted in me the idea that would become this
research. In his words

“Most of the standards were written by Russians, Italians, Europeans.

You seldom find a standard that isnʼt correct.
These cats came from here [Europe], they were well versed in theory and brought that to the USA.”

In a local context, the jazz scene of The Hague is particularly keen on jazz tradition and knowledge of
standards, with master pianist Frans Elsen, not only divulging his mastery to his students but having published
the series “Jazzpracticum” and “Jazz Harmony at the Piano”, where he analyses harmonic situations in the
Standards repertoire.

As we have seen, in the past, the rich songs of Gershwin, Porter, Kern were, as popular tunes, ubiquitous in
their time, making their assimilation an organic and informal process, immediately changing and adapting
them into jazz vehicles, substituting some compositional features by vernacular ones.The question then arises,
how does the contemporary jazz musician acquire his repertoire since those tunes are now longer ubiquitous?

Usually they resort to a “fake book”, where the changes are transcribed usually from the jazz interpretations
(not the originals), the verse and lyrics are forgotten and many mistakes are brought along with this
transcription.

Some jazz musicians also started looking into songs that currently inhabit the mainstream airwaves. This path
produced an impact, yet not a paradigm shift: first, of the thousands of songs nowadays produced, only a few
provide the improviser a minimum wealth in melody and harmony; second, popular culture is today much more
fragmented, and people of different backgrounds listen to different genres of music, disqualifying any of them
to pose as a lingua franca the way songs of the 30s and 40s were to the masses.

11
Materials and Methods Network
I began by approaching one of the most played standards in Jazz. It gets picked up so often mostly for being
a challenge, with good “blowing changes”. I selected it to be the centerpiece of my first Intervention Cycle.

Having played it dozens of times in jam sessions and concerts and even in my entrance audition for Codarts, I
was still pretty much in the dark about the piece.

I ended up discovering that it is also a beautiful and complex piece of music, with a deeper meaning and
structure.

First, I researched some history and context:

The song was written by Kern with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein in 1939 for the musical “Very Warm for May”.
This production was actually a faillure, to such extent that the producers enacted a radio version, to attract
audiences. This is a fortunate thing for us, since we then have access to a recording of the original theatrical
cast and band - a rare situation.

A comparison of the leadsheet with the “original” recording put in evidence the fact that the actual score being
played by the musicians was not strictly based on the leadsheet: it is a fully arranged version, with more
counter melodies and slightly different harmony at times. This prompted the question of who actually wrote
what was being played - and I arrived at the figure of the Arranger / Orchestrator and its most renowed
representative at the time: Robert Russell Bennett.
A fairly accomplished composer himself and a student of Nadia Boulanger, Bennett had his career divided
between the concert and Broadway worlds, excelling at both. He worked with virtually all major songwriters
and producers and was said to be able to complete a full musical score in just a few nights. The beautiful
counter-melody we hear on the orchestral verion of “All the Things You Are” comes most likely from his pen.

12
Then, with the aid of Allen Forte’s “The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era”, I referred again to the
original score and analysed melody, harmony and lyrics. Forte’s book is one example of the few books that
approach the standards in the framework of traditional harmony and theory - probably more consistent with the
musical background of those who wrote / arranged the pieces who were, at best, only acquainted with jazz but
not at all jazz musicians.

Being myself a “jazz musician” I sought some knowledge in traditional harmony by taking harmony lessons
with teacher Wobbe Kuiper, following Aldwell and Schachter’s “Harmony and Voice Leading”.

With that I produced the following musical analisys:

(colors unite different voice leading lines)

13
 in the recurring phrase "You Are", we expect "You" to be accented, but "Are"
is accented instead. "You" feels like an appogiatura, and it displaces the whole important note. breaks the pattern
harmony (I comes on bar 4!). This makes sence because the whole "object" of the song is to (we expect B flat)
describe what you ARE. "Are" is also the word on the highest pitch in the melody. lyric describes a rough season (winter),
compared to spring in measure 4
usually badly played in jazz.
 B:
G   ' 5 5 5 5 5 5 B 5 5 5 5 5 5 !B 5 !' '
You are the pro -missed kiss of spring time That makes the lon - ly win ter
- seem long.
Ab: VI II V I IV VII7 IIImaj
  '
 ' ' ' ' '
' '
falling fifth relation makes Bbm
have weight, although in a weak measure.
this reinforces the feeling of harmonic syncopation.
only difference between 1st and 2nd periods.
enhances closure in G Major
(no unresolved lines - G Major is here to stay,
9 or even further, made it's comeback!)

G   ' B: 5 !5 5 5 5 !5 B 5 5 5 5 5 5 !55 !5 5 ! '
You are the breath less hush of ev -ning That trem - bles on the bring of a love - ly song.
Eb: VI II V I IV VII7 IIImaj
   ' ' ' !' '
 ' '
We re-introduce G Major (key of verse, with the lyrics
"brink of a lovely song".
In the verse, we were on the brink of a lovely song.

14
 Continuity from the A part is also established, by another
2 transposition of the lower voice leading line from A parts, not parallel
16 now in the upper voice leading line. (would be C-C# instead)
 !5 !B 5 5 5 5 !' 5 !5 !B !5 5 5
G   4 !5 5 E5 !5 !5 5 !5 E'
E5 !5
You are the an - gel glow that lights a star the dear - est things I know are what you are

!' lowest note of the tune is "Are"

   ' !' ' ' E' !'
 !'
Although Bridge seems like a dramatic shift from A,
it recovers the Verse in Key and arpeggiated character.
24
 ' B: 5 B: 5
G   ' 5 5 5 5 5 B 5 '
Some day my ha - ppy arms will hold you and some day I'll
VI II V I IV IIm7b5
' ' ' '
  !'
 ' '

31
3 highest note of the tune is "Are"
5 B
G 
5 B ' '
5 5 5 5 5 B: 5 5 5
know that mo -ment de - vine when All the Things You Are are Mine!
V(sus64) #IIdim II V I
  
 ' ' ' ' ' '

15
Jazz versions:
The next step was to investigate the path of this piece through time, as played by jazz artists.
Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw were the first ones to recognize its potential and issued their renditions briefly
after the song came out on the theater, in 1939. Then Art Tatum included it in his repertoire, his version being
the first highly transformative and “jazzed” one, in 1940.

Erroll Garnerʼs 1944 rendition provides some insight into jazz procedures of alteration to a standard.
I point out the following:

- Starts in I instead of VI.

- Dominant chords have the b9,13 color
- in second A, IV (of Eb) is played IV7 (bluesy)
- “Half-step up” II-V-Is as a mean of embellisment.

While searching for jazz versions of this and other songs, I was surprised to see that before the Bop revolution,
jazz hadn’t christalized its harmonic devices and intepretations of musicians like Don Byas, Erroll Garner,
Lester Young and Art Tatum refer a good deal more to the original material than those of later musicians, whose
focus seems to be more on the improvisation than on the song in itself. A good example of this earlier
approach is

Ben Webster and Art Tatumʼs version of All the Things You Are:

- Played as ballad
- Rare: plays the final bars, with same bass notes as original: Bb half dim, instead of Dbm6, and with pedal
point.
- Embellishment of melody, requires deep knowledge of original melody and sense of melodic figuration
devices (appogiatura, passing and neighbouring notes).
- Accentuates the implied polyphony of the melody, with great sense of voice leading.

Intervene:
Re-Arranging

Having gained a new insight into the piece, I decided to organize a rehearsal with my peers where I would
make them read an adaptation of the verse and a modified lead sheet of the song, in a slower tempo than
usual, to break away from the normal “burnout” atmosphere of jam session playing. I played the verse and
melody chorus with special attention to the melody and improvised one chorus, trying to maintain a proximity to
the original changes. The result is documented in audio, as described in the “Appendix Section”.

16
Intervention Cycle II: Embraceable You

Again trying to depart from the jam session playing, I started by recording myself playing in that setting, with
me and the rest of the musicians reading from a regular “leadsheet” from a Fake Book (recording included in
the Appendix section - warning, unprepared thus quite bad).

Listening to the recording, what strikes me the most is a general lack of direction, each musician in the band
has probably different references concerning the character the tune and we all seem to be hinting with each
one’s playing, how we interpret the song.

Also, many fundamental characteristics of the song are absent: in my playing of the melody, I do not respect
the silence in the first downbeat of the phrases, one of the things that makes this song so special.

I created a comparison between the information contained in the leadsheet from the Fake Book and the
original score. To have a more clear side-by-side analysis, I extracted from both only the outer voices and
some explicit voice leading lines. The result made it very clear for me to see what was missing in the Fake
Book and all the lost opportunities contained in the original song.

17
 Embraceable You - Comparison between Fake Book and Original Score
!
"
leadsheet melody and bass have same note
! $ % % % $ % % % %" %
&
% % '
#" '
' (' '
why jump? how jazz expands a V:
"always" by putting a II behind it
disagrees with melody!
!
original
" imperfect consonances in most downbeats (much better counterpoint)
! $ % % % $ % % % %" %
&
% % '
exp. a V in 1st inversion w/ when melody is static,
chromatic neighbouring motion harmony complements it
#"
' ' ) ) ") )
smooth bass motion
!
perfect consonances in most downbeats !
2
" %"
5
%
4 --->5 over V7-I
% &
! $ % % $ % % % % % '
hidden 5th doesn't work
#" poor bass motion in outer voices
( ( )( ' ( (
(
II came too soon
!
"
! $ % % % $ % % % %" %
&
% % '
recovering idea from top highest note of region,
(harmony over static bass) highlighted by
luminous chord
' )( "( % % (
#" ' *(( ( (
' ( ( '
first time we hear II
expanded I by passing motion
!
3
$"
"
9
%
! $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ &
raised 7-6 going down?
' "' "' (' ' "'
#" ' )'
& ' ' &
!
$"
" %
! $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ &
self contained melody
smooth counterpoint
#" ' ' "' ' ' ' ' '
moving towards V
!
4
" $"
13
! $ $ $ $ $ $ $ "$ %
$ $ $ &
#" ' ' ' &
"' &
!
in larger scale: half cadence of
" $"
"antecedent / consequent" construction
! $ $ $ $ $ "$ %
$ $ $ $ $ &
' "' $
#" $ $
& $ & &
6/4 chord!
!
5
"
17
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21
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25
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Having studied the above, the practical question arises: is it possible to highlight these newly discovered
features in a jazz solo?

Enter the tenor legend Don Byas and his beautiful 1945 version. This is one of the best examples of how one
can bring a song into the jazz idiom and still stay connected to the material. The piano player expands the first
V chord with the same procedure as the original, instead of playing a II-V, which, as we saw in the analysis,
unnecessarily repeats the chord in the fifth bar. They play the cadential 6/4 chord instead of the turnaround

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suggested in the fake book, and finally, the melody is embellished without loosing its elegance.
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3
consulted with my saxophone teacher (Simon Rigter) about, for example, the expansion of the V chord in bars

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Intervene:

new chords, improvise and write a line.

In order to challenge that perception and create a musical environment that doesn’t rely so heavily on a fixed
“jazz” texture, I decided to arrange the song for piano and bass, and take to the rehearsal the actual sheet
music and a lead sheet that I extracted from it, much more detailed than a normal one. (Included in the
Appendix section)

The idea was to guarantee that certain backbone features of the song were going to be on my interpretation,
while opening a space for improvisation where I could try to incorporate the material that I found while studying
the song.

This approach is indeed a challenging one, as so many of the solutions that are in my jazz musician’s “arsenal”
are now unpractical. I was surprised with how different I sound and how this simple and common group of
instruments can sound so far away from conventional jazz sound.

First, and after a lot of negotiating between a strict reading of the original score and my jazz adaptation, the trio
was able to perform a few choruses, with me battling to play these new harmonies. (in appendix)

Then I recorded as a play-along to practice at home. (also in appendix)

In order to learn how to play over this new structure and sonority, I wrote a line in eight notes that, I believe,
includes some new solutions and tries to really stick to the chords that I extracted from the original. (also in
PDF and Audio in the appendix). I used some of the lines discussed with my teacher for certain unconventional
harmonies: in bars 2 and 3 and also bars 26, where the unusual progression occours: a half diminished chord
followed by the secondary dominant, which is suspended and with a natural 9th (the flat nine would be
normal). I got the idea to highlight this beautiful effect from Robert Russell Bennet’s orchestra version (audio of
that section is included).

19
Discussion, results and outcomes

I believe that after performing this artistic research, my view of what means to be a jazz musician has changed.

First of all, the process of learning a new piece and adding it to my repertoire ceased to be a mundane and
disorganized one. I am convinced that I found the right way to do that: I have acquired a few author-specific
songbooks (listed in the bibliography) that contain the now familiar piano reduction + melody line and I take
the time to read the piano part, normally within reach of my very modest piano skills.

The knowledge in traditional harmony that I gathered parallel with this research allows me to understand that
music in non-jazz terms, which adds a degree of freedom between sticking completely to the original and
resorting to the normal jazz procedures.

I then listen to a version as early as I can found and after I will try to look also for versions of pre-bebop players
that I came to discover during this research, like Don Byas, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum, among others.

To answer the research question, I believe to have shown how paying attention to the original compositions
which we normally only hear an echo of, can open up many possibilities for developing my style and
capacities as an interpreter and improviser. The possibilities shown througout this report are merely the first
ones I came across and I belive I will encounter many more in the future.

20
Bibliography

Literature

READ, Mike - Major to Minor: The Rise and Fall of the Songwriter - Sanctuary Publishing Ltd
(6 Oct 2000)

Peter van der Merwe - Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century
Popular Music (Clarendon Paperbacks)

WILDER, Alec - American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950

FORTE, Allen - The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Area: 1924-1950

Songbooks
Note: a great assortment of original versions of standards is available at the Codarts library. After
consulting with theacher Ab Schaap, who put them together, I realized that the best source for
original scores of standards were these publisher’s songbooks.

Cole Porter 100Th Anniversary Songbook 1891-1991 Piano/Vocal/Guitar

Jerome Kern Collection (Piano-Vocal Series) [Paperback]

The Gershwin Song Collection (1931-1954): Piano/Vocal/Chords

21
Appendix
Note: All the appendix materials are available online at

http://goo.gl/e1VDT
Comparisons of original versions and selected jazz versions.

How Deep is The Ocean

1. Original / Paul Whiteman 1933

2. Billie Holiday 1954
3. Peter Bernstein (Present day?)

Night and Day

1. Original / Fred Astaire

2. Joe Henderson

Out of Nowhere

1. Original / Bing Crosby 1931

2. Don Byas (1945)
3. Stan Getz

Intervention Cycle I: All the Things You Are

Original Recording (radio broadcast)

Jazz versions:
1. Erroll Garner (1944)
2. Art Tatum and Ben Webster (50’s)

My version with adapted verse, refrain and improvised chorus (with Jaejin Ahn, Guitar; Noa Stroeter, Bass and
Seong-Jay, Drums).

Intervention Cycle II: Embraceable You

Orchestration (excerpt)
Jam session
Attempt to improvise with new changes. (Augustas Baronas - Drums, Francesca Tandoi, Piano, Noa Stroeter -
Bass)
Play-Along version (Augustas Baronas - Drums, Francesca Tandoi, Piano, Noa Stroeter - Bass)
Written line on adapted Chords (in PDF and audio)

22