to know it, so do you.
Jazz context. Tunes we call standards— originally contemporary popular songs that everyone knew, that were a standard part of a working group’s book. These terms arose when there were regularly working bands and an active musician’s union. As we’ve become just a rabble of guys trying to scrape together a living, and do a gig, that meaning has gotten obscured. The tunes themselves become just inherited repertoire, with a lot of people having no popular reference for them— we think. So a lot of hapless individuals are asking why do them, what is their relevancy today?, and not learning tunes.
With this deprofessionalization of music, these tunes are increasingly referred to historically, as “American Songbook.” Some younger players call any tune frequently played by jazz groups standards, but usually the term is reserved for the so-called American Songbook— I’ll Remember April, If I Were A Bell, All Of You. Jazz tunes— like Solar, Confirmation, Well You Needn’t, Oleo— are called jazz tunes, or bop tunes. Blues tunes are blues tunes, or just blues, a blues. Never the blues.
Some musicians self-consciously try to “get relevant” by playing music The Beatles wrote 60 years ago, or that Radiohead or Britney Spears recorded 25 years ago… as if that’s vastly more current. It always seems forced— the tunes aren’t that well suited to a jazz interpretation, and are not always as widely recognized as players imagine. And who wants to the pay mechanicals for covering them? And forgo their own meager airplay royalties, and the possibility of a composer Grammy or ASCAP prize?
Where these questioning jazz musicians are really behind the times is in clinging to the old boomer notion that youth is all-important and things must be new and current. Legitimacy with the most consumeristic young people = legitimacy period— implicitely adopting the present-day boomer notion that young people only like the worst contemporary crap.
Time does move, times change, the meanings of things change, what we do changes, our relation to our material changes. Popular songs become classic repertoire. Symphony orchestras don’t worry about what are we even doing here? Mozart’s original audience is dead, maybe we should move on.
Art museum: Why do we keep these Rembrandt things around? Everybody’s into TikTok now.
Things find a new audience, because they’re good, and someone is playing them, and/or hearing them, now.
Media has a longer memory than it used to. We don’t have to wait for someone to give a concert, or for a family member to dig out the sheet music, to hear a piece of music. Our tech overlords have graciously stolen the entirety of recorded music and given it away for free to anyone with an internet connection, and people do explore that. And there are a good 70 years worth of modern “hard” media laying around for people to buy and listen to. A side benefit of media companies promoting their existing catalog over new artists is that people do actually hear older music— which makes it current, whatever the current state of the actual economy and culture from which it originally arose. Much less the musicians themselves, who may be dead or very old.
And, for all the crying we love doing over the state of The Youth Of Today, and all the horrible awful crap they listen to, they do actually seek out good music, which a lot of times means older music. My students keep surprising me that way. You crying about how awful they are is actually you being an old out of touch fart, they’re moving in a good direction.
Standards, then: A few of them have stuck around, in actual popular media. There are new recordings, they still get used in movies, older movies where they were featured still get watched. Kids still see the cartoon with the singing frog. Anyone streaming old TV shows gets a ton of them— turn on an episode of Columbo sometime, there will be a ton of things I played on this site’s titular boat gig. There are still well known performers doing the old tunes, and there is still new show music being written and performed.
…as a freshly(?) middle-aged person, I’m in a privileged spot— old enough to start getting a sense of the actual scale of history, but not completely geriatric yet. For example, when I was doing that boat gig, that music was mostly very old and irrelevant to me, but there were still a lot of people around for whom it was their popular music. They were all in their 70s then; by now most of them have died, or are pushing 100 years old. Some of them may begin slowing up soon.
It’s not a linear thing, where, if it seemed old to me when I was in my 30s, it must be really ancient now, 25 years later. It is, I supposed, but its position has also changed. Moon River, for example— we hated it, it was a dead tune. Now suddenly it’s a hip item. Melancholy Baby was the classic old fashioned cornball tune for longer than I’ve been alive, like people thought it was cornball in the 50s. Now we have Michael Buble covering it.
Finally, for musicians: none of this matters. The job is to know music, and however “dead” some very smart individual claims something to be— like, that word is a very easy syllable to speak, it takes no effort or real thought at all— there are still large numbers of accomplished musicians for whom this stuff is like oxygen. It’s their playing environment, it’s part of the greater arena for modern music.
Movie people are supposed to know the entire history of cinema, and pre-cinema photography, writers are supposed to be versed in the modern literature of their language— in English, going back to Chaucer. Musicians are supposed to know the entire history of modern-form music. We may not specialize in every style or genre local to a particular period, but we’re supposed to know it all.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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