[theguy2]

I was thinking tonight about the old concept of adding new songs to the jazz lexicon to inject life into the genre. Now, that's a whole separate debate that I don't want to get into here. But as I was thinking about it, the concept of Broadway musicals as a source for material kept coming back to me. Obviously the Great American Songbook is made up in large part by tunes from Rodgers and Hammerstein and Hart and countless other Golden Age Broadway musicals. Now, the idea of adapting the tunes from more current shows is hardly an original idea on my part. But it does seem very feasible, doesn't it? Les Mis, Little Shop of Horrors, Cabaret, and even more recently Wicked, Avenue Q, Hairspray, Disney musicals, and dozens of others have led to a huge revival in mass interest in the theater. The stories are great, the songs are great, and jazz definitely has a great opportunity to revive its partnership with theater.

BUT (after that exceptionally long intro), the main problem I ran into as I was executing a few tunes in my head is the form of the songs. The reason Golden Age Broadway worked so well with jazz is because of the AABA song form. It translated really well to the cyclical nature of jazz solo sections, so very little tweaking needed to be done. Modern musicals tend to follow a more pop or rock-formatted approach of AABABABAetc. where A is a verse and B is the chorus. Because the verses and choruses are so different from each other, it tends to throw off the cyclical form that improv needs, and just doesn't sound great as a solo section. The question I pose to you all is: how would you tackle this problem? How would you make a verse-chorus form cleanly integrate as a jazz solo section? For that matter, are there any artists who have already done it, and how did they handle the problem?

Obviously there's tons of potential answers and solutions, I'm just interested in hearing the various perspectives, approaches, and feedback.

 

[gary]

I hope this is tactful, but I don't think the problem is in the form or the media. At least two generations of musicians have handled popular music forms in jazz or mixed idioms well. In other words, it's not a problem. And there's nothing to say that jazz tunes are cyclical by nature. There are tons of tunes written, particularly since the early 60s that have different forms - and that's been half a century.

While this is pop oriented, it is by jazz players, but my reason for adding the link is to show how the form can be stretched and used practically any way you want to.

 

[Pete Thomas]

Earlier forms of jazz used a lot of popular songs of the time. As jazz has evolved, those songs have been left behind somewhat as more modern jazz tend to rely on original jazz compositions rather than using contemporary pop songs.

It's true that many pop songs these days would be difficult to use as vehicles for jazz, not that it can't be done, but you are right, the old AABA form did make things easy, if only for the fact that it made memorising of melodies easier.

Players such as Sonny Rollins and Roland Kirk used more contemporary pop tunes, although it was a few decades ago. But then these were not the more complex forms you might get in modern musicals which you are talking about.

 

[dexdex]

From what I could observe, the AABA form isn't the only "jazz enabler" which we might miss in contemporary pop song writing. Even more important is the the fact that the strong presence of II-V-I and other typical 4 bars Cycle-of-5ths patterns underlying most Broadway classics of the beginning of the 20th century are being replaced by other patterns, to which the whole swing and be-bop language just doesn't fit that naturally. The post-bop modal approach seems fitting better.
Paul Anka's "Rock Swings" album shows it is possible.

But improvising the "good old way" on those often pentatonic and "3 chords only" structures is a challenge. Take Jackson's "Billie Jean", just as an example. The A part doesn't even have a "real" blues resolution. Not easy to tell a musical story over such a pattern.
My daughter is very much into contemporary Musicals, and I recently bought the printed music of "Wicked". It is in my plans to work with her on some creative attempts. If we find time for it.

 

[gary]

There's just something about the premise here that rubs me wrong. I think it's that there seems to be a tendency to want to define jazz tunes as ii-V/ AABA structures and with strong leanings towards bebop, as well. IMO that's thinking inside the box.

Jazz is a creative art, able to handle all sorts of harmonic, structural and textural elements. If there are players who are so anchored in bebop and swing idiomatic styles that they can't move with ease into other popular musical forms, I think that's really unfortunate. Fifty more years of great, creative performance has been added to the jazz legacy - enough to have made bebop a major era in jazz' living history, but also to have added enough performance practices on top of that, so that bebop is one of many jazz idioms - not "the" idiom.

So - premise aside, IMO the work's already been done. But let me turn this back on you, theguy2. If you don't have the "crutch" of blazing through familiar ii-7/V7 patterns, what do you have?

How about rhythm? Now this is going to be simplistic, but a typical bebop solo is 8th note based runs with some triplets thrown in. Actually, that's not very rhythmically interesting. If you are suddenly in a relatively static harmonic environment you can't do that or you'll die. So you're first challenge is to make it rhythmically interesting. And while you're at it, why not make the rhythmic content of the repeated A and B sections, different from each other?

Harmonically, what can you do? In bebop, you can run through the changes and sound hip. You can play tritone subs and sound hipper. You can side slip etc and sound hipper still. What can you do in a relatively harmonic static situation with the harmony? You can still play inside/outside. Depending on the song and its character, there are also times when you can emphasise the points where the harmony does change and make those points lovely. Etc, etc.

I could go on and on. The way you opened this thread leads me to believe that you can answer most of these questions for yourself. So my suggestion, really, is to listen to how some really good players handle the same situations. Your opening post gets down specifically to playing show tunes in a jazz context. You also acknowledge that modern shows are, for the most part, pop music oriented. So I would think the answer to your question is to listen to instances where jazz musicians are playing pop music, right?

 

[skeller047]

There's one other thing to note about the older show tunes as standards in jazz. Many, if not most, of these songs HAVE a verse - sung at the beginning, and sometimes in the middle too, and sometimes then with different lyrics. What is the "jazz approach" to this? Answer: leave the verse off, don't play it.

Some musicians make a point of playing the verse, sometimes. Many singers sing the verse, since the lyrics often set up the main part of the song.

So be a jazz musician - adapt the tune to your needs, rework the chords or melody to suit, and leave the verse or chorus off during solos, or some other well-worn approach.

I guess I am basically agreeing with Gary - this is a non-issue. Jazz is in the ear of the musician.

 

[FawltyTenor]

Good advice Gary and Steve. Guess I don't think there are any hard and fast rules here. I would think that having a melody strong tune would help, as a lot of recent things seem to rely upon the arrangement.

I think whatever is necessary to make a piece work is fair game... reharmonization, altering form, etc. A lot of music you might not immediately connect with jazz has been adapted from movies or popular music... Chim Chim Cheree, My Favorite Things, Charade... or how about this one - Madonna! Frissell actually uses some of the original arrangment to great effect here...

Basically, we're really only limited by our own capabilities and imagination here. And of course the paradigm of just repeating how things have been done in the past...

 

[theguy2]

Gary, I absolutely agree with you. Although I suppose the simplest form of my opening question would be "how do you make a solo section out of songs that don't naturally repeat like a solo section?" I actually was definitely thinking the same thing about seeing how existing players have handled the situation. Ears are the greatest tool in jazz. Problem is, no real examples jump to mind beyond Redman's "Tears In Heaven." Any good recordings you might have in mind for a jumping-off point of jazz players handling pop tunes?

 

[JL]

...the simplest form of my opening question would be "how do you make a solo section out of songs that don't naturally repeat like a solo section?"

Are you asking how to improvise a solo in the song? If so, I'd say you have a couple of choices (well, technically a lot more than a couple). You could maintain the overall structure of the song, the song form, whatever it is (AABA, AAB, ABA, or whatever), OR you could simplify the form for the solo in whatever way you choose. Set up a 2-chord vamp, or stick with the A section, or the B section, or.... Of course if you choose to deviate from the song form, the whole band needs to know what you're going to do on the solo sections.

It's fairly common in rock & roll & some blues tunes to have a more complex arrangement for the vocal section, maybe a 'long I' (of 8 bars instead of 4), or a section with alternating I & IV, etc, then revert to a standard 12 bar blues progression for the solos.

You can do what you want as long as everyone in the band knows the arrangement.

Hope this helps, but I may not be answering your question if I misunderstand it. I don't really see where the problem lies.

 

[814jazzer]

Take the Ahmad Jamal approach to improvising with form. If a pop tunes has a verse, chorus, and perhaps a bridge ("C" section), then have your band improvise the flow and sequence of these structural parts of the tune. Develop some simple visual cues to indicate "go to the bridge now", for instance. Keeps everyone on their toes, keeps for fresh performances from gig to gig.

my two cents.

Jamal, mentioned above, has been doing this with so-called AABA tunes since the 1950s, by the way. So has Ellington, though in a composed/arranged -- not improvised -- way.

~ Rick

 

[saxpiece]

What Gary said is what I would say.

It's pretty obvious anyway if someone has delved into different styles.

In the II V I bop sort of thing, the harmony is always changing and so it's not that hard to play through it and come up with something that sounds passable just by playing things that stick mostly to the changing harmony and the rhythm is mostly 8th notes and triplets and occasional 16th notes and there is not a lot of space where the harmony doesn't change and this is the Charlie Parker sort of thing and Charlie was a master at it and even though it's possible to play something passable it's probably not going to be at Charlie's level for most players.

In the modal or more modern or rock sort of thing, there are often big spaces to fill because the harmony doesn't change so something else has to change and that can be dynamics, rhythm etc etc.
It's up to the player to generate things a lot more.

A player like Kenny G or Grover Washington etc has much more rhythmic variation going on than Charlie Parker has, simply because Kenny G needs to because he has more spaces to fill.

For a tune like Billie Jean, it would be up to the player to use rhythmic and melodic ideas from Jackson's vocal line or various counterpoint things along those ideas and even throw in curve balls and some bop and use dynamics for build ups and let downs, it's up to the player and their ears and taste.

Thinking like a songwriter and maybe trying to come up with 3 main ideas and then bouncing off them is the sort of thing to try with a thing like Billie Jean.

I think it's harder in lots of ways to play over spaces where the harmony doesn't change much, and it's pretty easy to end up playing a lot of random unconnected unmusical gibberish when confronted with space.

 

[gary]

I'm not sure, actually, if we're talking about playing "swinging" jazz to pop forms, or playing jazz enfluenced music to pop-oriented show music. At any rate, I'll throw this in - listen to Tim Ries' "Rolling Stones Project" and see if that doesn't give you some ideas. What about the Bad Plus? Patricia Barber does some wonderful things with pop standards.

 

[saxpiece]

A Jazzy sort of thing can be done with more modern chord progressions

A few chord subs and II V I's thrown in might help for a jazzy solo used within a more modern chord progression song.

Depends on how someone wants to arrange it.

It could go the other way as well with a more modal approach depending on the arrangement.