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But there is a modern real book.

From what years ? I haven't seen it.

 

Standards were the pop tunes of the 40s and 50s. For today how about some Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran and/or John Legend? There are a few hummable, singable contemporary artists but not many. I’m sure there’s a long list but I’ve never been much of a fan of pop.

 

Bobby Watson: Heckle and Jeckle


Uptown Funk is an obvious choice.

 

This is one of the best questions asked on this forum!! Jazz didnt die in the mid 70s. Im interested

 

I thought so too. Why did jazz muscicians stop "jazzing up" popular tunes in the 1970s? If you go down the top 40 pop tunes today there's not much of anything there that would translate but occasionally something worthwhile turns up. Alicia Keys is 15 or more years ago but she had a lot of good stuff people could riff on. I don't get why jazzers are stuck in the 40s and 50s.

 

To put it in the terms of modern kids, “the meta changed”. The rules changed.

I think in the 1960s there was a huge push of rock which emphasized individual groups with unique songs, and especially the “authentic” quality of music written by the band members. Jazz also followed this to a degree, which is why many of the best jazz compositions come from the 1960s when new songs became the focus rather than standards.

On top of this, copyright restrictions became increasingly draconian so doing covers is more difficult. It used to be most standards were musical tunes - well, the closest we have to modern musicals are film musicals, such as Disney animated films, and they are extremely strict about copyright.

Add to this that a lot of jazz from the 1970s-1990s is “not really jazz” to someone or other and you get a sudden disappearance of the old fashioned standards book.

 

There’s the All Jazz RB from Sher Music. It’s a mix, but includes quite a few more contemporary jazz tunes. It’s not about pop/R&B, though.

 

Thanks for this! A lot of tunes I've never heard of, but good enough to make the book so I'm going to start tracking em down and listening.

 

Straphangin?

 

I’d love a book of tunes that were popular in the jazz world from when I was turned onto the music to now…maybe 1990-2000 and ‘00-‘20 or something. I was listening by sophomore year; ‘93, long before I ever tried to play seriously. Josh Redman, C. McBride, Roy Hargrove, Herbie because he’s always been producing…’Dis is Da Drum blew me away, Sanborn was mainstream popular with Bang Bang and Snakes. Have to include smooth jazz, Maceo stuff, all the things others have mentioned. Lettuce, Soulive, some jam band stuff, Tower of Power…so many.

 

A real challenge for the jazz community is to acknowledge that a lot of original compositions folks put on albums are simply not that great. One time I bought a Marcus Miller album based on a lot of glowing 5-star reviews on Amazon. While the improvising and technical prowess of the musicians was superb (obviously) the compositions themselves were utterly forgettable. I ended up listening to it about 5 times and put it away.

 

You are on point ! We have many great wonderful players and some write some really challenging music. But as hard as it is to play it is tougher to listen to. Back years ago when I began buying Jazz albums by Horace Silver, Shorter, Chick etc. the songs were as memorable as the playing. Not the case today.

 

I'm not sure I agree with that: there are a great many brilliant compositions being released all the time.

A quick flick through my music on this phone shows compositions by Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland, Kenny Garrett, Jeff Tain Watts, Julian Arguelles, Mike Walker to name just a few that are all elegant, well constructed and eminently listenable jazz compositions.

There was a project local to me in the North West of England back in the mid 2000s to create a real book of 100 compositions from local musicians; and there's a wealth of great stuff there. They selected a bunch to record and I think you'd agree that they're mostly "bangers":

 

I think it is fair to say that yes...contemporary Jazz artists HAVE stopped doing versions of pop tunes. The place in Jazz this may not hold true as much are Jazz vocalists...Diane Schuur, Jane Monheit, Samara Joy, Karen Souza come to mind as artists who have inserted re-arranged pop (and even country) songs into their oeuvre. Tuck and Patti did this somewhat regularly while they were popular, too. But again, all vocalists.

Herbie and Josh Redman BOTH released albums in the past 15-20 years or so which attempted this...all material was pop material, jazzified. I think it's interesting to note however, that neither received a whole lot of attention and the albums remain pretty unknown to most jazz fans.

(Candy Dulfer, over the years has done this as well...mostly with old-school R&B tunes; and again often using a vocalist...either Chance or Leona or some other vocalist joining in to sing). Larry Goldings, the organist, also threw in a fair number of classic pop tunes, mostly R&B in origin, in a number of his earlier albums.

 

Regarding Herbie’s lack of recognition for his pop cover works:
Herbie’s 2007 album of Joni Mitchell songs won the Grammy for Best Album of the Year.

Herbie also released a modern pop song-oriented album in 2005 called Possibilities which had tunes from Paula Cole, Stevie Wonder, Sting, etc…I was at a small party a few years back when it was being spun by the host…it grabbed my ear so hard I picked it up the next day.

 

I think Brad Mehldau is the most prominent jazz musician playing more modern pop/rock songs. And was also the pianist on Joshua Redman's similar styled album (which I think is better known than you say).

 

It would be cool to have some of the swing mini-revival era tunes in the book as well: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Brian Setzer Orchestra, The Daddies, and bands like that...maybe arranged for 2-3 horns with full band supplementals? The Bb and Eb versions of The Latin Real Book have tons of killer arrangements all written out.

A “where did that come from” reference book of tunes used for acid jazz and hiphop/ rap samples would be fun.

 

Joshua Redman, with Gabrielle Cavassa, did this "Chicago Blues" mash-up of Basie's "Goin to Chicago" with Sufjan Stevens's "Chicago" - and I don't think Sufjan Stevens was anyone's pick for current songwriter most likely to be jazzified. Every time it's posted here, some people say they like it and some people wish Redman was doing something else (probably more straight-ahead). So I don't know if it's the contemporary song material that is the obstacle, or also the audience expectations of what "jazz" is.

 

Perhaps Sufjan Steven is slightly too obscure for a lot of people (me included). I think that perhaps the biggest issue, we don’t have exactly as strong a “popular” music, people tend towards more microgenres. If you’re talking standard music you need a sort of common music shared by a lot of people. I think that is less of a thing now.

 

Almost every track from both Aaron Parks ‘Little Big’ albums.
Catchy, clever tunes with great hooks, often in deceptively odd time signatures (but they all feel great) and always beautifully melodic.

 

All modern music is crap. Until you hear someone amazing (like Herbie’s New Standards) playing it and then you realize it’s the musician not the material.

 

The material on "New Standards" is also pretty good as well.

 

Yeah cause the likes of say Jacob Collier are such terrible musicians....

 

In my opinion, the tunes that most need to go into collections like Real Books / Fake Books are the ones that high school players starting to get more serious about jazz are trying to find.

I'm sure if you polled even a handful of HS big band players you'd get a pretty great list.

I'm too old for that demo, but Some Skunk Funk would 100% be on my list.

 

My Berklee Fake Book (ca. 1977) has "Some Skunk Funk".

 

Sounds awesome!

 

I think the two become wrapped up into one: a reverence, perhaps unwarranted, for the standards and their merits, alongisde an automatic knee jerk that current popular music is s*** and as you put it, unworthy. The only reason I brought up a standard that I think isn't all that great as a song (though I do like playing it) was to try and highlight an element of hypocrisy - modern music is crap, standards are fantastic etc.

And yet despite that, we get some of the most beautiful music I've heard from the likes of Brad Mehldau (his versions of Teardrop by Massive Attack, or God Only Knows by the Beach Boys are in the hair stand on end category for me).

The challenge, with regards to this thread, are that those songs aren't "in the book" and they're not taught as something new jazz students should learn as opposed to Stella By Starlight, There Will Never Be Another You, Rhythm Changes and so on.

I think you're right that the academia aspect of jazz has potentially stifled it's progress. After all you can't be a great jazz player until you've transcribed Hawkins, Young, Parker, Gordon, Rollins, Coltrane, Mobley, Stitt... and that's just sax players....

 

Tin Pan Alley; in its prime

 

If we take 1990 as a starting point, there are a lot of tunes which will be familiar to (and likely played by at some point) jazz musicians who came up in that era. A lot of them probably aren't open jam session calls, with the exception of Strasbourg / St. Denis, but that's true of a lot of tunes in the original real book too. Of course, any compilation is going to be biased by the editor's own preferences, again as the original real book was. I'm showing my own age here, in a way, because this list is heavily focused on 90s and early 2000s records that influenced my generation significantly.

Chance - Kenny Kirkland
Crooked Creek - John Cowherd
First Song - Charlie Haden (probably dates from before 1990, but I know it from a few 90s records)
High Wire - Chris Potter
Jazz Crimes - Joshua Redman
Midnight Voyage - Joey Calderazzo
Minor Blues - Kurt Rosenwinkel
Morning Bell - Radiohead a la Chris Potter Underground
Myron's World - Mark Turner
Paranoid Android - Radiohead a la Brad Mehldau
Seattle - Avishai Cohen
Shaw - Kenny Garrett
Sing a Song of Song - Kenny Garrett
Slings and Arrows - Michael Brecker
Strange Meeting - Bill Frisell (first recorded in the 80s, but probably best known for the Frisell, Holland, Elvim record)
Strasbourg / St. Denis - Roy Hargrove
Undertow - Joshua Redman
Valentine - Fred Hersch
Virgo Rising - Wayne Shorter
Zhivago - Kurt Rosenwinkel

There are also a lot of neo-soul and 90s/00s R&B tunes that musicians know and love, especially in certain scenes. You could walk into a lot of sessions in NY, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, LA, etc. and call D'Angelo tunes without anyone batting an eye.

The bottom line is that there have been a lot of wonderful "jazz" composers working in recent decades. This is a totally unsourced opinion and paints a very broad brush, but I'd say that we've entered a period of incredible compositional creativity within the jazz world as musicians born after 1975 have have found their compositional voices in different ways. 1975 is an arbitrary date, but an interesting one in my opinion. People like Mary Halvorson, Hamilton de Holanda, Miguel Zenon, Darcy James Argue, Esperanza Spaulding, Tyshawn Sorey, Amirtha Kidambi, Melissa Aldana, Lage Lund, Sullivan Fortner, Shabaka Hutchings, Jaimie Branch (RIP), Maria Grand, etc. all have extremely compelling compositional voices.

 

Sing a song of song definitely gets called at jams round here.

 

I went to the Grove School for a year in 1990 and took commercial composition.
Dick Grove taught alot of the classes.
He said melody is king, that's why iit can be protected but not chord progrssions.
Many standards have memorable melodies.
I think Sting, Billy Joel, The Beatles, etc wrote some songs that are "modern" standards.

 

That original Real Book certainly made an attempt to incorporate then-current new jazz compositions, some of which never really “stuck” as standards over the following decades (& some of those seemed to be included as a bit of a self-promoting interest, even if they were solid tunes in their own right).