The Vernacular

Walk into any jazz club in New York City. With the exception of the few featuring new music, in nearly all you will hear the same standards: "Autumn Leaves", "Beautiful Love", "Corcovado", et al. Some of these songs are beautiful and bear repeating. Others - "The End of a Love Affair", "Blue Bossa", etc - are just hokey, unlistenable songs.

While jazz musicians give a great deal of thought to repertoire, diligently learning hundreds of tunes, those choices are more often pragmatic than artistic. I myself am often guilty of this offense. After a jam session, I think "what songs were called that I didn't know? ... I don't want to get stumped again." To some extent, this mode of thinking is inevitable - there must be some vernacular over which jazz musicians can converse. But while this body of songs was steadily evolving through the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, it has since stagnated, frozen in time as canonized by such haphazard conglomerations as "The Real Book".

Artists, which most of jazz musicians claim to be, are supposedly craftsmen engaged in the act of self-expression both emotionally and intellectually, an act that requires deliberation in all aspects. The thought of any other modern musician passively accepting repertoire arbitrarily is laughable. I admit classical musicians could be similarly accused of stagnation in repertoire, but this line of thought invites the comparison of tin pan alley show-tunes, selected originally for their popularity, with Bach's fugues and Beethoven's symphonies.

And while classical musicians might be slaves to a musty canon, those works are selected with a great deal of thought, studied thoroughly and specialized in. They aren't easily memorized ditties haphazardly called upon. I fear that while these songs were initially chosen for legitimate reasons, some musical, some commercial, now they are perpetuated only by inertia. "We play these songs because ... these are the songs we play." Meanwhile, the world has changed, both musically and commercially, leaving jazz musicians in rooms full of other jazz musicians.

Yesterday, at the Zinc bar, I attended a jam session where nearly all people in the audience were themselves musicians waiting to perform and all the musicians were expected to pay a cover charge. The night concluded with a seven saxophone rendition of "My Shining Hour". None of the saxophone players in attendance or onstage, including myself had seen the 1943 film "The Sky's the Limit," for which it was composed, yet they had 30 minutes worth of eighth notes with which to pontificate on the matter.