Did the American songbook kill jazz?

BY SCOTT TIMBERG

At first, it sounds like a mistake: The opening notes are blurred, like something has gone a bit wrong in either the playing or the recording. But after a few bars, we realize that these bent tones from a horn — with just a stark bass and drum behind them — are outlining one of the most hallowed of American standards. Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins is at the Village Vanguard, bashing through “What Is This Thing Called Love?” as if he could anticipate the punk rock that would come to this same neighborhood 20 years later. It’s an elegant song by Cole Porter, reduced to its skeleton. And “All the Things You Are” and “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” get the same kind of rough, raw, harmonically daring treatment.

It’s the kind of thing jazz can do at its best — but something the music may be doing less and less of. Or too often and not well enough. The various factions that make up the jazz world — audiences, musician, writers, plus the teachers and students who seem to be the only groups growing in number — don’t have a consensus on the matter. But the jazz fraternity seems to know two things: Despite continued artistic quality, the audience around the music is dying. And the choice of what songs jazz musicians play — and what they don’t play — may be part of the problem.

Over the past few years, Rollins — perhaps the living jazz musician with the widest knowledge and deepest feeling for standards — has experienced a change of heart. “Jazz standards don’t have the same pull on the audience,” he says now. “I love the American songbook, but people don’t recognize them any more. So I feel we need more original music. Jazz has got to keep moving: It’s important to get new music, new melodies.” During the four weeks he spent in Europe this fall, Rollins played very few standards. “They’re still powerful to me, but to audiences, they’ve lost some of their power.”

*   *   *

The issue of song selection — as central to a repertory-driven art like jazz in a way that it’s not for, say, rock ‘n’ roll, which, since the Beatles, has been about original songwriting — has been talked about for years now. But it all became more pressing lately, with the emergence of several high-profile artists who reject or ignore the tradition of Porter, the Gershwins and Jerome Kern — or even the related lineage of songs by jazz musicians, such as Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” or Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight.”
Read more: http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/did_the_american_songbook_kill_jazz/