You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Our 7 Favorite Jazz Compositions

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

It's a new week and a new list of 7 from the Podcave, as Peter and Adam give their HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE list of their favorite jazz compositions. You can listen to all of them on our Spotify playlist here: https://open.spotify.com/user/12741112/playlist/6kJxFfAOUfG2o6GzfvEpza?si=745VSbZfRcS0yTkkqR-pXgFavorite Jazz Compositions"East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" - Duke Ellington"Lush Life" - Billy Strayhorn"Ruby, My Dear" - Thelonious Monk"A Night in Tunisia" - Dizzy Gillespie"Inner Urge" - Joe Henderson"Before It's Time to Say Goodbye" - Kenny Kirkland"Remembering" - Avishai Cohen*Bonus: "Emotion in Motion" - Peter MartinToday's episode is sponsored by the Oxford American. The Oxford American is a magazine dedicated to documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South. Its award-winning annual music issue comes with a CD sampler and digital download - a must-have for any serious music fan. Recent issues have featured Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, John Cage, and John Cage. Visit https://www.oxfordamerican.org/yhi today for a special subscription discount!Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Peter. Hey. Happy Monday. Hey, man. Happy Monday. Hump. Come on now. You're trying to trick me.

Is it, though? No, man, it's Wednesday. Okay, that's right. I'm Adam S. And I'm Peter Hardin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. Coming at you.

Today's episode is sponsored by the Oxford American. The Oxford American is a magazine dedicated to documenting complexity and vitality of the American Sound. It's award-winning. Annual music issue comes with a CD sampler and digital download. It's a must-have. For any serious music fan, recent issues have featured Nina Simone, the loniest monk, John Cage, and John Coltrane. Visit oxfordamerican.org slash y-h-I. That stands where you'll hear it.

Yes. And we have some good offers there for some of the folks. Some awesome offers. I mean, I'm just looking at this. This is their 20th annual music. I mean, all their issues are great. It's quarterly. But I always love the music issue.

I didn't realize they have 20 of them now. Later in the week for sure. This is so good. At home, we have this next to books. Like, this isn't the kind of magic. magazine, you read and then it's like old news and you toss it into the recycling. Not that I'm anti-recycling. I'm very pro-recycling, but you don't like this, you can kind of savor it like a book, which is nice. It's great. Yep. It's really, really good.

Today we're talking about our seven favorite jazz compositions. Yeah, now I felt like, okay, full disclosure, you came up with this concept. I mean, we both come up with ideas, but a lot of times... Sorry, are you throwing shade on my concept? I'm not throwing shade. No, it's a great thing. I mean, we accepted it into the pantheon of episodes, but I felt like it was a little bit limiting. So we may extend it a little bit, right? You feel like the art of jazz composition is limiting? Well, you're going to see as we go through here, there's some obvious omissions. I just wanted, that's why I said full disclosure, I want to put it out there that before we get, you know, shade thrown on us from our beautiful listeners, when they put up their umbrellas with shade on top of us because we're like, why didn't you mention such and such?

Oh, well, whatever we do is going to get some kind of shade for whatever list of seven we throw on. 77. We could pretty much cover all the... Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm already thinking of some big holes, even in eras. But that's what we didn't say the seven greatest jazz composition. Well, wait to start out the episode

with a little bit of a downer, man. It's one day. It's Monday. All right, well, let's get into it. Our number one, this comes from the king of jazz composition, you know, the originator of a lot of techniques that jazz composers still use.

That's the great... Jelly Rolebone. Oh, Duke Ellington. Oh, Duke Ellington, right. I thought you said the originator, the greatest. So I had a lot of the original. I had another Duke composition on here, but I switched it to this one because I think this one is deeper.

And this is also in an era where I think he really started to develop. I mean, he came out of the gate, you know, amazing. But this is when it got next level. This is East St. Louis, Tudaloo. You know, it's from a very, very long time ago, very early in the recording technology. Yeah. And people still play this tune.

Yeah. I mean, Steely Dan recorded it in the 70s. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a great composition. And you, even with the limited technology of the recording, you can hear like the dynamics. I mean, of course, the orchestra was great. He always had great players and he wrote, you know, he wrote for them great. But this is one of those compositions that, you know, to me, a great jazz composition.

It's a vehicle for improvisation, of course. And, you know, right into that, you've got the space for that on the trumpet, great trumpet solo. But it's also like memorable melodically, first and foremost, certainly rhythmically, harmonically, but it's just like any other kind of great song. It's a great composition. It's not just a vehicle. Although there are some great compositions. There's a couple that didn't make our list, but could have easily, that actually have no melody. And then the melody that the improviser puts on it, but they're so strong structurally,

harmonically that they're a vehicle for great melodies. But really, when we talk about art, I think when we were talking about different compositions, and we had to whittle it down, obviously. Oh, yeah. Even within Duke Ellington world. that strikes me about this, and as I look down our list as we go through these, I think a common theme that's going to come up is the melody

is swinging. Yeah. Even when the tune isn't a straight swing rhythm, the melodies here and all these great jazz compositions are swinging. Well, in East St. Louis-Toodaloo, there's a bunch of phrases starting with that main first

melody that have become such a big part of the jazz vernacular. The language. I mean, think about... The popular music vernacular. The second theme. Bap-a-d-du-ba-du-ba-du-ba-bo.

Like, that is like something you or I would play today. Yeah, it's literally, oh, thank you. No, it's literally like the vocabulary of our music, which is wonderful. Totally. And it's great. What do you got for number two? Number two, now this is Lush Life by Billy Strayhorn.

And this is really, I think this is probably my favorite song, favorite jazz composition. I don't know if that's any different. In my mind, it's not really. It's obviously it's a great jazz piece, but it's also a standard. I would say it's a standard in the great American songbook, whatever the hell that is. It's a little bit of both there.

I mean, we were kind of talking about what constitutes, you know, the difference between a jazz composition and American songbook. Yeah. I think this walks the line because Billy Strayhorn was a jazz composer. Yes. But this has obviously the lyrics and the lyrical nature of an American songbook. Yeah, and I believe he wrote the lyrics and the music and everything himself. When he was what?

16 or something. Yeah. Goodness. But I mean, yeah, I mean, he's certainly. So Billy Strayhorn was an amazing jazz composer. obviously, but he was also an incredible songwriter. And so you, on different compositions of his, you have the intersection in different ways. But to me, Lush Life is just, it's like, it's really just my favorite song ever written.

I mean, I love the melody. I love the words. I love, you know, various versions of it. I love playing it. I think it's the kind of tune. I mean, you talk about not chasing around after a tune and just letting it come to you as a, you just play this bad boy and good things. are going to happen. You know, I've never put it into my regular repertoire, and I really should

just to get in there and experience it regularly, because it's so beautiful. Let's check out John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman's version, one of my favorite versions. I used to visit all the very gay places, those come what made places, where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life. Man, poetry. To get the feel of life. From jazzed and cocktail The girls I knew had sat and sullen grey faces With distant hair traces That used to be there

You could see where they'd been washed away Right too many through the day Man, how does a 16-year-old come up with that kind of raw, You know, emotional honesty, the emotional depth. Depth of storytelling, too. Big shout out to McCoy, Tanya. That's some of my favorite. piano accompaniment of vocal.

It's so different than, I mean, it's so McCoy, but it's so different than what he normally plays and fits so well, but still has all the stylistic implications of his.

McCoy, yeah. And it's a great, this recording, too, is such a great combination of song, voice, band. I mean, everything just ticks the boxes. I mean, the whole album's great, but I think this is the standard.

When Elvin Jones comes in with the, I mean, that's like the brush. I mean, it's such a big part of the storytelling of this version. I can just, even though we didn't get that far, I encourage everybody that. I'm sure many of you have heard this, but you might want to go back

and reinvest some time because it's... Well, check the description. We'll leave a link to this Spotify playlist that we have here of this list, so you can hear for yourself. Next, number three, we have... I mean, we had to have something by Monk. And this is a tune that I'm playing a lot

recently. This is Ruby, My Dear. Yeah. Again, John Coltrane and Monk version. What's so great about this composition is how specific obviously Monk is with it. Like that melody, it's the same shape, but he obviously is very strict with the rhythm, you know, depending on the time that it happens

because different recordings, it happens similarly every time. You know what I mean, where it's placed? Yeah. And you wouldn't think that. You think, oh, maybe that's just how Train is phrasing it. I don't think so. No, and I think that, you know, Monk is, especially with his ballads,

is similar to Billy Strayhorn in that his compositions, they really border on what you would think of as standards songs, although Monk was not, I mean, there's been some great lyrics written later of his tunes. I don't believe he was big on writing lyrics, so that part wasn't there. And so there's been some wonderful lyrics put to this and some other ones. But they're really like often written in this sort of standard A, ABA, you know, Great American Songbook form or whatever. But I think that, you know, melodically and harmonically and in terms of the form, they're just so beautiful

and so well structured just from that. And then they've got a lot of the more complex kind of jazz interpinnings, but they don't get in the way like a lot of jazz composers kind of, they lose that beautiful simplicity. I mean, Monk had that ability like Billy Stringhorne to write incredible melodies,

you know, in a way that a lot of times, you know, we don't always associate with jazz composers. Yeah, really, really amazing. I love all the little hits in this arrangement that, I mean, that's part of the composition, yeah. Because as you said, it's not like it's just like hits, for hits sake. It's just part of the composition.

Structural. All right, number four, where you got? Number four, we have Knight in Tunisia by Dizzy Glassby. Oh, yeah. And this is, I've always loved playing this tune. I love hearing it. It always sort of takes me to that period of jazz. I mean, I guess it's bebop, but it's also kind of the, not necessarily the beginnings,

because we had a lot of this with Duke Allington and a lot of the New Orleans musicians. and it's always been a part of the jazz music is the intersection of different cultures and different styles of music from the Caribbean, from Africa, from Europe, and obviously New Orleans. But it's like a night in Tunisia is one of the early songs that was really spread around the world and played a lot by a lot of other musicians Beyond Dizzy and Charles Mingus and Charlie Park on those early recordings that brings in the Afro-Cuban elements and then still within that kind of A.A. B-A form with that extended little segue thing. Yeah, yeah.

It's just really fun to play. I love hearing it. I remember hearing Dizzy when I was like 14, 15 years old play it live. Yeah, yeah. That was like a transformational thing. That arrangement with the big band was so good. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's great.

Let's check out one of the first versions. So, swing in. That's from the genius of Charlie Parker. Again, all of these are available in the description here. We'll leave a link for the Spotify playlist with all of these tunes. And I always think about it in a night in Tunisia. I mean, I might be projecting a little bit. I don't know how historically.

Oh, you are. Okay. Thank you. Now, I was thinking of it as kind of the beginning of, or an example of the beginning of so-called world music, what we ended up calling world music. Right. And fusion music and stuff like that, where you're taking in, like, Dizzy was great about taking in, you know, different grooves and being very open to that and putting them,

even the way this tune is, you know, that, that groove, bo-p-p-bo-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-d-and-and-then. And then, spad-de-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-. And then going into the swing and the juxtaposition. Totally. You like that. Splu-du. I was like, swing. I was all at the playground on that one.

It certainly helped it be introduced to jazz audiences, and specifically bebop audiences, I think, that influence for sure. Cool. What we got for number five, my friend? Number five, we have the great Joe Henderson. This is Inner Urge. Man, I love that tune so much. Yeah.

That's just one of my favorite all-time tunes to listen to to play. I think it's brilliant. Yep. In every way. Amazing. Amazing. And I mean, the way that's recorded is so it puts you right in that era, Joe Henderson. I mean, he had a very long career.

But that puts you right in that particular time period, the impulse records. Great, great sound. Number six. So this is Kenny Kirkland's Before it's time to say goodbye Let's check it out Man that's beautiful

Yeah so I mean obviously very beautiful mournful tune But I think it incredible just Beautiful melody so simple And it kind of brings together some interesting elements Almost like New Orleans dirge March It's in three

And then I love the way it's recorded It's so open People always think of Kenny Kirkland As being a very busy player which he was at times, but much as, you know, the great Oscar Peterson and other great jazz pianists at times, he was such an incredible master of the instrument

that he could just play. Yeah. Like very simple, like the phrases we just heard, which left room for something that I think jazz is so great at doing with compositions, which is having a great drummer be a part of the composition. So what you just heard Jeff Watts doing there, big shout out to Jeff Tain Watts,

you know, with that little brush, work and stuff is like part of the composition. So it's not there every time. And obviously, if you don't have Jeff Watts, it's going to be different. But much as when we listen to the John Coltrane, Johnny Hartman, Lush, Life version, we didn't get to when Elvin Jones come in. But, I mean, the brush has become such a part of the composition. And I think when we talk about our seven favorite jazz compositions, it's so much tied

to these recordings. And then what's great as you hear it live, it's a little different. The composition is still there, but it's about the performance of the composition. This is from Kenny Garrett's songbook album. to say that recording is anyway. Which is not Kenny G. Songbird. That's another great album. Songbook, songbird, both saxophones. I just want to be clear on it. And both named Kenny.

First name Kenny. Yeah, I'm surprised by the time this night is over didn't make our list here, but it didn't. Well, yeah. Well. So for number seven, this is from 2004. This is Abashai Cohen, the bassist. Basist, right? Really incredible composer. And this is remembering, I forget what album this is from. I have it here from a soundtrack. A lot of his stuff is not on Spotify, for some reason, but this is remembering. So many good moments in his compositions. You know, I just was trying to think, I'm like, this is such a highly subjective list.

We just want to reiterate that. These are all great compositions, but I was looking for something. I mean, look, because we left out a lot of songs. We even love it seven. We left out John Coltrane off the entire list, which is obviously, and Herbie, which are two of our favorite composers, obviously. I was just thinking of things I'm in the mood for right now. But that's so important that I think what we did capture here.

here and we both picked about half of these. So it's somewhat random, but I think the thing that pulls these all together is that we love listening to these. We love these songs. We love to play them. We love to listen to them. We love the original, a specific recording, whatever. And I just encourage everybody, there's so much

great stuff out there. The wealth and depth of this music compositionally is so amazing. And I think one thing that I do, that did kind of strike me, maybe connects all these compositions is the use of space. And this something that we see in all styles of composition.

And for you composers out there and improvisers, don't be afraid to you space. We heard that great in that last, you know, in remembering, you know, when you, I mean, Lush Life has some great spaces harmonically and actually structurally within the melody. Where you put that space is always a hallmark, I think, of great compositions. Can we do a bonus?

I'm doing a bonus, but I'm calling an audible. Oh, oh. Yeah. Boom. One of my favorite modern compositions was composed by the man sitting across the table for me right now. I don't think that's... I liked it so much that when I first started this podcast, I used it as its theme.

We're going to go out. This is Peter Martin's Emotion in Motion. You'll hear it. What?