Saxophone beginners How is a Jazz Standard Ballad different from other pop ballads ?

[LostCircuits]

As does Joshua Redman

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HKmJ7k0ZFA

The Dotsero version was definitely different, a lot more punch, but the idea behind it was the same. But it was at an open air "park" venue, the band stayed on stage and Dave walked the crowd. It was just super cool!

 

[6441]

And then of course there's Mindy's Imagine that has been posted on this forum at least once, maybe several times. These are hard tunes to milk for jazz, but the best players have no trouble.

 

[LostCircuits]

You can pretty much take any Sting song and depending on who guest stars it'll turn into a pop or jazz tune.

 

[JayeNM]

Most "jazz standard" ballads are originally show tunes, complete with verse and chorus (every so often, people will actually play or sing the verse). Thus considerable harmonic sophistication even in the original "vanilla" form like in the books for the show. Most "pop ballads" are just simple-chord confections thus offer less material for improvisers to work with. It takes a higher level of skill to make a quality artistic statement out of something like "Time after Time" (Miles...) vs. "Someone to Watch Over Me" with all its chords and 32 bar structure and the lengthy, rarely heard verse.

Agree with everything ....

...except Time After Time can stand on its own quite well (Tuck and Patty did a nice jazz cover of it too, and actually my quintet does a latin version of it and it really needed no particular embellishment as it has 3 parts A-B-C to the song already)....

...so I wouldn't lump that particular tune (and a number of other slow tunes from the 80's, honestly) in with the sorta mind-numbing, fast-food ballad garbage of most of today's contemporary pop.

(sorry, you have probably gathered that using that song as an example of an unsophisticated pop ballad hit a nerve with me - it's a good tune IMHO)

 

[JayeNM]

So basically there's an interesting hypothesis being posited by a number of repliers here....

....that it was the harmonic and structural sophistication of the pop tune which made it desirable material for the jazz artists to cover in, say, the 40's-50's-60's.

Which may extrapolate into saying :

"the reason pop tunes of, say, the 70's-current are not 'covered' by jazz artists like they were in the 40'-60's is because pop music became less musically/compositionally interesting".

Would we say that is an accurate assessment ?

(I am not so sure I'd go that far, myself...just wondering if most others here would agree with that ?)

 

[6441]

Jazz bands play standards, but when I hear "jazz standard" I think Round Midnight, and similar.

 

[JayeNM]

Ooh...this one popped back into my head....here's a KILLER latin-jazz rendition, if you hadn't heard it:

View: https://youtu.be/0iokHONE_eE

 

[JayeNM]

Jazz bands play standards, but when I hear "jazz standard" I think Round Midnight, and similar.

And, interestingly...rock/pop/soul/etc bands play "covers"...as the nomeclature has developed, eh ?

 

[6441]

Would we say that is an accurate assessment ?

Yes or No. <joke> I think it's harder to make something of the simpler ones, but there are still compelling tunes out there, I just don't listen to that stuff. And then there's the reverse phenomenon of loop-based songs that use samples of jazz tunes.

 

[Pete Effamy]

"the reason pop tunes of, say, the 70's-current are not 'covered' by jazz artists like they were in the 40'-60's is because pop music became less musically/compositionally interesting".

Then people that go with that argument should try and explain Steely Dan and a bunch of other similar bands.

 

[6441]

Then people that go with that argument should try and explain Steely Dan and a bunch of other similar bands.

But Steely Dan isn't generic enough to cover.

 

[Pete Effamy]

But Steely Dan isn't generic enough to cover.

I'm just scoffing at the idea that music from the 70's had poor harmonic content

 

[6441]

60's and 70's were good, until disco.

 

[LostCircuits]

60's and 70's were good, until disco.

Even that is a fallacy. There were a lot of songs that ended up as "disco", sometimes even remastered by third parties like the discoboyz:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHLA4QIKRRk


Take Alphaville's Forever Young, one of the most covered ballads of all times, originally "new wave" but it ended up in the discos and sometimes disco is not a terrible thing either.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08A8cLf6QSs

 

[6441]

I admit to being totally ignorant of that era. I didn't listen to anything but classic jazz in my collection.

 

[Colin the Bear]

I'm just scoffing at the idea that music from the 70's had poor harmonic content

Genesis and Floyd oh oh oh and Baker st. When did Basie and Ellington stop touring?

 

[LostCircuits]

I admit to being totally ignorant of that era. I didn't listen to anything but classic jazz in my collection.

Hey, it's never too late to have a happy childhood!
Arguably, a lot of the stuff was close to rubbish but man, can you do me a favor and record a bebop version of YMCA and post it here 🙂

 

[turf3]

"Alphaville's Forever Young, one of the most covered ballads of all times...."

You've got to be kidding.

In a world that contains songs like "Someone to Watch Over Me", "At Last", "As Time Goes By", "Yesterday", "Body and Soul", "Darn that Dream", "Polka Dots and Moonbeams", "Unforgettable", "Moon River", "Easy Living", "My Funny Valentine", "When Sunny Gets Blue", "Autumn Leaves", "East of the Sun", etc., etc., etc., you would call THAT "one of the most covered ballads of all times"?

 

[jbtsax]

I love traditional jazz ballads and have performed many of them in the groups I have played in over the years. I also am fond of ballads from popular music---especially those that came out when I was in my teens and early '20's. Several tunes by David Gates fall into this category as do many of the Beatle's songs. Not only the melodies and harmony have a lasting quality about them, but the lyrics as well.

 

[LostCircuits]

I'd say if you just type it into the YouTube search box, you'll find pages and pages and pages.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doDFyRaBH-s

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLWvvskiSEk


But of course, those aren't real artists in your book