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Show up to a jazz gig and there is no rehearsal. The bandleader calls a tune and expects you to know it, and if you don’t, you are not working next week. Ted Gioia used to write lists of those tunes for his piano students - what to learn, in what key - until he realised nobody had ever written the book. So he did.
Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Ted Gioia, author of “The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire,” in a conversation first recorded in 2019 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened.
Nate and Ted take four songs and hear each one twice. “St. Louis Blues,” the song that carried the blues into mainstream American pop, starting with W.C. Handy in a Mississippi train station around 1903, listening to a man play guitar with a knife - heard first as Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, then as Django Reinhardt made it over in Paris. “I Got Rhythm,” one of the simplest songs Gershwin ever wrote, and the reason it became the most borrowed chord progression in jazz, under “Cotton Tail,” “Anthropology,” “Oleo” and “Rhythm-a-Ning.”
Also: Jerome Kern, who hated jazz musicians playing his songs - and whose estate, Ted notes, has never sent back a royalty check; Benny Goodman, the biggest pop star in America, commissioning Bartok and Copland; how “Night Train” came out of Duke Ellington’s band; Dave Brubeck refusing to play “Take Five” the same way twice; why “Donna Lee” may really be Miles Davis’s; and why Burt Bacharach’s songs scare jazz players off.
After the paywall: Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” turning into the R&B smash “The Hucklebuck” (danced on The Honeymooners), “Donna Lee,” Monk, Mingus and Bacharach, and “My Favorite Things,” from Julie Andrews singing it to children to John Coltrane “exploding it into a million beautiful pieces” - plus Ted’s one wish for jazz, that its musicians would start playing each other’s songs again.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* “St. Louis Blues,” Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong
* “St. Louis Blues,” Django Reinhardt
* “I Got Rhythm,” Louis Armstrong
* “I Got Rhythm,” The Esquire All-Stars
* “Now’s the Time,” Charlie Parker
* “The Hucklebuck,” Paul Williams
* “My Favorite Things,” Julie Andrews - The Sound of Music
* “My Favorite Things,” John Coltrane
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park.
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