Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Pt. 22: The Great American Songbook
I. What Makes It Great When you are in the autumn of your years, you get more and more sympathetic to the spoken aside tossed off by Van Morrison on his stupendous live double-LP of 1974, Too Late to Stop Now : "Now for the best, later for the garbage," said Van. At danger of becoming one of those people who only listen to Mozart and Bach and Dvorak and Beethoven and Schubert since everything else, especially anything new , is just inferior , I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to jazz versions of what are called the "standards," the timeless songs from the Golden Age of American songwriting, otherwise known as the Great American Songbook. I'm on Apple Music and am continually building a playlist of standards, with more than 1300 songs now. I mix vocal cuts with purely instrumental ones. Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon might stretch out for some involved investigations followed by Billie Holiday or Carmen McRae stripping things down to their esse...
