Standards - Freedom of Interpretation

Recently I admitted to myself that I enjoy playing old standards most of all, though I enjoy listening to classical music just as much. I might as well enjoy myself when I'm practicing. 

Just now I was thinking about the catchy song of the late 1930s, "Comes Love," composed by Sam H. Stept (whom I've never heard of), with witty lyrics by Lew Brown and Charles Tobias (also unknown to me), featured in a long-forgotten Broadway musical called "Yokel Boy." I decided to share it with some friends and looked it up on Youtube. There I found a cover by Joni Mitchel. She sings it in the saddest way, as if love were a disaster. The great Artie Shaw recorded it, sung by Helen Forrest, in a serious but not tragic vein. But long ago I had heard it in a much cheerier mood sung by Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong, welcoming love. 

So what's the right way to play it? I'm aware that Glenn Gould made some controversial performances of well-known classical pieces, claiming the freedom of interpretation automatically awarded to popular songs like "Comes Love." But he was Glenn Gould. Not too many classical musicians would dare to alter canonical works with the freedom he arrogated to himself, but in the performance of standards, jazz musicians are expected to do whatever they want. They can change the tempo, reharmonize a tune, and take it so far away in their improvisation that listeners would be hard put to recognize it if they didn't hear it at the outset.

Some of the standards I've been playing are challenging, like the Jobim song, "Chega de Saudad."  If you didn't grow up on them it's hard to play bossa rhythms the way Brazilians sing them. If you listen to different recordings of that song, in Portuguese and in English, by various performers, you hear the freedom of interpretation I love so much and find so hard to emulate. 

If I play Bach or Telemann on the flute, I feel obliged to play as accurately as I can, and I carry that over, inappropriately, to the playing of standards. In fact, I doubt that musicians of the eighteenth century would have felt the need to be 100% accurate. The notation of the rhythms of bossa songs and jazz standards is merely a suggestion, because standard notation isn't designed to convey the subtleties of those rhythms. I imagine that it was equally inadequate to convey baroque rhythms. Certainly composers didn't bother to notate dynamics, articulation, and ornamentation.

Maybe I'll play baroque music better if I keep playing jazz standards.

By Ear, By Heart, From Notes

Recently I've been doing an exercise that makes me feel sorry for anyone who happens to be listening. I pick a song that I know by heart. Recently I played Autumn Leaves, Pennies from Heaven, and I Could Write a Book on the flute. I start in the key the were written in and then transpose them, moving around the circle of fifths (C-F-Bb-Eb- etc.) until I cover all twelve keys. Things get somewhat difficult when I reach the keys with a lot of sharps and flats, and I occasionally have to stop and think - and LISTEN to myself.

My ear isn't so great, and my musical memory is also weak, so I often have to remind myself, let's say, that a melody moves up and spells a half-diminished chord (as in Pennies from Heaven), or shifts briefly into another key. But I'm sure this exercise is doing me good.

When I read music, I don't listen to what I'm playing in the same way as when I play by heart or by ear. By forcing myself to play in all the keys, I'm hearing better and moving my memory of the tune from my fingers to my mind. By listening to what degree of the scale the song starts on (Autumn Leaves is in a minor key and starts on the tonic; I Could Write a Book is in a major key, starts on the third degree, and jumps to the seventh before we actually hear the tonic note), I hope I'm training my ears to hear what key the song is in. With some songs, like Desafinado, you don't hear what key it's in until the very end.

Jazz musicians were (are still?) expected to transpose easily, because vocalists often required a lower or higher range than the original key of a song. I have read that Coleman Hawkins was often so bored with the standards he was playing on a club date, that he called them in unexpected keys, making things tough for the musicians he was playing with. It's more or less standard procedure to play Mack the Knife in a new key every chorus, moving up chromatically.