Great Unknown Jazz Covers

One of the delicious things separating jazz from pop is that in jazz everyone covers everyone else’s tunes—and not just jazz songs, but Tin Pan Alley, folk and even pop. Anything musical is fair game. In great measure this is because while you can copyright a melody, chord changes are open to resupposing—and it’s jazz, not pop, that exploits the widest possible range of chord changes. And, of course, jazz musicians have the chops to play other people’s tunes—and play them well. Rock’s fake-primitive brand of auteurism means song-writing is considered key, even as 99% of rock songs sound the same. The freedom of jazz leads to endless new arrangements and takes on even the oldest chestnuts. Really, jazz has long been what hip-hop has aspired to be—a music where every musical element is a handy tool for composition, and old songs and ideas are ever finding new forms.
Here are seven little-heard and unlikely cover tunes worth seeking out:
1) ”Stolen Moments”—Betty Carter and Carmen McRae.
This is the best-remembered tune off of trumpeter, arranger and composer Oliver Nelson’s legendary Blues and the Abstract Truth album, a great recording in its own right, and also a turning point in the marketing of jazz. “Stolen Moments” first appeared on Eddie Lockjaw Davis’ 1960 album Trane Whistle (here called “The Stolen Moment,” and with Nelson playing on the cut) in a sped-up version, but the take on Nelson’s album is pretty much perfect. Suffice to say that this is a tune that pretty much anyone’s who’s heard it once can hum, but it’s rarely covered. How to improve on perfection? Carter and McRae make a real go at it with what just might be the only other take on the tune worth hearing, and add a great duet with words, a very adult or mature (in the pre-euphemistic sense of the word) meditation on an affair.
2) Soul on Top—James Brown. A 1969 big band swing album from the Godfather of Soul (and the Godfather of Al Sharpton, incidentally), with arrangements by Louie Bellson. Brown does his own tunes, along with “That’s My Desire,” and a very tight “September Song.” This is the closest you’ll hear to the Cannonball Adderly-James Brown album that sadly doesn’t exist, but very much ought to.
3) “Black Coffee”— Ella Fitzgerald. Accompanied only by Paul Smith on piano, this cut from the long out-of-print soundtrack to the 1960 film Let No Man Write My Epitaph. Anyone who creates a dynamic where Ella sings while Billie mourns is selling both women short, and Ella, always queen of the bridge and the intro, rips through the close here: “My nerves have gone to pieces / My hair is turning grey/All I do is drink black coffee / Since my ma-an went away.”
4) “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”— Robin Nolan. The jazz guitarist takes the old Tony Bennett hit and makes into the sexiest tune this side of—yep, I said it—”Spanish Caravan”—with a tight jazz-flamenco arrangement. Along with a killer cut of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” that actually has more of that Oriental feel than even Ellington’s own takes, Nolan shows just how elastic jazz is, without veering off into pop, world music or any other such cheap hybrid.
5) “Just My Imagination”—Walter “Wolfman” Washington. The most versatile ax-man this side of the recently-departed Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown here scats the Temptation’s classic while channeling Louis Armstrong (“I believe if Louis were with us today, he might sing it something like this…”) Hearing it is a sexual or religious experience. Possibly both.
6) “All My Tears”—Jimmy Scott. The man every female jazz singer from Billie on has stolen licks from takes born-again Christian country singer-songwriter Julie Miller’s “All My Tears,” a tune known mostly for Emmylou Harris’ sensational cover on her career-defining Wrecking Ball, and somehow bends it—ache after pause after unbearably high note—into jazz.
7) These are my roots—Clifford Jordan. An entire album of jazz covers of Leadbelly. And somehow it works. Though the album is mostly instrumentals, the stand-out cut has got to be “Black Girl,” with Sandra Douglass on vocals.

By Harry Siegel - nypress.com

Technorati tag: Jazz