Books on the topic: jazz standards

I love jazz standards. I love their melancholic mood, their simple but expressive lyrics about well-known emotions, their ever-green property, the countless performances of them. This feeling reaches me very often, and I wanted to know more about these songs, more than its lyrics and nice melodies. The stories behind, the circumstances of their birth, the authors' thoughts. Jazzstandards.com helps me of course but I prefer reading in books, not on web. This site helps in this, too, because it offers a big range of books on this topic. With the help of Amazon's Look inside! function I chose the most interesting ones and maybe I'll read one of them in the summertime this year.

Listening to classic American popular songs

This book will be read by musicians because its main feature is sheet and lyrics of twenty-three well-known songs, like I've got you under my skin, Autumn in New York, Come rain or come shine, etc. It also gives some knowledge about harmony, melody and rhythm in the first part of the book, and you can listen to the songs as well on the cd attached to the book.

The NPR's curious listener's guide to popular standards

The main advantage of this book is that it doesn't only write about 100 songs, it also describes the songwriters, the performers, it defines the meaning of it and shows the whole evolution of this style.

The Great American Songbook: Stories of the standards

This book tells us the stories of the standards and their writers, such as: Night and day: Cole Porter, The way you look tonight: Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, Kind of blue, So what: Miles Davis - and many more (up to 29). It also presents songs which haven't got lyrics but became very, very famous.

America's songs: The stories behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley

It's like a history textbook: the chapters are periods of time (1910-1919, 1920-1929, ... , 1970-1977) and they are divided into years - with interesting, illustrative photos.

More:
American Popular Song: The great innovators, 1900-1950
The American popular ballad of the Golden Era (1924-1950)

There are a lot more but you wouldn't choose... and I didn't show the books which concentrate on only one writer.

Jean Michel Jarre concert review - Oxygene Tour

The concert I wrote about in the previous post was my second Jean Michel Jarre concert experience. The first was in 2008 November, called Oxygene Tour when he played the whole album from its first sounds to its last noises and additionally a few from Oxygene 7-13, and as a bonus, Oxygene 4 again. All of the songs were played on the original analogue instruments. That concert was slightly better than this World Tour - maybe just because that was my first experience or because I'm fond of Oxygene. I remember as the sound was better, though we were standing in front of the stage not too far, in a very good place.

There he played Oxygene 12 and besides Oxygene 2 (of course) it was my favourite period of the concert. In living version it's much better than on the album, and that song got a perfect video-mix playing behind the stage: fastened motions of nature (like flowers blossom and animal corpses get rotten), shots of animals, turbulences... it is wonderful. It totally matches to the music. So when I heard it at World Tour, I was very glad and it became one of my favourite moments of the two hour experience.

The other amazing thing was a speciality which was played only here, in Hungary. As JMJ told us, he was walking in the city and heard a street musician and he invited him to his concert. The result became awesome: an improvisative song by the hang drum and the concert devices. It had a very special atmosphere, watch it below.

Oxygene 12:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xSzn7tpEhg

Jean Michel Jarre and Norbert Pável:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc5ToA4GK0w

Jean Michel Jarre concert review - World Tour

One of the stages of his World Tour was Budapest, so tonight I saw the concert. JMJ said that it had been the first concert since his mother died so he dedicated it to her. It was powerful, really.

Surprisingly he didn't play any song from Téo & Téa or Metamorphoses, the songs concentrated on Equinoxe, Oxygène, and Rendez-vous - which isn't problem at all, I think. We got everything which is connected to his shows: laser harp, theremin, endless number of synthesizers - and a spectacular light show. No, this word is too small. It was shocking. The lights were showering the audience, making unexisting planes and surfaces in the air, in a great rhythym to the music - which, was very "large" sometimes. I dare to say too large, and too vivid, but as my thoughts kept rolling by during the concert, I felt it's right. He's French. Kraftwerk is German. You can see the differences in the way of their playing but it's totally all right. They were my absolute favourites in the secondary school fan-years so the concert was also nostalgic for me. Two hours of sounds, sounds which you hear and think they belong to him. It's fantastic. He created sounds and new atmosphere. I read an article few years ago where he was asked that You are often said to be the father of electronic music, what do you think? And he responded, I must be only the father of my child. But he really made something new.

My fave moments of the concert:

Oxygène 5 turning into an improvisative trance-thing

Oxygène 12 with the fantastic video behind

Equinoxe 4 with the nice original art inspired video

the song, when we could see incredible numbers from the wolrd

Equinoxe 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qop9Ms82FI8

Oxygène 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4HN4Kxju1c

Oxygène 4 + 12 (not Budapest):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWICdlD_85w&feature=related

His official website:
http://www.jeanmicheljarre.com/

Billie Holiday - Recorded from Carnegie Hall live

I was just thinking about what to listen to in this rainy and grey spring afternoon, and my decision happened to be ideal for this mood.

This special concert recording features short excerpts from Billie's autobiographical book, Lady sings the blues read by a narrator with a perfect voice which is absolutely suitable on this album, I reckon. I immediately peeked into it at Amazon and maybe I'll read it in the summertime.

With a cup of tea on the window sill I was staring out the window, daydreaming about what was and what will be and the beauty of music, while the rain was heavily knocking the glass in front of me. It was beautiful, indeed - music has a power like nothing, it starts thoughts in your head and writes on. On this album Lady Day sings the famous Lady sings the blues, Body and soul, Yesterdays, I cover the waterfront while we can peek into the interesting segments of her life. Lady sings the blues... yes, that's totally true. With her hoarse singing voice the ballads are very impressive and she absolutely lives the songs - and takes in them her pain, memories and desires. The older quality is ice on the cake.

I cover the waterfront:

The album inspired me and I watched another videos from her on YouTube, here are two songs: Autumn in New York, Good morning heartache (I'm looking forward to write about these two songs in the section standards, this year it will surely happen).

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.

I was a woman when I was sixteen. I was big for my age, with big breasts, big bones, a big fat healthy broad, that's all. So I started working out then, before school and after, minding babies, running errands, and scrubbing those damn white steps all over Baltimore.

But whether I was riding a bike or scrubbing somebody's dirty bathroom floor, I used to love to sing all the time. I liked music. If there was a place where I could go and hear it, I went.

John Coltrane Quartet - Ballads

When I first heard the samples of this album on the internet, I wan't interested at all. It was strange to hear Coltrane playing in this style - but he felt its opposite when he was also said by others to be the best of the angry tenors as we can read on the original cover, which Impulse kept when it released it in the newer Impulse originals series.

The title perfectly and simply describes what we'll hear: ballads. Beautiful standards...

1. Say it (over and over again)

2. You don't know what love is

3. Too young to go steady

4. All or nothing at all

5. I wish I knew

6. What's new

7. It's easy to remember

8. Nancy (with the laughing face)

...which are good to hear again and again any times - that's why they're standards and get famous and have stayed alive. I think there's a few people who these songs don't take effect on. So to angry tenors he answered: I guess, they say that because I play the horn hard. Now he proves his abilities to this style, too, and maybe it was a need himself as well to do something lighter than his real, deeply serious music. It's a fanatastic album for silent and sensitive moments. Unfortunately it's only a little bit longer than half an hour, but it is worth to hear.

Gene Less writes about Coltrane the following:
Coltrane is, as a matter fact, one of the gentlest and quietest people I've met in jazz. And, two or three years ago, he was just about the shyest.
Now that he has become a study in effusive cameraderie. But he has emerged considerably from that cocoon of quiet in which he lived his off-stage life. He talks more now, he laughs more readily, he seems more assured.

Too young to go steady:


Listen to Naima.