Cover Songs and Standards

Every piano, horn, and clarinet player should at least familiarize themselves with blues and jazz standards, if not necessarily know how to play them all. Standards are the bread and butter of professional jazz musicians, the songs that all of the greats played because the tunes themselves are great. Who doesn't know how to finish the sentence "It don't mean a thing..."?

While innovation makes the music world go 'round, a musician still has to eat and you may well find yourself filling in with a band playing jaz standards in a swanky lounge between opportunities to make your own brand of wonderful music or getting low-down with blues standards to which your audience can relate. Standards also provide a sort of inside joke amongst musicians, a common language you can sneak into your own compositions and a framework on which to build a vocabulary of your own while remaining accessible to other musicians and fans alike.

Even if you don't play an instrument jazz and blues standards form a foundation on which so much wonderful music has been built. Knowing and enjoying these songs offers you a wider appreciation for the roots of much of the popular music of today, whether blues, jazz, country, or even hip hop. You can recognize influences, melodies, and riffs from many standards that clue you in to the influences of your favorite musicians. And just think how smart you'll sound when you identify that sample in the background of a pop song as having been lifted from a version of Apache! If you're interested in more talk about jazz and cover songs, try this National Public Radio story about jazz musicians turning hard rock into standards.

Now, you may believe all of that to be so much blather and see no real benefit to yourself. But I've saved the best for last: standards make great listening. Regardless of the fact that you don't want to impress your friends with the depth of your musical knowledge or wish to play Wednesday nights with a sweet jazz combo at the Holiday Inn, these songs stand out as the classical music of the past century.

Whether it's the mournful and lovely Stormy Weather or the wildly varying takes on Summertime, the loving I've Got a Crush on You or the defiant The Lady Is a Tramp, standards became such by offering enough complexity or beauty or simple emotion to capture the imagination of dozens of musicians.

Every performance of I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm is new and different while it remains familiar. Cover songs offer endless variation on common themes and musicians like Ella Fitzgerald are renowned for taking a few elements from a jazz standard and creating entirely new structures on that base. This offers listeners a landscape of new and different music, standards from a hundred perspectives.

Standards are great cover songs. Whether it's a Count Basie and the Rat Pack crooning I've Got You under My Skin, Duke and Ella swinging Mack the Knife, Bing bubbling through Blue Skies or Buble burbling I'm Beginning to See the Light, or even a guy with a guitar at the open mic night at your local pub, jazz standards became popular because they speak to so many.

The odds are pretty good that your favorite musician has played a jazz or blues standard or two in his or her day and perhaps even recorded one (if not an entire album, as Willie Nelson, Robbie Williams, and Rod Stewart have all done recently). You'll even get an extra smile the next time you catch someone sneaking The Girl from Ipanema into an elevator scene in a movie.