Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

An interesting question came up in the January 2008 issue of Down Beat magazine’s “The Question Is…” column, which takes a question involving America’s first true musical genre and poses it to several jazz musicians.

In the wake of such recent jazz releases as Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, his Grammy-winning [not just the jazz grammy either, but Record of the Year] collection of improvisations on the songs of Joni Mitchell, and pianist Cyrus Chestnut using Elvis Presley songs as the basis of jazz improvisations, the Down Beat column in question asked, “Are there limits to using pop repertoire for jazz interpretation?”

The columnist in question, Dan Ouellette, writes: “Boomer artists in recent years have found jazz inspiration in pop songs by Elton John, The Doors, and James Taylor…” After referencing the aforementioned Hancock and Chestnut releases, Ouellette asks, “Where will it end – would someone ever make a go at jazzing up the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s bubblegum hit ‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy’? Simply speaking, what works and what doesn’t for jazz interpretations of familiar pop tunes? How far can a jazz musician delve into the pop world for ‘new standards’?”

Hancock had already been plumbing possibilities about a decade prior to River when, in one of his first albums for Verve in 1996, he recorded the album New Standard, in which he used the likes of Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, Prince’s “Thieves In The Temple”, Don Henley’s “New York Minute”, and songs by Peter Gabriel , Sade, and Stevie Wonder as the basis of improvisational workouts. Hancock, of course, apprenticed early in his career with one of the true masters of jazz, Miles Davis.

Miles Davis being Miles motherfuckin’ Davis, of course, didn’t care where a song originated – if he could improv over it or explore the melody of it with his horn, he was going to do it. Having covered (with considerable audacity at the time) several popular and Broadway songs – many of which are now considered jazz standards – during his days with his first great quartet (the one with John Coltrane on tenor sax) in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, his approach would rub off directly on Coltrane, who would have one of his first ‘hit’ recordings with his 15-minute modal workout based around The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things”.

Miles would retain that same don’t-give-a-fuck attitude in 1985 when he made new standards out of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” and Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” on his album You’re Under Arrest. A few of his band members at the time weren’t entirely sold on the idea – guitarist John Scolfield said that he hated playing the songs in a later interview – but Miles was more than satisfied with the results… as was Cyndi Lauper herself; in the wake of Miles’ original cover version, “Time After Time” has become one of the most performed and recorded songs in modern history. (No doubt, the songwriting and publishing royalties Cyndi Lauper has been collecting for the past twenty years on that song alone have made it more than possible for her to do whatever the hell she wants in the recording studio, as opposed to endlessly repeating her She’s So Unusual and True Colors triumphs.)

Nowadays, however, very few of the pop hits that have been released to American radio in the past several years could lend themselves to the same improvisational terrain that Miles found in a song Cyndi Lauper had written during the tail end of recording sessions for her first album. For every brilliant example of modern American pop songwriting like Panic At The Disco’s “Nine In The Afternoon”, there are at least 50 crappy club bangers built solely on a single repetitive strain of music and an equally monotonous hook with little or no melody.

In response to Ouellette’s question, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt lamented, ”The quality of pop music has severely decreased since the birth of the ‘hook’, a.k.a. the moneymaking ploy. I haven’t heard a decent song since the mid-90’s, so if I were to cover a pop song, it would be from that era and earlier.”

Pianist Ryan Cohan also responded in part, “Unfortunately, some pop music today is driven and defined solely by production values, this producing ‘hits’ void of any actual musical components. Such music provides no real substance in a jazz context.”

Well, nobody said that jazz artists had to stick to AMERICAN pop songs.

Under US Copyright Law, there exists what is called a compulsory license. If you wanted to record a cover version of a song, while one could go through a formality and ask permission to record a cover version, in reality all any artist has to do is properly credit the songwriter, his publisher, and whichever music royalty organization (BMI, ASCAP, or SESAC) he or she is affiliated with. For example, if someone were to cover a song I had written, they would have to print my name, the name of my publisher (I actually don’t have one at present), and put (BMI) at the end of the credit (and yes, for the record, I really am a writer member of BMI).

BMI, ASCAP and SESAC also deal with performance rights societies in the rest of the world, collecting song royalties for their member s earned in other parts of the world as well as helping keep track of songs from other countries that get played and sold in the US.

Imagine if one of the many jazz legends that helped shape American music were still alive – or one of the many left that are still alive – using (for example) a Morning Musume song as the basis of a jazz improvisation. How would they interpret it?

Picture one of Miles Davis’ post-The Man With The Horn groups doing an extended electric improvisation on “Joshi Kashimashi Monogatari” that would rival one of the side-long workouts that featured on Bitches Brew or Miles Davis At Fillmore.

Picture John Coltrane playing “Furusato” or “Namida ga Tomaranai Houkago” with the same reverence that he used for his versions of Sinatra’s “All or Nothing at All” or “Nancy (With The Laughing Face)” from Ballads.

Picture Thelonious Monk taking “Morning Musume no Hyokkori Hyotanjima” and putting in his trademark stacked piano chord clusters with the same panache he used when he transformed the moldy oldie “Tea For Two” into an uptempo Monk classic on Criss-Cross.

Picture Jimmy Smith, the man who invented jazz organ (and influenced Deep Purple’s Jon Lord and Mike Watt & The Secondmen’s Pete Mazich, amongst countless others, in the process), doing “Osaka Koi no Uta” with the same spirit that drove him when he dared to cover “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” on his Got My Mojo Workin’ album.

Picture Count Basie’s great orchestra taking on “Mr. Moonlight” and redefining what the song’s subtitle of “Koi no Big Band” means!

But since none of those artists are with us anymore, except in spirit, picture one of the many living artists currently upholding the jazz tradition (Branford Marsalis or the aforementioned Mr. Hancock, anyone? – I’d have to sit with a year’s worth of Down Beat back issues to catch up with the names of current jazz artists) coming across one of Morning Musume’s songs and deciding to cover it on their next album? The logistics regarding performance rights aren’t difficult to get, the musical territory would be a lot more suited to a horn or piano improvisation than most of the recent American hit singles of late, and as a nice side effect – especially if, for argument’s sake, Herbie Hancock was to cover a MoMusu song on the follow-up to River (which, thanks to his Grammy win, would definitely have some attention drawn to it the moment a release date was announced) – some considerable interest would be shown to Morning Musume by an audience outside of the growing cult fanbase they currently hold outside of their native Japan.