Blair Big Band - Songbook (2019)

Today, jazz is studied, performed, and preserved in university settings.
Jazz ensembles, private lessons, and survey classes study the canon, learning technique and the iconic recordings and artists that created and developed jazz and its many sub genres.
It is important to remember, however, that before universities accepted jazz as a genre worthy of study and created the first collegiate jazz programs in the 1940s, jazz was the popular music of the era. The success of early jazz records, some of the earliest pop music disseminated through sound recordings, initiated the birth of the recording industry and illustrated the potential of a popular culture market. Within this setting, jazz was challenged, becoming an object of blame for its association with youth culture and the social constructs that jazz and its musical and cultural performance seemed to challenge. Between the first commercial jazz recording in 1917 and the advent of bebop in the mid 1940s, arranged jazz charts for small ensembles and larger bands were the most popular songs of the era, heard both through live performances in clubs and dancehalls and through the radio that broadened the market, expanded the audience, and created some of America’s first pop stars.

Many big bands’ repertoire comprised both newly composed charts and arrangements of older, familiar songs, often rooted in the earlier sounds of 1920s jazz or in ragtime and pop compositions disseminated through the sheet music industry. Jelly Roll Morton’s 1923 “King Porter Stomp,” for example, was later arranged for band by Fletcher Henderson, whose arrangement was recorded by Benny Goodman in 1935, whose popularity helped to strengthen the song’s role as a jazz standard. This type of borrowing (similar to musical and textual references in today’s popular music) helped to create a popular music that was both familiar and new, introducing the developing and everchanging sound of the big band within a familiar framework that likely encouraged audience engagement with the music and interaction with the musicians and among each other.

With the decline of swing music in the late 1940s and the rise of rhythm and blues as America’s “new” popular music, jazz ensembles moved in new exploratory directions, leading to smaller ensembles and the development of bebop, its new and experimental techniques creating an expanding genre more concerned with technical skill and artistry than with audience participation. Thanks both to surviving bands and to a number of big band revivals throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the big band has survived and flourished by adapting to the times and creating new arrangements of jazz standards and contemporary pop music. This tradition of referencing, arranging, and adapting is continued on this recording. The Blair Big Band, under the direction of Dr. Ryan Middagh, has selected ten big band charts, covering a wide spectrum of modern popular music styles. Included on the album are selections written by or interpreted by iconic popular artists: the Beatles, Steely Dan, Toto, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Radiohead, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, and Ray Charles. The Blair Big Band’s interpretations of these songs are based on a number of arrangements that include charts by Dr. Ryan Middagh, Dr. Tucker Biddlecombe, and recording artist and Blair alumnus David Rodgers.

The selection of songs on the album traces the history and development of popular music. From “Drown in My Own Tears,” most associated with Ray Charles’ 1955 recording or Aretha Franklin’s powerful 1967 interpretation, to Radiohead tracks released in 1992 and 2001, the key songs the Blair Big Band has selected range from the beginning of “rock and roll” as a marketable genre to the turn of the 21st century. However, this album is not a cover record, but a reimagining, a new interpretation of pop standards through a jazz tradition that has always referenced, borrowed from, and re-contextualized the new sounds of popular music. This type of borrowing creates a familiar sonic space wherein known songs, which many of us can sing along to, are reinterpreted by young musicians, many of whom were not yet born when the referenced songs were first released. This referencing of classic popular songs through an even more classic popular genre by a group of musicians who are primarily familiar with the borrowed music and genre through a new introduction to both, creates a fresh interpretation of the included songs, while capturing the joy and continued relevancy of the big band. In this recording, listeners hear a group of talented students, making music together, creating something new out of something old, leaving us with an interpretation that goes beyond a sonic replica. The arrangements and their execution allow the students to follow the footsteps of the jazz musicians who came before while providing a space to leave their own, taking their rightful place in the jazz tradition and, in the process, reminding listeners that jazz continues to be a relevant and vibrant form of popular music interpretation and expression.

Robert Fry