St Louis Blues, one of the most famous tunes in jazz, was published seventy years ago thus year, and since then has been played and recorded by countless bands, while countless singers have told us that they hate to see the evening sun go down. Bing Crosby recorded it with Duke Ellington. The only film ever made by Bessie Smith was called St Louis Blues, and featured her singing the number. A typical jazz number, you might think. It’s not, actually – it’s a very odd jazz number indeed. For a start, it’s not a jazz tune at all. If you played it on the piano as written by WC Handy, you wouldn’t be playing jazz, and you wouldn’t really be playing the blues either. But then, that applies to lots of other so-called jazz numbers – the Gershwin tune most associated with jazz, I Got Rhythm, is not jazz either as written by the composer or indeed as played by the composer.
A much odder thing about St Louis Blues, actually, is the fact that it falls into two parts. Jazz musicians don’t normally like tunes that fall into two parts. They prefer something straightforward which they can repeat over and over again. But they quite like to play St Louis Blues, probably because there’s a bit of drama in the way one part, a straight 12 bar blues, contrast with the other part, a Latin American sixteen bar segment. Back in 1918 when it was published the tango was all the rage, and that’s probably why it’s there, this sixteen bars from south of the border. But 40 years after it was written you can hear how pianist Erroll Garner went to town on the contrast, almost melodramatic, between these two parts, between singing and playing Latin.

      

  ERROLL GARNER – ST LOUIS BLUES  

            Erroll Garner, swashbuckling his way through St Louis Blues. But if it’s odd to find two different sections in one jazz tune, there’s an even odder thing about St Louis Blues – as a blues. It has a tune. This is pretty rare in a vocal blues, to find a distinctive, memorable tune that you can sing or hum. Most blues, most of the millions ever written, have no particular tune, just a bluesy sort of vocal line which is pretty much the same from song to song. But St Louis Blues has a handsome little melody line, even if no singer could comfortably sing it at the speed Erroll Garner was taking it at. Still, it’s safe to say that Erroll Garner had not the slightest interest in the words of the song. It’s also safe to say that after the opening section, with the alternation of the two sections, Garner lost all interest in the melody as well. If a musician switched on in the middle of that record, he’d know almost immediately that it was a blues, but he wouldn’t have the faintest idea which blues it was, at least, not till the end. When jazz musicians improvise, it isn’t the words or tune they care about – it’s the chords, or the harmony.
You can see this actually happening in a concert given by the Gerry Mulligan quartet back in 1955. Right at the start of the concert, Mulligan was announced, but the audience wasn’t ready. “Maybe I’ll play some blues while you get seated,” he says, and they do. There’s no tune, no title, no words, nothing except a key and a speed. That’s all musicians need to create the beginnings of something, with a 12 bar blues and its chords.

 GERRY MULLIGAN – BLUES GOING UP

Four jazz musicians and not a composer or arranger in sight. Jazz doesn’t normally need composers, and some musicians play right through their lives without meeting a composer face to face or even using one. They play songs by composers, yes, but that’s different. It’s not the song that’s important – it’s what the jazz player does to the song that makes the difference. It’s even been said that jazz is not a music – it’s a way of playing music – so that a jazz musician spends a lot of his time taking a tune which is not jazz, just a good song, and turning it, almost recomposing it himself, into jazz. I can give you a rather unusual example of that, from the end of the war. One of the most famous partnerships before the war was that between Stephan Grappelli, still playing violin today, and his partner Django Reinhardt, the gypsy guitarist. Grappelli was in London all during the war, and Django in occupied France, so they didn’t see each other for five years. On reuniting in London in 1945, they must have had a surge of patriotism to the head because the first tune they chose to record again was La Marseillaise.

 

 DJANGO ‘N’ STEPHANE – LA MARSEILLAISE

 

 The French National Anthem, picking its skirts up and doing a gentle jive. It sounds as if I’m trying to prove that jazz doesn’t need composers at all, and actually, if you consulted most jazz musicians for their favourite figures in jazz, you might get that impression from them. They’d name lots of people who blow and strum and hit the keys; it would almost be as an afterthought that they named anyone who sat and scratched at paper with pen and ink. Of course, they might add, if you have a big band you’re going to need a composer or arranger, because there are simply too many people in a big band for them to be allowed to organise themselves; someone’s got to do it for them. This is partly true, though only partly true. If you listen to one of Count Basie’s like Ham and Eggs, and wait for the tune to come, you’ll have to wait a long time. There is no tune. The band plays a few riffs, it’s true, but I doubt if anyone was hired to write them – the band usually worked out things at  rehearsals. This record glorifies the soloist, not the writer.
    It always seems a bit unlikely that the band worked out a performance like that which seems pretty polished and organised, but it does happen. I play in a group myself – not a jazz group, but still a group – which has 200 or 300 pieces in the repertoire, and we don’t have a single bit of written music to remind ourselves of the arrangements. So why have a composer in jazz at all? Why not just play nice songs? Why not work out routines in the band? Or why not, like Erroll Garner playing St Louis Blues, pretend to be an orchestra on the piano and orchestrate as you go along?
   The answer becomes clear when you listen to a jazz composer who knows what he’s doing. Charlie Mingus played a wonderful bass, led some of the best musicians in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, but above all shaped what they played into something grander than a bunch of good musicians playing jazz. Listen to what he got them to do to a plain blues, how he adds colour, and background and depth to it. Listen to Boogie Stop Shuffle, recorded way back in 1959, but not sounding thirty years old to me.

  BOOGIE STOP SHUFFLE

It’s just the 12 bar blues, but turned by Charlie Mingus into something a bit more architectural, a bit more 3D. Still simple, though, the basic structure is not even as ambitious as St Louis Blues was 70 years ago. And here we hit one of the strange paradoxes of jazz, and one that isn’t much notice; form and structure have tended to get simpler in jazz as everything else has got more complex. It’s one of the things that people notice when they come to jazz for the first time from the direction of classical music. Well used to formal sophistication, they say: Yes, the harmonies are really quite tricky and you’ve got some wonderful techniques and some pretty clever rhythms, but why is it so simple in outline? Why do you repeat the same shape over an dover again?
It’s a good point. The answer partly lies in the fact that it has been tried, and it didn’t work. Back in the 1920s, a lot of jazz compositions, like the ragtime classics before them, had anything up to four or five different sections, in different keys, going from major to minor and back again, providing a quiet interlude or even a complete change of mood. The most famous composer of the 1920s, Jelly Roll Morton, scarcely ever wrote a piece with just one strain, as he called them. He would have considered that pretty poor value for money. Here’s an example of something that a classical critic would agree to be a prettily constructed miniature, even if the name didn’t appeal to him: Black Bottom Stomp.

MORTON - BLACK BOTTOM STOMP

Jelly Roll Morton did as much for jazz in the 1920s as Charlie Mingus did in the 1950s, and along the same lines: organising musicians to do more the the sum of the parts. But I said just now that that sort of complicated structure didn’t work. It was pretty clear, listening to the record, that it did work. So what do I mean? I mean that it didn’t work for the musicians. The more musicians came to improvise, the less they wanted to have fiddly compositions written by composers who wanted to organise them. Musicians wanted to blow, and the best tunes for blowing   on were simple shapes, 12, 16, or 32 bars long. In jazz, what the musician wants always wins out in the end, even over public taste, or composers’s wishes, or, as in pop music, what the singer want. The reason that musicians kept recording I Got Rhythm was not that it had good words. It hasn’t. Or that it has a good tune, because it’s only got one clever phrase in it. It was because it had nice simple chords for blowing on, with a middle eight bars that present something a little different. Now, the Gershwin song as written has a little two bar tag on the end, which provides a little variety. Singers always sing it. Dance bands always keep it in. Jazz musicians never play it, except when they are just playing the tune, because it gets n the way of their improvising, and destroys the symmetry of the 32 bar choruses. What they’re saying to Gershwin is: Thanks for the compositional flourish, Mr Gershwin, Mr Gershwin, but no thanks.

I GOT RHYTHM - CHARLIE PARKER

I GOT RHYTHM - GEORGE GERSHWIN