recommended versions
Ahmad Jamal, from Chamber Music of the New Jazz , Chicago, May 23, 1955 Modern Jazz Quartet, from Concorde , Hackensack, New Jersey, July 2, 1955
Miles Davis (with John Coltrane), from ’Round About Midnight , New York, September 10, 1956
Sarah Vaughan, from After Hours at the London House , live at the London House, Chicago, March 7, 1958
Bill Evans (with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian), from The Complete Village Vanguard
Recordings, 1961 , live at the Village Vanguard, New York, June 25, 1961
McCoy Tyner, from Live at Newport , live at the Newport Jazz Festival, Newport, Rhode Island, July 5, 1963
Shelly Manne (with Tom Scott), from Hot Coles , Los Angeles, 1975 Makoto Ozone, from Nature Boys , Los Angeles, October 4–5, 1995
Buster Williams (with Gary Bartz), from Somewhere Along the Way , Englewood Cliff s, New Jersey, November 11–12, 1996
Denny Zeitlin, from Denny Zeitlin Trio in Performance , live at the Outpost Perfor- mance Space, Albuquerque, New Mexico, December 2004
All the Things You Are
Composed by Jerome Kern , with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
I am tempted to say that “All the Things You Are” is my favorite jazz standard. But I would need to immediately clarify my statement. Frankly, I am not espe- cially entertained by the song as written by Jerome Kern—the melody, with its predictable whole notes and chord tones, moves with an austere, quasi- mathematical precision that leaves me cold—but the piece represents, to my mind, an exciting set of possibilities as a springboard for jazz improvisation. I love this song less for what it is , than for what it can be .
In my twenties, I would play “All the Things You Are” almost every day, often at great length, and I found constant solace in constructing melodic variations over its chord changes. I’m sure I’m not alone in this regard: many jazz artists have returned to this song, over and over again, during the course of their careers. I recall talking to saxophonist Bud Shank a few months before his death at age 82, when he noted that he never felt he had exhausted the possibilities of this specifi c song, which he had fi rst recorded almost 60 years earlier. Pianist Lennie Tristano and his acolytes have also demonstrated a quasi- obsessive fi xa- tion on this composition, apparently fi nding in it a zen-like inspiration for higher-order creative improvisation—an attitude I must admit to sharing.
16 All the Things You Are
There is some heavy irony here. Jerome Kern was notoriously hostile to jazz musicians who took liberties with his songs; and in his mind, almost anything a jazz musician might want to do was considered a liberty. Yet the improvisers persisted despite this antagonism and have worked tirelessly over the years to showcase—and keep vital—the legacy of this composer, born back in the nine- teenth century before jazz even existed. In the last decade alone, more than 300 jazz versions of “All the Things You Are” have been recorded—testimony to the fact that this piece, once a Broadway show tune, is now primarily a jazz compo- sition, more likely to be heard wherever improvisers congregate than on TV or radio.
“All the Things You Are” fi rst appeared in the 1939 musical Very Warm for May , an unsuccessful show that closed after seven weeks, a victim of such nasty reviews that, on the second night, only 20 people purchased tickets. (However, nine-year-old Stephen Sondheim saw one of the 59 performances, and later credited it as a reason for his interest in a career as a Broadway composer.) Yet jazz players quickly took a liking for Kern’s song, and both Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw scored top 10 hits with “All the Things You Are” in February 1940.
After 1940, this song would never again show up on the pop charts, and for good reason: the salient virtues of this piece may well be lost on the general public. To the uninitiated listener, the second eight bars may sound identical to the fi rst eight bars, yet musicians will appreciate the unusual modulation that brings the same melody down fi ve scale steps, a shift that appeals to me as a deepening of the underlying mood of the song. Throughout most of the form, the bassline moves through the circle of fi fths with such zeal, that when Kern departs from the pattern, at the end of the bridge and in the elongated fi nal A theme, it imparts added piquancy to the proceedings. Kern himself reportedly felt that the composition was too complex to ever become a lasting hit, and Alec Wilder, mulling over this verdict, off ers the intriguing suggestion that if the opening bars of a song are catchy enough, the public will put up with the most labyrinthine constructions later on in the form.
“All the Things You Are” has weathered the passing fads and styles of the jazz world with admirable endurance and adaptability. The song stayed in the big band repertoire during the early 1940s and was taken up by the beboppers almost from the start. Dizzy Gillespie recorded it with Charlie Parker in an infl uential 1945 track (incorporating a much imitated intro—perhaps initially intended as a parody of Rachmaninoff ’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor ), and the duo revisited the Kern standard at their Massey Hall concert from 1953. Parker, for his part, frequently included this song on his set list, and it also served as the basis for his “Bird of Paradise,” recorded with Miles Davis in 1947. But the cool jazz and West Coast players of the 1950s were equally attuned to “All the Things You Are,” and it shows up in recordings of this period by the Modern Jazz Quar- tet, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, and indeed almost every signifi cant
All the Things You Are 17
improviser associated with these movements. Nor did the rise of hard bop, free, fusion, and other contrary styles do much to dislodge the song from its prominent place in the standard repertoire.
This song’s cross-generational familiarity and popularity have made it a fre- quent choice when musicians of diff erent eras collaborate on projects. The results can be both strange and exhilarating. Sonny Rollins delivers some of the most avant-garde playing of his career (ably assisted by Paul Bley) in his 1963 pairing with Coleman Hawkins, an odd time to explore the limits of tonality. Equally fascinating is the daring combination of Dave Brubeck, Anthony Braxton, Lee Konitz, and Roy Haynes on a 1974 session, in which Brubeck, the oldest man in the studio, digs into his polytonal bag in an attempt to show that he can push the changes with as much prickly insistence as any of his younger compatriots.
This piece has hardly exhausted its potential—a remarkable claim given the frequency with which this warhorse from the 1930s has been dissected and deconstructed. Brad Mehldau’s 13-minute trio performance from 1999 fi nds him delivering “All the Things You Are” in a very fast 7/4—a recording that did much to popularize the playing of familiar standards in unexpected time signa- tures among the younger generation of jazz improvisers. Yet this song can also generate excitement in a simple jam, as demonstrated on the heated give-and- take by Phil Woods, Vincent Herring, and Antonio Hart from their Alto Summit recording from 1995, Woody Shaw’s match-up with Bobby Hutcherson from the 1982 Night Music album, and Johnny Griffi n’s 1957 all-star confrontation (including John Coltrane and Lee Morgan) from A Blowing Session .
recommended versions
Tommy Dorsey (with Jack Leonard), Chicago, October 20, 1939 Artie Shaw (with Helen Forrest), New York, October 26, 1939 Dizzy Gillespie (with Charlie Parker), New York, February 28, 1945
Johnny Griffi n (with John Coltrane and Lee Morgan) from A Blowing Session ,
Hackensack, New Jersey, April 6, 1957
Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins (with Paul Bley), from Sonny Meets Hawk!, New York, July 15, 1963
Dave Brubeck (with Anthony Braxton and Lee Konitz), from All the Things We Are , New York, October 3, 1974
Woody Shaw (with Bobby Hutcherson), from Night Music , live at Jazz Forum, New York, February 25, 1982
Keith Jarrett (with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette), from Standards, Vol. 1 , New York, January 11–12, 1983
Gonzalo Rubalcaba (with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian), from Discovery: Live at
18 Alone Together
Phil Woods, Vincent Herring, and Antonio Hart, from Alto Summit , New York, June 4–5, 1995
Brad Mehldau, from Art of the Trio 4—Back at the Vanguard , live at the Village Vanguard, New York, January 5–10, 1999