Setting the Standards

By WILFRID SHEED

Fashions come and go in pop and classical music alike, but never has the same idea hit both ends of the street at the same time the way jazz did in the first quarter of this century. Unlike such other seismic events as rock 'n' roll (downtown) and atonality (up), jazz contained a bit of everything: the tingle and immediacy of pop but also the sophisticated harmonies of classical and the authenticity and rootedness of folk.

So whatever music you wrote, the question was, "What do we do with this thing called jazz?" It's generally agreed by now that George Gershwin, whose centennial is being celebrated this week, gave not one but two answers to this question better than anyone else--by taking jazz upmarket with his Rhapsody in Blue and Piano Concerto in F Major, and by weaving it back into folklore with Porgy and Bess.

But maybe Gershwin's greatest legacy is his third answer: how to use jazz in songs. To put it another way, What greater musical legacy has America given the world than the songs of Gershwin, Cole Porter and the rest of the gang? What body of our music has been more widely played, admired and memorized around the world than the jazz-flavored songs known as standards? And where did they come from? Listen up.

To be fair, not even Gershwin's legendary ego was big enough to claim more than half the credit for this astonishing outburst of melody. No sooner had Scott Joplin introduced ragtime in the late 19th century than commercial writers were figuring ways to work its kicky, irresistible beat into their songs. By 1911 young Irving Berlin could confidently assert that Everybody's Doing It (Doing It, Doing It) Now--and not just Americans either. Dukes and lords and Russian Czars were doing it too, as Berlin noted elsewhere. And a few years later, ragtime became part of the sound track for World War I and the jazz age that followed.

But there's a lot more to jazz than just a catchy beat. There were whole new chords and phrases and key changes--and moods--that the rag writers hadn't even touched yet. From 1919 to 1924 these would virtually serve as Gershwin's private playground and personal gold mine, from which the Brooklyn-born son of immigrants proceeded to extract all kinds of music, including, in one glittering shovelful, not just his famous Rhapsody but also a related song called The Man I Love. This would beget almost instantly a new kind of American song, exemplified by Porter's Night and Day and Richard Rodgers' My Funny Valentine.

In no time, a whole new generation of talent had broken into Gershwin's gold mine and was digging away merrily for songs like Stardust, Stormy Weather and Dancing in the Dark. Even established writers like Jerome Kern and Vincent Youmans began to swing a little with Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man and Time on My Hands, respectively. But no matter what anyone else did, Gershwin seemed to stay at least two moves ahead, causing Youmans reportedly to mutter "so the son of a bitch thought of it" every time Gershwin struck again.

His services to the American song didn't end with providing a mechanical rabbit for others to chase. He was an incomparable booster of other writers; it's hard to find a rival that he didn't befriend and, if necessary, help. So it's not altogether unfair that when any song from that era is played, someone almost always asks, "Is that by Gershwin?"

Yet the answer is usually no, because Gershwin had so many children. If, for instance, you've been listening to Michelle Pfeiffer sing Makin' Whoopee in The Fabulous Baker Boys, the names on the recording are "words, Gus Kahn and music, Walter Donaldson"; if you've just heard Sam play it again in Casablanca, the credits for As Time Goes By should read "words and music, Herman Hupfeld."

And the beat goes on, as each year more great old songs seem to seep through the rock-'n'-roll cracks via TV commercials, Woody Allen sound tracks and the whistling of senior citizens, or else they just make it out there on their own, like the socks that escape from Jerry Seinfeld's washing machine. And while some of their authors were lucky one-shot rollers, a crazy number of them, like Hoagy (Georgia on My Mind) Carmichael, were giants in their own right, who would have dominated a halfway normal era themselves. In fact, if they'd been British, their Majesties might have had to break out anywhere from 50 to 100 new titles for them, starting of course with Duke Ellington, who doesn't strictly need one, and proceeding to the likes of Sir Frank (Guys and Dolls) Loesser and Viscount Arthur (The Band Wagon) Schwartz and, choosing at random, Jimmy (Here's That Rainy Day) Van Heusen and Richard (Ain't We Got Fun?) Whiting and Johnny (everything) Mercer--but every name suggests another one, and we haven't got all day. Suffice it to say, the songs by these writers were enough to triple the world's supply of humming material.

What happened, in fact, was that the biff-bang arrival of records, radio, talking pictures and jazz created a demand for fresh sounds that was equal, for once in history, to a great nation's supply of potential talent, and everyone got a hearing. But only a few got a remembering as well, partly because there were just too many names to squeeze through the door, but mainly because the then new media were so hellbent on promoting performers that the public wound up believing that Bing Crosby simply made up the songs as he went along.

So unless you sang them yourself, like Mercer and Carmichael, or else wrote for Broadway, it didn't matter how good you were, as witness the strange case of Harry Warren, who wrote just about every movie tune you can't quite place, from Busby Berkeley's Forty-Second Street through such postwar oddities as That's Amore and the theme from An Affair to Remember, without attracting much attention at all.

Gershwin and Porter aside, people don't even think of the standards as particularly American by now. So just call them an anonymous benefaction, from a country that doesn't do many things anonymously, and from a bunch of guys, like Warren, who might have liked a little recognition but had to settle for royalty checks instead.

Right now, though, their ghosts must be bracing for the millennium and a positive orgy of nonrecognition, as list after list comes out without their names on it. But their songs will be played too, possibly more than ever and certainly more than the past 30 or so Oscar-winning ones--and who cares at this point if people think they were all written by George Gershwin? It's a fine brand name and undoubtedly the second choice of the writers named above, as well as countless others who didn't make this list.

What matters now, to borrow a phrase from that other Gershwin, Ira, is that their songs are most certainly, and very clearly, here to stay.