Prologue Premises, Premises In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the pianist Keith Jarrett sat down for an interview with Robert Siegel of National Public Radio. Jarrett had just released an album called Somewhere , which included his trio's rendition of the songs "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" (written in 1932), "Stars Fell on Alabama" (1934), and "I Thought About You" (1939). Jarrett has a reputation as an avant-garde jazz artist, but this was only the latest of a series of albums-others include Standards, Vol. 1 ; Standards, Vol. 2 ; and Setting Standards- that featured his trio's renditions of classic American popular songs written roughly in the second quarter of the twentieth century. That is, standards. Siegel started off by saying, "Standard tunes, first of all, what do they mean to you and why have you recorded so many of them on this disc?" "First of all, they are anything but standard by today's standards," Jarrett replied. "They're exceptional.

There was a period of time in American history where so many things came rushing in, especially in popular music." Siegel wondered, "Do we not have more songs like this for lack of people trying to write them? Is it unfashionable?" "Yes, is the short answer to that," Jarrett said. He suggested parts of a longer answer as well. First, in that long-ago period of time, there were "people who were actually good at writing melodies." Second, he talked about the importance of singers. He recounted that Miles Davis was once asked who he learned his phrasing from. His answer: Frank Sinatra. Today, Jarrett said, "there are also no important singers, so maybe it's all part of the same pancake mix.

If there's no singers and there's no good songs, which came first?" The pianist said it once occurred to him to try to write a standard, a song that had the quality of having "existed before." He eventually came up with a tune he called "No Lonely Nights." "But it wasn't that easy to do," Jarrett said.         The standards, as Jarrett said, "came rushing in"-from the 1920s through the 1950s, but most quickly and intensely in a two-decade span starting in about 1925. The best of them are said to make up the "Great American Songbook" (the term was first used as the title of a 1972 album by the jazz singer Carmen McRae), the size of which varies depending on who's counting. In his definitive book American Popular Song , Alec Wilder puts forth about three hundred entries. What are the attributes of these few hundred songs? The composer Jule Styne once gave a concise definition to a young friend of his, the jazz pianist Bill Charlap: "What's the secret to a great popular song? It must be melodically simple and harmonically attractive." Expanding on that, standard songs are sophisticated (in several senses of the word) and melodic, constructed with, at the minimum, superior craftsmanship, and sometimes with remarkable innovation and artistry.

Charlap is speaking of Styne's "Just in Time," but he could be referring to any of hundreds of songs: "It has an innate sense of structure. There are rests, points of emphasis, and overall balance and taste. It's so pliable, and very American." Although the standards are roughly divided into ballads (slow) and rhythm tunes (fast), the categories are fungible and a given tune can be interpreted in many different ways. Fast or slow, standards are jazz-inflected in rhythm and harmonic possibilities and, especially in later years, show the influence of modern European composers like Ravel and Debussy. The main criterion for songs' status as standard is the music, but most of them have lyrics that rise to the occasion and are wedded to the melody: sophisticated, once again, and sometimes dazzlingly inventive. The internal rhymes and wordplay from a Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart can suggest W. S.

Gilbert with an American accent. But even when dealing with commonplace tropes of love and longing, as in Irving Berlin's "Always," "How Deep Is the Ocean," or "Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep)," a standard can have a palpable honesty and conviction and can be emotionally affecting without being schmaltzy. Or at least it can be delivered that way by the right singer. The melodies were written-to start naming the great names-by Berlin, by George Gershwin, by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Duke Ellington, Arthur Schwartz, Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Whiting, Vincent Youmans, Walter Donaldson, and Jimmy McHugh. They went with lyrics by Ira Gershwin (George's brother), Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, Howard Dietz, and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg. Those men were all born within a seventeen-year span, from Kern in 1885 to Rodgers in 1902.

A slightly younger group, consisting of Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Jule Styne, and Fats Waller, were born between 1903 and 1910. Burton Lane and Jimmy Van Heusen came on the scene in 1912 and 1913, respectively, and that was pretty much that. To be sure, not all their songs were gems, and even in the very heart of the golden age, a lot of hack tunesmiths turned out reams of lesser material. But not every painter in Renaissance Florence was a Leonardo or a Botticelli. The comparison might raise your eyebrow, or both of them. But the more you ponder the short list of places where intense creativity emerged from a core group of artists in a limited amount of time, the less far-fetched it begins to seem. The place from which the Great American Songbook emerged was New York City. The highly concentrated music industry originated around the turn of the twentieth century on one Manhattan block, West Twenty-eighth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, called "Tin Pan Alley" for the cacophony that blew out of music publishers' offices.

The designation persisted even after the publishers moved uptown, to various outposts centered around the Brill Building on Broadway at Forty-ninth Street. From the 1920s on, a growing number of the best songs originated in the scores of New York musical shows or revues. Henceforth, an ambitious fledgling songwriter's goal was to have his number in the Broadway spotlight, figuratively and literally-clearly, a big step up from being a mere assembly-line worker in the pop music factory. The first talking motion picture, in 1927, was a musical called The Jazz Singer , and for two decades after that, Hollywood was the western outpost of American songwriting, the home base for such outstanding practitioners as Warren, Mercer, Arlen, and Van Heusen, as well as lesser artisans. Bigfoot New Yorkers periodically went west for short sojourns. Some of the biggest furnished just three 1930s films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with an astonishing number of standards of the highest caliber: Irving Berlin's score for Top Hat ("Isn't This a Lovely Day [to Be Caught in the Rain]?," "Cheek to Cheek," "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails"); Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields's for Swing Time ("The Way You Look Tonight," "A Fine Romance," "Pick Yourself Up"); and the Gershwin brothers' for Shall We Dance ("They All Laughed," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "They Can't Take That Away from Me"). But gems popped up even in films that were less than classics. I'll cite three examples from hundreds.

Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's timeless "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" was introduced by Irene Dunne in a forgotten 1937 film, High, Wide and Handsome . "There Will Never Be Another You," with music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Mack Gordon, is recognized as one of the greatest songs ever; go to a jazz gig in any city in the world, and you are likely to find it on the setlist. It first appeared in a 1942 Twentieth CenturyFox B movie called Iceland , starring skater Sonja Henie and John Payne as a U.S. Marine posted in-that's right-Iceland. Another from the same year: the timeless "Moonlight Becomes You," by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, originated as filler in a Bob HopeBing Crosby comedy, Road to Morocco . The parity among the three sources of standards-Broadway shows, Hollywood movies, and one-off Tin Pan Alley compositions-is illustrated by a recent book of sheet music, The Great American Songbook: The Composers . The Hal Leonard Corporation book includes one hundred songs, from "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive" to "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To.

" The roster is highly selective and (obviously) subjective, but it's credible, and useful for giving a sense of where standards originated. Eighty-two songs in the book were written in 1950 or earlier. Of them, 33 percent came from Broadway, 33 percent from Tin Pan Alley, and 34 percent from Hollywood.* The songs were composed with sundry goals in mind, producing great art rarely being one of them. But the songs-the best of them, anyway-took on lives of their own: it turned out they lent themselves to being interpreted in different styles and with different approaches by a range of singers and musicians. They became a repertoire, a canon, repeatedly redefined.