New standards Is jazz catching up with contemporary pop? BY JON GARELICK

A soprano sax squeals into its farthest upper reaches, descends into bluesy cadences punctuated with Bechet-like vibrato and shake, then does some fancy arpeggiating. A soulful organ chord enters with a drumbeat and cymbal smash; then everyone shifts into a slow groove with a backing vocal chorus: "Do-do-dowee-oowee, do-do-dowee-oowee, wee-ah!" It sounds eerily familiar . . . could it be? No! But yes, Virginia, it’s all too true: Pavement’s indie-rock slacker anthem "Cut Your Hair" played as an instrumental (not counting the oowees) by a jazz band.

And not just any jazz band. This is multi-reed monster James Carter with pianist Cyrus Chestnut and the rhythm team of bassist Reginald Veal and drummer Ali Jackson. The saxophonist and the pianist have been jazz stars since the mid ’90s, Veal is a long-term Wynton running buddy, and Ali Jackson has just taken the drum chair in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. "Cut Your Hair" is one of eight tracks on the new Gold Sounds, the first release on the New York–based Brown Brothers label. It’s the brainchild of Brown Brothers honchos Jake Cohn and David Elkins, who came up with the idea of bringing expert musicianship to bear on a band known for brilliant songwriting and sloppy execution. In the process, two audiences would meet on common ground: the jazz snobs and the indie-rock purists.

If you think the idea sounds like a hopeless critics’ equation (Pavement nerd rock meets Wynton-era jazz perfection), or as one of my colleagues put it, "middlebrow," you’re not alone. Rolling Stone quoted Gold Sounds’ liner-note question, "What album would we want to buy which doesn’t exist?" and concluded, "If your answer is ‘hot young jazz players covering a grab bag of Pavement songs,’ you probably don’t exist yourself."

But the existence of Gold Sounds (none of the players previously knew who Pavement were) dramatizes a larger issue in the jazz world: the absence of new "standards." That is, contemporary pop songs adapted by jazz musicians as standard repertoire to improvise on.

The drought of such standards is, at this point, about 50 years old. The wealth of what’s become known as the Great American Songbook of the pre-rock-and-roll era once served, in critic and songwriter Gene Lees’s phrase, as the "lingua franca of the art form." Everyone knew, if not the lyrics, then the melody and the chord changes to "I Got Rhythm," "How High the Moon," "I Can’t Get Started," and a gazillion others — the pop music of the day.

But rock was not the stuff of jazz improvisation. The simple three- or even two-chord harmonic patterns just didn’t provide enough fodder for an improviser to dig into. So the Great American Songbook gradually became the equivalent of the standard repertoire that classical musicians rely on.

Which isn’t to say there’s no new material in jazz — jazz musicians of all stripes are writing new music, from mainstream to avant-garde, and instrumental pieces by Ellington, Monk, Coltrane, and others have themselves become standard. But as Lees points out (his essay is in the Oxford Companion to Jazz), popular song was one of jazz’s links to the popular audience — the familiar with which jazz musicians led that audience to the new. Think of Miles Davis’s transformation of "Bye Bye Blackbird," or John Coltrane’s take on Rodgers & Hammerstein’s "My Favorite Things."

But except for Miles’s effective take on Cyndi Lauper’s "Time After Time" in 1985, or Chet Baker doing Elvis Costello’s "Almost Blue" late in his career, what else was there in new standards after 1965?

And yet, the trickle has grown lately. In 1998, Joshua Redman mixed American Songbook masters (Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein) with rock-era icons (Dylan, Lennon & McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Prince) on Timeless Tales for Changing Times (Warner Bros.). Don Byron recorded boogaloos by funk outfit Mandrill and played the Four Tops’ "Reach Out" in concert. Singer/pianist/composer Patricia Barber has done the Beatles’ "Blackbird," Bill Withers’s "Use Me," Sonny Bono’s "The Beat Goes On," and smatterings of Joni Mitchell. Singer Karrin Allyson has won approving reviews for her 2004 Wild for You (Concord), with its soft-rock mix of Cat Stevens, James Taylor, et al. Brad Mehldau keeps returning to Nick Drake and Radiohead. Bill Frisell has his C&W outings. And of course there’s the Bad Plus, with everything from Nirvana to Queen in their book.

In the wake of all this, Gold Sounds might represent a watershed moment. Right behind it is Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey’s The Sameness of Difference (Hyena), with Hendrix ("Have You Ever Been to Electricladyland") and the Beatles ("Happiness Is a Warm Gun"), among others. And Rolling Stones saxophonist Tim Ries has released The Rolling Stones Project (Concord).

The problem is that whereas earlier jazz masters subverted pop with their innovations, the current batch of covers tends to be conventional and tame. Miles’s "Bye Bye Blackbird" was an ultra-hip take on a 1926 hit for Eddie Cantor. Coltrane’s 1960 "My Favorite Things" (which, as Lees points out, was then being sung on Broadway by Mary Martin) was one of his boldest experiments. "The weird cover," as Don Byron once told me, is a radical "act of jazz." Even the accessibility of Coleman Hawkins’s 1939 "Body and Soul" was deceptive. Hawkins later recalled that he continued to get requests for something with "melody," like "Body and Soul," even though, as he was quick to point out, "We didn’t play the melody once" in that record. The "weird cover" may have been an "act of jazz," but subversion didn’t mean desecration. These musicians were, as the composer George Russell has said of his own music, trying to make "a classical music from the rhythms of our time."

So now we get a big band called the Björkestra, which to judge by the few recorded examples I’ve heard makes perfectly fine, perfectly conventional big-band jazz out of one of the most idiosyncratic singer-songwriters in pop. The most audacious appropriation of contemporary pop repertoire comes from Sinatra-protégé crooner Paul Anka. His Rock Swings on the Verve jazz imprint makes you sorry that the Chairman never lived to do his own lounge-lizard take of David Lee Roth’s "Jump." The album’s arrangements of big band and strings are state-of-the-art, and on the whole I think I prefer Anka’s version of "Black Hole Sun" to Soundgarden’s. Anka’s most notorious remake, though, is "Smells like Teen Spirit," which for a while you can almost believe. "I’m worst at what I do best/And for this I do feel blessed," he sings, nailing those sibilants in true Frank fashion. It almost makes you want to forgive him for mosquito and libido — but then, of course, he has to elide those final screams of "a denial!"

And there’s the rub. You can turn anything into "jazz," but will it still mean something when you’re done? David S. Ware’s "The Way We Were" is harrowing. The Bad Plus and Sex Mob (with their James Bond/Albert Ayler routines) are passing off novelty as relevance. Barber, on the other hand, knows how to adapt pop to her urbane irony, and to "smarten up" pop songs, as she once told me, in arrangements that work for jazz improvisers. Drake and Radiohead are perfectly suited to Mehldau’s dense, brooding romanticism. Ries, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and the Gold Sounds gang at least for the most part make real jazz without going schlocky.

About Timeless Tales (which had its own little "Favorite Things" tribute in its soprano-sax waltz of "Eleanor Rigby"), Redman said, " I’m not trying to hold up these songs as standards that jazz musicians should play . . . I do believe that there is a lot of modern popular music out there — or at least a little modern popular music out there — that is completely valid for jazz interpretation. In that sense, the validity of the music is determined by the musician’s creativity and by the musician’s desires, not by any kind of artificial standard of what is or isn’t proper material."

But a "standard" after all, is something that gets played regularly, by a community of musicians. And I don’t know anyone who’s heard even Redman play "The Times They Are A-Changin’ " lately.