Max Morath Interview

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"MY NEVER-ENDING ADVENTURE"
Interview with America's Music Man Max Morath

By Christopher M. Wright
© 2006 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

AMAZON CDLINKS BELOW - Listen to Samples

Part 2 - The Great American Songbook

Pianist, humorist, singer, actor, and composer Max Morath has been called one of America's greatest entertainers and a national treasure by National Public Radio. In the second of two interviews, Morath talks about the Standards era when so many gems of popular music were created.

Q: Now let's talk about the years 1920-1960, what's been called the Golden Age of Popular Music. Jazz was on the scene by then, of course, but there was also a group of immensely talented people writing songs for stage and screen. Some of these songs are still popular and are now called Standards. How does a song get to be a Standard?

Morath: Two things: the ability of the music industry to promote the song, and the high quality of the song itself. The music business during that lush period had plenty of both. A bad song can be marketed ‘til the cows come home, and nothing will come of it. But if you’ve got a quality song and good marketing apparatus, you could get it performed so often and so widely in those days that it would get into everybody’s head, especially the professionals’. (Remember – promotion was mainly by radio – two networks and a few powerful strong indies, and only three or four record labels that counted.) If it’s a great song, it stays around for years. End result of good marketing and good song? A Standard is born. And if you’re playing piano in a club or working with a pick-up band somewhere yet today, and a customer asks for, say, a certain Harold Arlen song that has become a Standard, you’d better know it by heart or you’ll be looking for another gig.

Why do people keep asking for the same songs – the Standards? Because those songs are good. They demand attention. Look, most popular songs aren’t very good. They come and go because they’re, for a brief moment, the fashion – like skirt length or dance steps or slang. They mark a time, perhaps even a generation, then disappear, and should. But the best songs, while they may slip away for a while, are still percolating in our culture, and they re-emerge, becoming Standards.

Q: You have observed that the people who wrote the Standards (Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Kern, etc.) were paid professionals writing for the theater or for Hollywood films. How was the Standards era different from the era of the singer-songwriter that we are now in?

Morath: In the 1960’s, Hollywood, for reasons perplexing and unexplained, stopped making movie musicals. By coincidence, around the same time theater musicals began to be more “through-written”. On Broadway in the early days, producers often plopped random tunes into shows – tunes which they thought would be great and exploitable outside the score. Then our great songwriters appear. The songs are better than the shows. Take the Gershwin musicals of the ‘20s and ‘30s. If they had plots, they were mighty thin. But the songs were great. They could survive on their own. By the 1960s, that marketplace had changed. Theater composers started writing songs totally integrated into the plot. Oddly, Rodgers and Hammerstein – songwriters who also had given us dozens of Standards -- led the way. Musicals, some would say, “matured.” Integrated scores have become the rule, but they don't often provide songs that can be lifted from the score and popularized on their own merit.

Then, beginning in the 1960s, the composer-performers took over – the Beatles, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. They’ve written great songs – written for themselves to sing. They sold millions of recordings, but in the process, their songs didn’t always inspire other singers to take them on. There’s the difference. With the Standards, you ask any jazz musician to play, say, Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm. We’ll make it our own – sing it, play it, take it into different keys, improvise, take solos – we’ll have a hell of a good time with it. On the other hand ask us, say, for a Dylan tune – chances are we can’t just play it our way. If we don’t sing all the words, and maybe sound a little bit like Bob while we’re at it, it might not go over. In other words, as good as these songs are in the hands of their creators, it’s difficult for other performers to make them our own, as we can the Standards. One reason we can do that so easily with the Standards is that they survive both as songs and instrumentals. That fascinates me. Almost all Standards were originally created as songs – with lyrics by the masters of the form. But their existence today is due as much if not more to their attraction as the instrumental backbone of jazz repertory. Put another way, a Standard possesses both words and music of unique excellence, performed together or separately.

Q: It's been said that the professional tradition of songwriting -- by people who were relatively knowledgeable about music theory and notation -- went underground after relatively unschooled rock'n'rollers took over the popular music scene. Do you think there will ever be a time when the professional tradition and people who know about such things as extended and altered chords will take command of popular music again?

Morath: Predicting anything about popular culture -- popular music -- is a no-win, but I’d say this: popular music is always in a state of flux. I’m sure there’s some thirteen-year-old kid out there right now who will be our next George Gershwin. Over the years the major changes in music, and in art and literature too, have been inspired more often than not by individuals. Without Louis Armstrong or George Gershwin, Ellington, Berlin, Mercer – those giants who produced and performed the Standards for forty-odd years, popular music would be a pretty pallid scene. Same is true for popular music since the Standards era. The big changes have come with Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan, Springsteen.

Here’s something I think will happen. I see in my travels around the USA – a lot of kids are going back to the acoustic wind instruments -- away from guitars and amps. At the same time others are moving oppositely -- into total electronics -– synthesizers, midi, sampling. From either or both persuasions I think we’ll see exciting new music. It’ll be based on the old, but will be new. The music industry will scramble for new catch-all labels. The old ones -- like jazz and rock, swing and rap -- will be ancient history. If the next bunch of innovators happen to be schooled in advanced harmonies and techniques, that approach will be hip again.

Don't forget, most of the songwriters of the first 20 years on Tin Pan Alley were not schooled musicians. Even Irving Berlin was untrained, however gifted he may have been with a remarkable sense of harmony and melody. (He worked with a transposing piano that would play whatever he wrote in any key. He called it his 'Buick' and it's at the Smithsonian now.) New York’s “operetta” composers such as Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, and Rudolph Friml were certainly superbly-trained composers, but they gave us only a few Standards. But the 1920’s brought us Gershwin and Rodgers, Youmans and Kern and Porter -- all-around musicians of great talent.

I often have arguments with people of my generation – they say the kids today don’t have it. I say they’re wrong. I’ve been touring the USA for years, and I meet superb young musicians in every corner of the country. But they’re challenged by a much more difficult marketplace than were the creators of the Standards. The music industry is overwhelming; it’s got dozens of compartments, and there’s no clear way for one popular genre to dominate again.

Q: Your book The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Popular Standards [AMAZON LINK BELOW] gives a short list of essential Standards, but what are some of your personal favorites?

Morath: One of my favorites is Body and Soul. It was composed for a show in 1930, but Coleman Hawkins’ 1939 recording on tenor sax established it as a Standard. From then on, if you were playing solo piano or in a pick-up jazz band, you’d better know the [chord] changes in Body and Soul. It’s not easy; the original key is D flat, with the bridge going to D major, then D minor, then back to D flat. Talk about harmony and modulation. It begs for improvisation. You very seldom hear the words, by the way. It’s usually performed only as an instrumental.

Of the vocal Standards, it’s impossible to cite just one or two. As a combination of lyrics and music, I love Skylark by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. Of the Gershwin songs, because the lyrics are so simple and touching and the music so richly improvisatory – Someone to Watch Over Me.

Those are three of my favorites but the great thing about the Standards is this: you can come across one you've never noticed before and say “Ohmygod, I've gotta learn that. It's great!" The Standards are just a wonderful treasure trove. And they become very personal for the performer. When you sing those songs to an audience, you're singing about yourself. You may change it around, put it in a different key, or syncopate it, but the words are all-important. There's a wonderful book The Poets of Tin Pan Alley [AMAZON LINK BELOW] and a lot of people including Max Morath agree that song lyrics represent some of the best American poetry of the twentieth century. Lyrics, we call them, by our poets Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Larry Hart, E.Y. Harburg, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, many others.

Q: You recorded a CD in 2003 with William Bolcom and Joan Morris celebrating the songs of lyricist E.Y. 'Yip' Harburg. [AMAZON LINK BELOW] How did that project come about and what was special about Harburg?

Morath: Harburg was an especially literate and socially-hip writer, and he partnered with some of the best composers in the business -- Harold Arlen, Burton Lane, Jerome Kern. The recording was one of a number I’ve done with Bolcom and Morris. The Harburg album was suggested to them by Studs Terkel, a longtime friend of Harburg going back to the 1930s. We recorded five live performances at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York and put out the CD on Original Cast Recordings. In 2004 we did a similar project for the same label on the songs of Gus Kahn, the Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood lyricist. [AMAZON LINK BELOW]

Q: Why did you write that Louis Armstrong is "without question the twentieth century's dominant figure in American music"?

Morath: I’ll give you four reasons. First, Armstrong’s the man who linked jazz, the “new” sound of the 1920s, to popular music. He moved beyond the original (and limited) jazz-march repertory from the early days in New Orleans. Armstrong took on pop tunes and Standards like I Can't Give You Anything But Love and used their melody and chords as the basis of his brilliant improvisations. That process is so taken for granted in jazz today that it seems obvious and natural. Take any jazz record of the last 70 years and look at the titles. They're mostly Standards. The musicians use them as a framework for their improvised solos. Armstrong is recognized as the innovator.

Second -- Louis Armstrong broke new ground for African-American musicians. He opened doors. We honor him not only for his music, but for his influence on our wider culture.

Third -- he was an entertainer as well as a virtuoso on his horn. If anything, some people didn't realize what a great musician he was because he charmed them as an entertainer.

And fourth -- he lived long enough to influence three generations of musicians. The man was a true genius. His command of his instrument was unequaled. Every trumpet player since, from Miles Davis to Wynton Marsalis will tell you. They found Louis Armstrong. Everybody loved him.

Q: Did Stan Kenton make an original contribution to jazz orchestration and, if so, why does his star seem to be fading?

Morath: I loved Kenton’s bands. I was working in radio stations in the '50s and heard all his recordings. His arrangements were a logical and brilliant next step in the evolution of the big band sound. But the marketplace was changing. Big bands were hurt by World War II and they never really came back. They continued to play the dance halls but nobody was dancing to Kenton, so he went the concert route with various band configurations, and did very well for a time. Regarding his orchestrations, I recall best his use of brass -- trombones and trumpets, I think five of each. His vocalist June Christy was a true jazz singer who improvised brilliantly. The Four Freshmen, the legendary jazz-vocal ensemble, toured often with his band. Kenton was also a fine spokesman for jazz, as well as one of the innovators, a break-through guy, certainly quite successful for a time. I think we'll see a major revisit to his work sometime soon.

Q: You give credit to Linda Ronstadt for popularizing Standards among a new generation of listeners today. [AMAZON LINKS BELOW] What can you tell young people today that will convince them that the Standards matter, that they're among the finest examples of popular music ever produced anywhere?

Morath: It can't be done through persuasion. Young performers of both sexes and all races will come along who will perform the Standards their own way, and create new material respecting the genre, but not imitating it. If we don't do it in the USA, it’ll happen elsewhere. But look, we do have Norah Jones and Diana Krall – young singer/pianists selling big. Michael Feinstein continues to champion the Standards on TV, in theaters and clubs, on CDs. Linda Ronstadt's versions of the Standards with Nelson Riddle arrangements are still selling. The good songs emerge and endure. They always have.

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