Michael Zilber’s Notes on Reimagined: Jazz Standards, Vol.1
Steve Smith, with whom I’ve played for the past six years in various settings, has particularly enjoyed blowing on what he calls my “Zilberizing” of jazz standards. He suggested that we make a CD consisting entirely of them. Traditionally, jazz musicians have reworked tunes from the great American Song Book in one of two ways. The beboppers took chord changes to standards such as I got Rhythm and wrote new melodies on them (Shaw Nuff, Oleo). Later, folks such as Bill Evans took existing tunes and subtly reworked the harmonies supporting them -what jazzers call reharms (or as my friend John R. Burr jokes, to harm again).
I don’t know whether or not I coined the term “reimagined,” but it is the best description of what I do to standards. It is the process where everything in the tune EXCEPT some form of the melody (sometimes rewritten) is fair game, from changes to meter to form to tempo. For over 20 years, I have been doing my own reimaginings of tunes at the same time I’ve been writing originals.
At the time of this recording, Steve and I had been playing together for about two years in a quartet rounded out by the beautiful piano playing of Paul Nagel and the inspired bass work of John Shifflet. These two, joined by the astonishing polyrhythmic virtuosity of Steve, made this sax player’s job very easy and joyful. The results are in your hands.
In most cases, the reimaginings went far past simple reharms. In “All Blues,” we put the Miles Davis classic into a Teen Town-style 4/4 groove with altered changes and melody, “Manteca” was reworked into a pedal point 7/4 with 11/8 tag, “Freedom Jazz Dance” became a 3-4 Bobby Timmons’ inspired bugaloo, and so on. Some titles are tongue in cheek, such as “Re:Pressions,” taking Trane’s simple two chord tune and keeping the form, but cycling it through all 12 keys in row fashion, or turning Trane’s breakneck “Countdown” into a slow ballad in three with Pastorius-influenced harmonies. Probably the most radical departure is “Mood Indigo” — taking Ellington’s seminal ballad and turning it into a mid-60s Miles Davis-style sprint with loosely abstracted melody (it’s in there, trust me). “Solar” takes the original melody, reworks it through different key centers and puts it in a slow Brazilian groove, ”Caravan” adheres fairly closely to the original, other than some harmonic and measure modifications and the Trane-inspired bridge. “How Long Has This Been Going On” and “Somewhere” are more in the Bill Evans tradition, with little modification of melody or form, just different harmonic colors. As for “Fantasia on Giant Steps,” it’s a little bit of a musical Escherism: let’s take the tune that has traditionally been viewed as the proving ground for changes playing the past 40 years and rework it through six keys with a new melody.
I hope you enjoy listening to these as much as we enjoyed playing them!
Michael Zilber
Albany, California
Fall 2001