About Me (Why I Sing Standards)
Virtually everyone I know has a connection to some of the songs (and therefore to many of the artistic and cultural inputs and ripple effects) called "Standards," "Jazz Standards," or "Great American Songbook" songs. My own connections to these songs have been less "forward" in my life for many years and reasons. In 2016, my soon-to-be wife encouraged me to pursue "singing Jazz songs with Jazz musicians" through Jazz Jam sessions—something I knew nothing about. In 2018 I began that pursuit. SOME of what has happened since is (often copiously) detailed in the narrative of my "The 'TMI' Jazz Jam Blog" on this website. It's there for me—AND for anyone who is longing to participate in a creative collaboration, but who KNOWS deep down inside they have not invested the tens of thousands of hours to earn a way in as a peer. In my experience with general Jazz Jams, all (at this writing) in Central Indiana and at a Vocal Jazz Jam in a small Chicago cafe, there is extraordinary generosity, inclusiveness, a welcoming spirit, a "rooting for you" to do well. There are conventions that should be followed in Jam sessions, and there is the expectation that—if you're going to continually come to participate--you should learn, you should improve, you should become more "frictionless" to the people who are facilitating the event, and you should be driven by respecting the value of the participants on the stage and in the seats.
I am joyfully experiencing and learning all of this, thanks in no small part to the great Bob Wilson, a career Jazz musician (trumpet, piano) who made the generous offer to allow me to stop by his home to run through songs, get some coaching about how to participate in a Jam, and (this part is more than I can express) to allow me to ask a BUNCH of fundamental (and woefully ignorant) questions about the entirety of the Jazz universe without any judgment, eye-rolling or head-shaking. More than a great Jazz piano player, Bob Wilson is a great person. His generosity, and that of Fred Withrow, Kevin Anker, Mike Kessler and others at Indy's famed Jazz Kitchen, have made my deeply-felt, long-delayed urge to sing Standards with real, live, professional musicians a vivid, jubilant, always-interesting reality. All of these events are a the result of what's described below...
As a kid growing up in the 1960s in Central Indiana, I spent a lot of time at my mom’s record player. Mostly after school, on days when the weather wasn’t good enough to play outside, I’d sit on the floor next to my mother’s Mid Century Modern wire rack of LPs and flip through covers I didn’t fully understand: Slick but somehow authentic-seeming people in poses that conveyed some undiscovered emotion or adventure. Composited illustrations of scenes from a story of some sort, and lots of words about producers and “original casts” and theater names. I’d reach into these colorful cardboard containers, carefully slide out the shiny, black discs, place them on the turntable, lower the tone arm…and be taken to places I immediately ached to visit for myself.
The melodies and lyrics that emerged from the tiny, tinny speakers were overwhelming. They landed hard. They cut grooves in the heart of me, and I carry them with me to this moment. Maybe it was the combination of their brilliance—AND of hearing them mostly on gloomy, cold, rainy days. Whatever it was, I “got it.” These were towering, heartrending, show-stopping forces of nature. They were born in the crucible of world wars and world-shrinking technological leaps forward, and continual news bulletins that reminded everyone everywhere of the unpredictability and beauty and brevity of life. They are so universally true to the human experience, so succinctly accurate in their accounting of it, that—regardless of changes of style and culture and art and fashion—the great musicians of every decade return to them, record them, surprise audiences with them as unexpected encores. They weave them, over and over again, into memories that—despite our very different journeys—somehow remain. In all of us, they remain. They are there to catch us, to remind us, to help us fully engage in and savor a meaningful moment. In the background, but never obscured, they are giant redwoods, providing reference points and permanence in our fleeting seasons. They are our Background Music.
We’ve all been there, at a live music event of some sort, when someone gets up to sing or play a song, and—as soon as we realize the song is “Fly Me To The Moon” or “My Funny Valentine” or “Unforgettable”—we spontaneously applaud. We do this almost instinctively as we recognize the first few notes of the melody line. Why do some songs compel our applause—not for the yet-to-happen performance—but for the very creative and emotional equity of the song itself? How can that be? Over the years, these songs have come to be called, simply, “Standards.” Decades before there was karaoke, at open mic nights and jam sessions in clubs around the world, musicians of all skill levels, seasoned veterans and aspiring wanna-be-s, would gather and try their hands and voices at expressing the truths of these songs. Like me, and like many of us, I suspect, they shared the experience of learning and first-loving these songs next to record players on living room floors, or near dimly-lit dashboard radios, or—if they were really lucky—in cushioned, numbered seats in Broadway theaters.
My parents met at the end of World War II: an Army Air Corps mechanic and a Navy-trained nurse. They moved during the post-war period to the booming pre-statehood Hawaiian Islands and became hardworking, social-climbing, middle class citizens. My mother, a statuesque beauty who had a silky, crystal-clear soprano voice more beautiful than she was, spent some of her evenings at the Outrigger Canoe Club and at small jazz clubs in Honolulu, covering songs she knew from memory, echoes of recordings by Louie Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. I never heard her perform in those settings but I heard little diamond-dust fragments over the years while dinner was being prepared, or sung along with something on the record player or radio. Hearing my mother’s voice and expression and heart made me want to sing, made me ache to sing. Neither of us ever became professional singers, but both of us treasured singing all our lives. Neither of us let go of that part of who we are.
Over the years my mom and I had some tough times and we spent far too much of it misunderstanding and avoiding each other. But, toward the end of her life, when it was apparent her voice, after 90 years, would soon go silent, I wrote her a love letter, and thanked her as deeply and generously as I could for the gift of vocal music she had so wonderfully bestowed. I wrote about the ways in which singing and hearing others sing had made my life so much richer. I wrote about my children—her grandchildren—all of whom were singers, and about the ways in which singing and performing maintained a common thread, a continuing legacy. My mother never heard my first granddaughter—her great-granddaughter—sing, but sing she does. And, like her great-grandmother did, she listens to a radio station (although it’s a satellite radio station) that plays songs performed by Louie Armstrong and Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby. Almost a century separating them, yet the Background Music of their very different lives is the very same.
I’m happy to share these songs with people, not because I’m REMOTELY talented enough to express them in a more profound or compelling way, but because, miraculously, the singing and hearing of these great songs somehow makes life better. I can’t explain it, but like that little kid by the record player all those years ago, I love them again and again, every single time.
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David G. Poncé • July 2019
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