Standard Songs Reinvented

Black Belt Masterclass · Lesson 4 of 5 · English Master

Albums: Ella Fitzgerald — Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book (anchor) · Bill Evans — Waltz for Debby · Sarah Vaughan — Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes · Listening time: ~3.5 hours for all three albums

The Idea

Every art form has a shared repertoire — a body of works so foundational that every practitioner knows them, returns to them, and must answer them. In jazz, this is the Great American Songbook: songs written mostly between the 1920s and 1960s for Broadway shows, Hollywood films, and Tin Pan Alley, that jazz musicians adopted as their primary vehicle for improvisation.

The word ‘standard’ is precise. These songs are standards in the sense of benchmarks — the shared reference points against which jazz musicians measure themselves and each other. When Miles Davis plays Autumn Leaves, or Bill Evans plays My Foolish Heart, they are not covering someone else’s song. They are entering a centuries-old conversation and contributing their own voice to it.

But here is what makes this particular conversation inexhaustible: the same song, played by different musicians, at different times, in different circumstances, becomes a completely different thing. The melody and the chord changes remain recognisable — that is what makes it a standard. Everything built on top of them is improvised, personal, unrepeatable. The song is the frame. What the musician hangs in the frame is their own.

This creates a unique experience for the informed listener. You can hold the original melody in your mind while hearing it transformed — noticing every departure, every re-harmonisation, every rhythmic displacement. You become a participant in the conversation rather than an observer of it. The more standards you know, the richer every jazz performance becomes, because you hear not just what is there but what has been changed.

Anchor Album — Ella Fitzgerald · Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book (1956)

Ella Fitzgerald made eight Song Book albums for Verve Records between 1956 and 1964 — one each for Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. They remain the most complete and authoritative survey of the jazz standard in existence. If you want to understand the Great American Songbook, start here.

The Cole Porter volume opens the series, and it is the right starting point because Porter’s songs are among the most sophisticated in the canon — harmonically rich, lyrically witty, and melodically memorable in the way that only the best songs are memorable. Fitzgerald’s voice meets them as an equal.

What Fitzgerald brings to a standard is threefold. First, absolute technical perfection — her intonation is flawless, her range extraordinary, her time impeccable. Second, interpretive intelligence — she understood that a lyric is a script, and that every word has an emotional weight that the music should serve. Third, and most important for this lesson, her capacity for improvisation: her scat singing, her ornamentation of melodies, her rhythmic displacement of phrases — all of these are acts of reinvention. She is not delivering the song. She is recreating it, every time.

Listen for: how she varies the melody. On Night and Day, she sings the verse more or less straight the first time — establishing the original melody in your ear. Then, as the song develops, she begins to reshape it: holding notes longer, ornmenting phrases, displacing the rhythm. By the time she reaches the final chorus, she has made the song hers without losing a note of Porter’s original intention.

Listen for: scat as improvisation. On the up-tempo tracks, Fitzgerald moves into scat — using her voice as an instrument making melodic and rhythmic patterns rather than words. This is the purest demonstration of a vocalist improvising: no lyric to fall back on, nothing but the chords and her instincts. The compositions become launching pads.

Listen for: the relationship between voice and orchestra. The arrangements by Buddy Bregman give Fitzgerald a setting that supports without overwhelming — the orchestra asks questions she answers, underlines emotions she expresses, and occasionally recedes to let her voice stand alone. The standard is not just reinvented by the soloist; it is reinvented by the ensemble around her.

Supporting Album 1 — Bill Evans · Waltz for Debby (1962)

You have already encountered Bill Evans in two previous lessons — floating through Kind of Blue in Module 1, and as the heart of the conversational trio in Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Waltz for Debby is his moment as a primary voice, and it gives you something Sunday at the Village Vanguard only hints at: Evans as an interpreter of standards at his most intimate and complete.

The album was recorded live at the Village Vanguard on the same June nights as Sunday at the Village Vanguard — the same historical session, the same trio of Evans, LaFaro, and Motian, recorded ten days before LaFaro’s death. What you hear is this trio at its peak, turning standards into something entirely new through the alchemy of Evans’s harmonic imagination.

Evans’s approach to a standard is to find the harmonic life underneath the melody and make that the centre of attention. His voicings — the specific arrangement of notes in each chord — are unlike anyone else’s. Where another pianist might play a C major chord as a solid block, Evans will voice it in a way that suggests several harmonies at once, creating a shimmer of ambiguity that is one of the most beautiful sounds in all of jazz. The standard becomes a lens for harmonic exploration.

Listen for: My Foolish Heart. This Rodgers and Washington ballad, written for a 1949 film, becomes in Evans’s hands one of the most purely beautiful piano performances on record. The melody is preserved — recognisable throughout — but the harmonies underneath it shift in ways that feel inevitable and surprising simultaneously. This is the standard reinvented: same song, different universe.

Listen for: the room sounds. Because this was recorded live, you can hear glasses clinking, audience murmur between tracks, the sound of a room. This is not a flaw — it is a reminder that jazz standards are living things, performed in real rooms for real people, not archived objects. The ambient sounds anchor the perfection of the music in a specific, unrepeatable human moment.

Supporting Album 2 — Sarah Vaughan · Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown (1955)

Where Fitzgerald approaches a standard as a singer who swings, and Evans approaches it as a harmonist who floats, Sarah Vaughan approaches it as something between an instrument and an orchestra. Her voice had an operatic range that she used with complete freedom — capable of a whisper or a roar, of a lyric line or a cascading improvisation — and paired with the incomparable Clifford Brown on trumpet, the result is a standard reinvented as dialogue between two great soloists.

Clifford Brown — ‘Brownie’ — died the following year at twenty-five, the same age as Scott LaFaro. These recordings therefore carry a weight similar to Sunday at the Village Vanguard: you are hearing an artist at his absolute peak, still ascending, unaware of how little time remained. Brown’s tone was warm and full, his lines fluid and melodic, his swing effortless. Against Vaughan’s extraordinary voice, he was a perfect interlocutor.

Listen for: April in Paris. You heard this title on The Atomic Mr. Basie, where Basie’s orchestra turns it into a vehicle for collective swing. Here, Vaughan makes it something else entirely — intimate, conversational, emotionally complex. Same song. Opposite worlds. This is the lesson made audible: the standard is infinitely malleable.

Listen for: the dialogue between voice and trumpet. Brown does not simply accompany — he comments, questions, responds. On Lullaby of Birdland especially, notice how he shadows Vaughan’s phrases, sometimes echoing them, sometimes answering them with something completely unexpected. This is the conversational principle from Lesson 1 applied to the standard: the song becomes a platform for a real-time exchange.

Synthesis

Three artists. Three approaches. Three completely different reinventions of the same body of songs.

Fitzgerald honours the lyric while she transforms it — she is the song’s most faithful and most creative servant simultaneously. Evans dissolves the melody into harmonic light — the song becomes a lens. Vaughan uses the song as a stage — not for spectacle, but for the most direct possible emotional communication between two musicians and a room full of listeners.

The standard is infinitely resilient precisely because it has been through so much. Every great musician who has played Night and Day, or My Foolish Heart, or April in Paris, has changed those songs and been changed by them. They arrive at you carrying the history of every previous performance — a palimpsest of reinventions. When you hear Fitzgerald sing Night and Day, you are hearing not just Ella and Cole Porter but everyone who has sung it before and everyone who will sing it after. The standard is jazz’s longest conversation.

Listening Assignment

Before you listen: Find and listen to one original recording of Night and Day as Porter wrote it. You can find it sung by Fred Astaire in the 1932 film The Gay Divorcée — just the melody, just the words, just the song as it was born. Then listen to Fitzgerald’s version. The distance between those two recordings is the entire history of jazz.

First pass: All three albums straight through. Notice which version of which songs surprises you most by sounding nothing like what you expected.

Second pass: Pick one standard that appears on two of the three albums and compare the treatments directly. Notice every decision the musicians made differently. When you can articulate why those decisions create different emotional worlds — you are ready for Lesson 5.