Still, the melody and the lyrics are correct on a piece of published sheet music. More tangibly, a comparison of the sheet with a historical “straight” (non-jazz) performance on record or in a movie will show many differences. Other prolific composers may not have overseen each piece of piano/vocal sheet music. Some of the composers may have been more like a folk composer, such as Irving Berlin, who apparently could not write out a piano score. It’s no “urtext” of a song in the manner of European classical music. To make the obvious inference: Tyner looked at the sheets, and then made up reharmonizations that fit the style of the session at hand. In pictures from the session, single sheets are spread out over Van Gelder’s piano. You used to be able to go to Colony Music in Manhattan and get nearly any song in a single sheet or an anthology - their massive inventory was cross-indexed - but Colony closed its doors in 2012.Ĭolony could have easily been where McCoy Tyner went to get the music for John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Together we came up with the following casual selection: Mike had most of the songs in his extensive collection, contained in anthology songbooks or photocopied from libraries. Over the years, Mike has given me a lot of harmonic “secrets” lurking in original published scores. Mike Kanan and I share an interest in this sheet music. (The relevant phrase “Tin Pan Alley” refers to a particular area of New York City where many music publishers were crammed on top each other like tenement housing.) At that time, sheet music was a thriving business, and nearly all these songs were published in piano/vocal scores, often as a single sheet with a colorful cover, like “I Should Care” shown above. Most jazz standards were originally written for musical theatre, movies, and other kinds of general entertainment in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s.
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