Nonstandard

It is more accurate to say I don't need any more standards CDs with fairly straight renderings of songs like "Summertime," "A Night in Tunisia," "All the Things You Are," or "You Don't Know What Love Is." (Not intended to be an exhaustive list.) If I pick up a standards disk these days, I want to know it's going to be substantially different than what I've heard before. That's not always easy to determine, but if it's an improviser like Sonny Rollins, you've got a pretty good sign. There's nothing standard about Jean-Michel Pilc doing "St. James Infirmary" on his solo CD "Follow Me," let me tell you. The instrumentation is telltale as well. I might spring for another Bill Charlap standards session if he was accompanied by an alphorn quartet, or bagpipes.

This doesn't mean I'm against drawing on jazz's tradition, but jazz has a lot of tradition to draw on, much of which isn't drawn on enough. The other day, I listened to a good rendering of Mary Lou Williams "Zodiac Suite" from pianist Geri Allen and her Mary Lou Williams Collective. I happen to have a CD of Mary Lou Williams playing the "Zodiac Suite," from Smithsonian Folkways, that I like. But the Allen group's version, on the Mary label and titled "Zodiac Suite: Revisited," offers a fresh perspective on the music, which is hardly overplayed.

I think no less than Wynton Marsalis kind of agrees with me on this line of thought, despite being a diehard traditionalist. Which is why he's had the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra recasting stuff like Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and some of the music of Mingus the last couple years (and recasting it in an interesting manner in both cases, I might add).