You’re probably familiar with the American Songbook, the collection of songs composed in the first half of the 20th century by the likes of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers, the Gershwins, and Duke Ellington, the songs jazz musicians call “standards.” The American Popular Song is another name for the genre, coined by Alec Wilder in his definitive book on the music and songwriters, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950.
Wilder is a prolific composer himself, of not just songs, but operas and chamber music, and music for films. In American Popular Song, he lists the artists he believes belonged to the Great American Songbook canon, and is quite candid—actually, beyond opinionated—in his appraisal of various songs and songwriters, which makes the book fun to read.
But it is also an important manuscript in that it identifies and recognizes that this tradition of songwriting happened in America and is worthy of study and appreciation. Academia, that is, music colleges, had not really embraced the music at the time of the book’s publication in 1972, although the music is high-level songwriting and embodies a tradition of passing the music along from person to person to person, influencing each other and in the end influencing the world, from Brazil to the Beatles.
The songs are defined by beautiful melodies and harmonies, and chords and chord progressions that make them interesting to play and that lend themselves so well to interpretation and improvisation.
As my Music Life and Times podcast co-host, pianist Kevin Bales, points out, “While American Songbook tunes are not all that jazz musicians play—jazz standards are songs written by jazz musicians that don’t have words—you need to know the ‘standards’ and be able to play them in order to play other jazz compositions.
‘Some of the songs jazz musicians play are specifically different because they’re trying not to sound like the standards,” Kevin adds, “like bebop musicians taking the chord changes to an American popular song and writing a new melody to it and maybe making the chords sound less like they fit in a key, like Charlie Parker’s ‘Donna Lee,’ which is based on the jazz standard ‘Indiana,’ or his ‘Quasimodo,’ based on ‘Embraceable You.’ So even if they’re not playing an American popular song they’re using the harmonies from them. “