Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” as performed in Top Hat sung by Fred Astaire with dance by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Music performed by Johnny Green and his orchestra, arranged by Max Steiner (?).
“Cheek to Cheek” as performed by Ahmad Jamal, piano, Israel Crosby, bass, and Vernel Fournier, drums. Recorded at the Spotlite Club Washington DC September 1958. Originally released as Argo LP636, available for download at Amazon (99¢, what a deal!) as part of Ahmad’s Blues.
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An example of symbiosis and transmogrification between popular song and jazz
These two versions of Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” one from 1935 and another from 1958, show how, over the course of 23 years, a staple of the American songbook, distributed through film, various radio iterations, and innumerable big band arrangements, is transformed.
Cycles of influence in music in the US and thrust of US history generally show that American music is many things; African-American, Native-American, European, and other influences yield a blended musical landscape. One feature of this landscape is the consistent reinvention of popular forms such as marches, hymns, and songs into related styles like piano rags, spirituals, and big band swing. These stylistic reinventions are made manifest at every level of the musical process, from timbre to form to methodology. Thus notated rags, themselves based on marches, jigs, etc transformed group music making into a solo format and codified a new rhythmic form and approach to improvisation (“ragging” and “jazzing” melodies etc). This notated rag style was reinvented as stride piano, which was aurally-based (ie not primarily a notated form as rags were), expanded the available improvisational range, and began to engage with popular song on the radio by adapting these songs to the stride style. Such transitions, from aural to notated and back to aural, from group to solo format, from strict form to a freer (or differently codified) sense of form, from marchlike to swinging rhythm, and so on, occur in various places, times, and ways, discursively adding to the available range of musical expression.
Listening to jazz renditions of American popular song brings this process into a kind of focus while raising new questions about the modalities, mechanisms, and meaning of great jazz interpretation. This short comparison between “original” recordings (one, above, for film, and the other, below, for radio play and record sales) and a later improvised small group performance makes an interesting case study. How do the “original” performances of “Cheek to Cheek” and Ahmad Jamal’s interpretation inform each other, and what does Jamal’s 1958 recording show us about the role of American song in the jazz idiom?
“Cheek to Cheek” has a novel AABBCA song form (each A is 16 measures, B and C 8 measures each) which achieves a sense of harmonic progression while remaining in a single key center. Each A begins with I and ends with V-I, complicated on the way with various cadential variations. B outlines ii-V-I in a couple of ways, and C establishes the parallel minor, i, visits bVI7, viiº, then iii-vi-ii-V to establish the final A’s I major. This simple harmonic structure creates a sense of narrative and development, building to the melodramatic minor tonic at C. The melody, preternaturally simple and catchy, uses motion only in steps and thirds, and spans an octave and a third (basic lead sheet p.1 and p.2). “Cheek to Cheek” was composed for notation-based performance yet its structure, unusual form, and simplicity can be seen as prototypical of “jazz” song; easily adaptable, identifiable, and improviser-friendly. (See Jeffry Magee’s article in JAMS 59, no 3 (Fall 2006) for more on this topic.)
Interestingly, “Cheek to Cheek” is, at one time, semi-modal (always in the root key, mostly diatonic melody), and always in a cadence (every version I’ve heard has a functional harmonic shift every two beats or so). When the song first emerged in 1935 (Ahmad Jamal was 5 years old) it was a popular hit, easy fodder for innumerable territorial swing bands, recorded several times, and quickly became a core part of the American songbook by way of piano sheets (pictured), band arrangements, radio play, record sales, etc. The song presents a perfect foil for Jamal’s piano approach, with plenty of opportunities to explore stasis but enough tonal variety to welcome interesting piano orchestration and abrupt texture shifts, hallmarks of his trio work in the 1950s. While not a typical jam session tune today, the success of “Cheek to Cheek” both as popular song and vehicle for jazz improvisation is notable.
The film version of “Cheek to Cheek,” top, is itself an iconic example of Hollywood gesamtkunstwerk, presenting a dizzying array of cultural and aesthetic codes, a dance scene packed with gender and courtship ideals, and slick production values by any standard. The whole form of “Cheek to Cheek” is played three times; once as background music for the scene, again with dance and Astaire’s vocal, and, after a modulation based on the C section, a final (schmaltzy) time to complete the dance. The orchestration is dense, and while the song swings it does so with a stiffly executed “two feel.” As this version was used in the film release I assume (incorrectly?) most people (including musicians) saw the scene once or maybe twice. The film’s release was followed by a radio friendly 78 with Astaire accompanied by the Leo Reisman Orchestra:
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(only 99¢ here)
This version of “Cheek to Cheek” was a big hit, swings nicely with a two feel that shifts to four, and is the definitive “original” recording of the song. The strings are much more restrained, a foreshadowing of the eventual extinction of strings as a section in swing bands. The harmonies are clear and logical, codifying the bVII7-VI7 at measures 7 and 11 of A, and leaner orchestration allows all aspects of the song’s craft to come forward. After a short intro Astaire sings the complete form, the form is repeated as an ABBCA instrumental , and the song promptly ends. While the melody is more or less stated throughout and there is no substantial improvisation, the contrasting orchestration of the instrumental chorus presents a varied musical surface and the effect is more engaging and subtle than the song recorded for film. The instrumental also breaks each section of the melody into totemic “chunks.”
“Cheek to Cheek” was firmly enshrined in the American Songbook in the late fifties when it was covered by both Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (in 1956 with the Oscar Peterson Quartet) and Frank Sinatra (in late 1958 with arrangements by Billy May, and part of 1960 best album Come Dance With Me). Both interpretations have a beautiful sense of swing, and Sinatra’s occasional substitution of “swinging” for “dancing” in the lyric emphasizes the close relationship between the song “Cheek to Cheek” and the style of swing music. Fitzgerald and Armstrong’s version is notable for its use of a simple I-vi-ii-V-I vamp in the A sections. Each arrangement has some different harmonies, a natural part of the development of jazz song forms from an “original” set of changes into various alternate sets. It’s more than likely that Jamal and his colleagues were familiar with Fitzgerald and Armstrong’s recording when they performed at the Spotlite in 1958. Sinatra’s, however, was not recorded until three months later. Both of these recordings are centered on the vocal performance, and state the melody and form clearly.
The Ahmad Jamal Trio’s performance of “Cheek to Cheek” (above), is more of a response to or exploration of the song. Considerably faster than the other versions discussed, the melody is stated in quick elastic fragments, showcasing Jamal’s nuanced sense of melodic improvisation. Rather than stating the melody in a comprehensive way, Jamal plays a riff based on the lyric “I’m in heaven” twice to open the performance then leaves his amazing rhythm section space to complete the first A. The second A has a bit more loosely played melody but is dominated by a chromatic vamp. At the first B Jamal plays the melody more or less, and continues to play the first phrase of the second B before stopping again. C begins with a bVI major chord (surprise!) then uses a couple of diminished chords to return to iii-VI7-ii-V. The melody at C is more or less complete. The last A brings Jamal’s longest exploration of the melody, but digresses into a long ornamental figure, again featuring bass and drums, and is extended by a long iii-vi-ii-V tag.
The familiarity of the tune and the texture of Jamal’s performance make the song recognizable, but the extremely fragmentary nature of the melody invites discussion of how compositions like “Cheek to Cheek” are internalized and developed by both listeners and jazz improvisers. Jamal’s initial statement of a melodic fragment on scale degrees 3 4 6 5 is more cheek-to-cheek-ish than faithful interpretation, yet the combination of this fragment and the swing timekeeping brings the ensemble and listener into a kind of “Cheek to Cheek” space, familiar at various points melodically, rhythmically, and harmonically yet never strictly hewing to any single core aspect of the song. Listeners familiar with the song (as many would be) are left to experience the harmonic progression of the sections more than a reliable melody, and the trio’s harmonic progressions systematically defy expectation with chromatic vamps, novel modulations (the bVI at C), and a long final tag. When the melody appears it sounds more like improvisation, and at the second B Jamal’s opening phrase can be heard as an elongation of the previous B.
After the first chorus and an extended tag with drums featured the group takes a Vsus4 chord vamp up in half steps through all 12 keys, returning to V-I and a piano solo over the form that never alludes to the melody until a short moment at the beginning of B. The melody at C is stated, and the last A builds to a final tag. For Jamal, his colleagues, and many listeners, “Cheek to Cheek” has become, by 1958, a song structure that is familiar even without any strict melodic statement, an internalized referent that is plastic and available for extensive, almost grammatical, reworking. The chromatic interlude extends Berlin’s overarching harmonic scheme by returning to the original I yet maintaining a sense of harmonic motion, and the recurring melodic fragments echo the totemic melodic statements of the original recording while opening a world of improvisational freedom for Jamal to explore. Meanwhile the statement of C in a new key shows how Jamal and others were exploring static tonalities in distant keys, a harbinger of modal jazz.
The ability of a hit song like “Cheek to Cheek” to penetrate culture is paralleled by its absorption into the musical minds of Jamal’s group and his listeners. Just as the song’s popular recordings can be used to evoke a temporal or cultural space in film, TV, or theater, the structure of the song itself has become a musical space, with form, some rules, and a lot of room for improvisation. Of course jazz musicians are famous for “jazzing up” familiar melodies, but this easy explanation glosses the deeper levels of deconstruction, interplay, and irony necessary to fully reinvent a song. Jamal’s “Cheek to Cheek” is symbiotically related to Berlin’s song through its reliance on Berlin’s framework and extension of the song’s meaning. In turns it is also a complete transmogrification of the tune, a new song assembled using the bones of the original.
Thus jazz interpretations of popular song are not “jazzy versions” of notated compositions and a platform for improvisation. They present commentary on previous recordings, players’ memory and context within the larger trends of music, in all a real-time embodied reevaluation of the song as music and as social phenomenon. Further, the “grammar” of popular song and swing music was familiar to many listeners, and these tropes were also part of the harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary of jazz, making the nuance of highly abstracted recordings like Jamal’s available even to nonmusicians. Today of course most people do not have a sense of the social moments encoded within American popular songs from before 1960, or an aural memory of these songs in their heyday. How does this lack of “insider” connection to jazz song affect how we hear jazz music?
Many of the techniques employed by Jamal and his trio can be seen in the Minimalist, Pop Art, and Op art movements in the 1960s: reuse of popular iconic forms, highly stylized abstraction, a sense that codified materials (like a Campbell’s Soup can or “Cheek to Cheek”) can be reinvented (as high art, or a freewheeling jam). “Cheek to Cheek” was composed for notation based performance, but The Ahmad Jamal Trio’s performance of the song shows how popular song was internalized and repurposed by jazz musicians into a flexible vehicle for personal expression and improvisation.
