This is Adam Manus.

And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast.

Daily jazz advice coming at you.

Today we're going to talk about how to approach pop tunes in a jazz setting.

Good, because I've been wanting to play the greatest love of all by Whitney Houston for like 20 years, and no one will let me do it on the jazz gig. Well, man, it sounds like a solo piano favorite for you to throw in there. I'm going to work it up. I'm going to work it up. Let's do it. So the first thing that we can do is to choose the right tune. You know, I do this a lot with my trio. I actually have, we're like 81% modern pop tunes right now. What's some of the ones you've been doing? Well, we do, so we do some nine inch nails. We do nine inch nails closer. We just added this great arrangement of Katie Lang's constant craving. I'm very 90s heavy right now, but we do like some outcasts.

I thought you said of this day. We do some outcast like Lana Del Rey. And you know, there's a, you have to approach it differently. Everybody wants to rule the world. I think I heard you. We do the tears for fear stuff and, uh, yeah. That might even be 80s, my friend. That's 80s. No, we go all the way back. But you know, I mean, like, how many 25-year-olds know the days in wine and roses? Like,

right, you know, I mean, like, how many 25-year-olds know the days in wine and roses?

Like, they don't really know that as a popular tune.

They just know it is something they hear from jazz combos at restaurants.

But we try to kind of put some things in that maybe people might recognize from popular radio.

So the key to this for me, though, at least the way I approach it, is, you know, one of the most important things is choosing the right one. You can't just choose any modern pop tune. I mean, you could, but for me, if it's going to be good, I have to really love the melody, first and foremost. It has to be a melody that, like, sounds good when you play it instrumentally.

A lot of modern pop tunes, man, they don't have, like, the strongest of melodies. Yeah, it's got to be melodic. I guess it would be the baseline. I mean, that's the one advantage that if you're a jazz musician pulling modern pop tunes in the 50s, you have a wealth of, you know, all these like Jerome Kern and the Gershwins and all this great musical theater stuff that has these really melodic melodies, these melodies that just soar all around. But I think jazz musicians, even back then, too, were very good at picking out the ones that would fit. I remember my dad telling me when I first, you know, kind of got into jazz, I mean, he's a musician and knows a lot about,

you know, a lot of kinds of music. And I was saying to him, I said, man, back when you were coming up in like the 50s and 60s, there were so many great pop tunes. All the pop tunes were so great and they adapt so well to jazz, you know, great harmonic content and great melodic stuff. and he was like, no, he's just like, the jazz musicians took those.

Those are the only musicians took those.

Those are the only ones that survive.

He's like, we had a bunch of crap back then as well.

It's the same thing, too.

So if you're choosy about what you're going to pick and try to arrange, this could really

work well.

And then, you know, for me, I look for great melodies. You can look for great changes, although as a jazz musician, I'm prone to make the changes, you know, my own anyway. And we're talking about harmony now. Yeah, we're talking about harmony of like the chord changes. Yeah, harmony. That's less important to me, the complexity. Yeah, we can always add that. Like, you know, we're going to do it anyway, so. We do a steely dan. We just threw in a steely dan version of Black Cow.

It's awesome, but we haven't changed anything about it because it's like the changes are great. Right. That's already kind of a, that's a jazz influence pop tune. Already, right. So I'm almost ready to throw it out because it's like, well, we're not making it our own at all.

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