This is the second in a series of articles on jazz musicians in popular music and jazz and popular music as fields of study in higher education.
Jazz musicians have played an important role in the development of popular music from the 1960s until today (we should also remember that jazz actually was popular music from the 1920s-1940s). For those who know the history of the music, this comes as no surprise--jazz and popular music stem from the fusion of the early blues and gospel music of the slave communities with the European song tradition of the 19C.
Jazz and popular music also approach composition in a similar manner which is very different from classical music. In most of classical music, the composition is written or conceived by one person, the composer. The collaborative element takes place as the musicians, the singers, and the conductor recreate and reinterpret the piece of music. In jazz, the collaborative element is at the forefront all of the time. The piece of music is usually little more than an outline with an initial melody and harmonic structure that is then collaboratively revised and re-envisioned by the ensemble at each performance. The resulting music is thus completely dependent on what each individual in the ensemble contributes, allowing for an incredible amount of personal expression and freedom that indeed largely defines the genre. In jazz, this is perhaps best exemplified by the many groups assembled by Miles Davis, each of which made it possible for him to establish and define new styles within a very crowded genre. In pop music, something similar takes place, where the producer and the session musicians contribute to the recordings that often makes the end product almost unrecognizable from the initial drafts of songs brought to the studio initially by the artist and groups.
Professional musicians who have worked as session musicians are very familiar with this aspect of pop music composition. An example from one of my first experiences as a session musician might be illustrative: In the mid-1980s, I was asked to play on a recording for a budding pop musician in the Windsor/Detroit area. I was working with a good friend and outstanding jazz pianist Brian Sharron, and we were given a demo of the tune to work on. The demo was sparse, just acoustic guitar with vocals, and there was very little going on--no drums, no bass, no background figures, nothing but acoustic guitar and voice. In terms of form, it was the standard pop song form (verse and chorus repeated a few times), and the harmony consisted of three or four elementary chords, repeated without variation. In short, it was bloody awful, but we were paid to "play keyboards" on it, which we did. However, it became clear that we were expected to do much more. By the end of the two day session, we had added about a dozen tracks of live and sequenced synthesizer parts, including drums and bass which we wrote together. We also added many new chords to the verse and the chorus, and we added a bridge (with a surprising change of key, as I remember). And all of it was done while paying close attention to the lyrics, with the intention of supporting the lyrics with sympathetic musical gestures whenever appropriate. When we added these new parts (a new chord, bass line, synth arpeggio, drum pattern, etc.), the nominal composer would chime in enthusiastically with "yes, that's what I was hearing." After about 12 hours in the studio, the song was completely unrecognizable from the original, except for the lyrics (which were fairly generic '80s pop shtick) and the melody, although the melody changed a bit in order to accommodate the new harmonies and accompaniment figures. All of it was done by the two of us, with some input from the engineer who was, more or less, producing the recording. A few months later, we were surprised to hear the tune in rotation on MuchMusic (Canada's version of MTV). We had a good laugh when we subsequently heard the artist in an interview on MuchMusic. He was talking about how he "wrote the tune in five minutes," and was "inspired" by one of the usual motivations from the pop and jazz playbook-heartbreak, betrayal, falling in love, falling out of love, wanting to be in love, loving to be in want, etc. The tune, apparently, sprang forth in a Promethean cloudburst of creativity, as the primordial forces of the universe selected him as the vessel to bring this three-minute pop ditty to the world (aided and abetted by two jazz musicians of course).
As you can tell fr