Practice This!
June 2008
Thomas Marriott on Making Songs Your Own

Click here to watch Thomas' Practice This! video clip.

In jazz music we have a lexicon of songs that we call “standards.” They were originally pop tunes or songs from movies or Broadway shows. Since the beginnings of jazz, musicians have taken songs familiar to listeners from outside of jazz music and made them their own. Miles Davis famously did this with such songs as “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” both pop tunes of their day. In order to keep jazz music a living, breathing art form with relevance to today’s audiences, jazz musicians continue the practice of taking contemporary pop songs, movie themes, and show tunes and adapting them for their own purposes.

The masters of the art form tended to have one common approach to making songs personal: abandoning some aspect of the original. Whether you are talking about keeping only the melody, harmony, form, feel, backgrounds, verse, chorus or even the lyrics, there are many ways to sculpt something new from what you find usable. One very basic approach is known as a reharmonization, where you keep the original melody of the song, but set it to new chord changes. If the melody is simple and diatonic enough, you can take a modal approach and change the mode (from major to minor, for example). Another example would be to change the feel of the song: if the song is originally a pop ballad, perhaps you might want to play it with a 70’s funk beat. One must always be careful not to water-down the song you are remaking, turning it into “musak.” Good taste is a must!

You can get started remaking your favorite songs right away. Find a tune you really like, and begin to identify the parts of the song you think are usable for your purposes: melody, harmony, rhythm, parts of the form, etc. Figure out what part or parts of the song you really like, and begin with just this. Songs that have had a wide popular exposure are particularly good, especially if you can remake them into something new, while still keeping the original tune recognizable. Explore the full range of grooves and feels, instrumentation, and musical possibilities you have at your disposal. And above all, do what sounds good to you.