What Is a Jazz Standard, and Why Did They Stop?

The most recorded jazz composition of all time is Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol's "Caravan", first cut in 1936. It has been covered more than 500 times. The most recently written song that anyone seriously calls a jazz standard is Joe Zawinul's "Birdland", recorded by Weather Report in 1977. That's a gap of nearly fifty years with nothing new entering the canon of jazz standards. What happened?

An accidental canon

Jazz standards weren't planned. There was no committee. Standards assembled themselves through repetition, adoption and a set of historical conditions that no longer exist.

The earliest standards came from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood. Songs written by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Hoagy Carmichael became jazz vehicles because jazz musicians needed material and these songs were everywhere. In the 1920s and 1930s, record companies often dictated what their artists recorded. Louis Armstrong was the first jazz musician given real freedom to choose his own material, and his band helped popularise many of the songs that became the first wave of standards: "Body and Soul", "Ain't Misbehavin'", "St. Louis Blues".

The critical thing about these songs is that they sat at an intersection. They were popular hits with wide cultural reach. They also had rich harmonic structures: key changes, secondary dominants, sophisticated chord movement. That combination made them ideal frameworks for improvisation. A tune like "All the Things You Are" (Jerome Kern, 1939) works as a standard because its chord changes are complex enough to sustain endless reinterpretation, but its melody distinctive enough that audiences still recognise the song.

Bebop changed the source but kept the principle. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk wrote original compositions that entered the repertoire alongside the Broadway tunes. "'Round Midnight" (Monk, 1944), "A Night in Tunisia" (Gillespie, 1942), "Billie's Bounce" (Parker, 1945). These weren't pop songs. They were jazz compositions written for jazz musicians. But they became standards in the same way: other musicians learned them, played them and recorded them. They spread because they were useful. Good changes, strong melodies, the right amount of space for a soloist to work.

The 1950s and 1960s added another layer. Miles Davis's "So What" and "All Blues" (both 1959). John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" (1960) and "Impressions" (1963). Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" (1962) and "Maiden Voyage" (1965). Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" (1966). Joe Henderson's "Recorda Me" (1963), written when Henderson was just fifteen and later widely adopted in jazz education and songbooks. Bossa nova fed in too: Jobim's "The Girl from Ipanema" (1962), "Desafinado" (1959), "Corcovado" (1962). All of these entered the repertoire within roughly a decade.

Then the pipeline closed.

1977 and the end of the line

Christian McBride, bassist, bandleader and host of NPR's Jazz Night in America, has argued that "Birdland" was the last great jazz standard. His reasoning is simple: from the time Weather Report's Heavy Weather came out in 1977, every high school and college band in America played that tune. Manhattan Transfer recorded a vocal version with lyrics by Jon Hendricks that won a Grammy in 1979. Quincy Jones covered it on Back on the Block in 1989 and won two more Grammys. Buddy Rich played it. Maynard Ferguson played it. It crossed over, spread through education and embedded itself in the repertoire.

You could make a case for Chick Corea's "Spain" (1972) or Hancock's "Chameleon" (1973) as similarly late-arriving standards. But the point is the same. We are talking about compositions from the mid-1970s. Nothing written since has achieved the same kind of universal adoption.

Why?

The common language broke down

The explanation is structural, not aesthetic. Several things happened at once, and they all pushed in the same direction.

Jazz stopped being popular music. The Great American Songbook standards became standards partly because the songs were already in the culture. Audiences knew "My Funny Valentine" from the radio before they heard it at a jazz club. When popular music simplified harmonically through rock and roll and then pop, the supply of mass-market songs with interesting chord changes dried up. Jazz musicians could still play Radiohead tunes (and Brad Mehldau does), but the cultural conditions that made a song like "Body and Soul" simultaneously a pop hit and a jazz vehicle had gone.

The recording industry changed. Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt has made the point that in previous decades, record contracts demanded frequent output. A musician signed to Blue Note in 1963 might have had to record two or three albums a year. If you didn't have enough originals, you learned other people's tunes. That economic pressure pushed musicians to adopt each other's compositions. Today, the economics run the other way. Recording is cheap, labels are optional, and every musician can release their own material on their own schedule. The incentive to play someone else's tune has largely disappeared.

Compositions got harder. Guitarist Mike Moreno has observed that modern jazz compositions are far more labour-intensive to learn than a 32-bar bebop head. A Parker original had an intro, a melody, solos over the form, and a head out. Contemporary jazz compositions can run to four or five pages with complex road maps through shifting sections. That complexity may make for great records, but it works against the kind of casual, widespread adoption that creates a standard. At a jam session, you can call "Autumn Leaves" because everyone knows it. You cannot call a five-page Ambrose Akinmusire composition and expect the same result.

Community fragmented. Saxophonist John Ellis has said that there is no linear sense of the jazz scene in terms of progression or community any more. People within the scene are disconnected from each other. The older model, where musicians came up through established bands (Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers being the classic example), created a shared musical vocabulary. You learned the book. You played the tunes. That book was the standards. Without that apprenticeship system, the connective tissue weakened.

Branding replaced repertoire. Pianist Orrin Evans has pointed to the modern obsession with branding. Every musician, pushed by publicists and managers, feels the need to play their own music and do their own thing. Evans pushes back on this. He believes you can still be yourself through how you interpret other people's music. But he's in the minority. The culture of jazz has shifted from interpretation to authorship as the primary marker of artistic identity.

Put all of these together and the picture is clear. Standards weren't created by aesthetic conservatism. They were created by a specific set of conditions: a shared popular culture, an economic structure that incentivised adoption, compositions simple enough to spread easily, a tight-knit community of musicians who played in each other's bands, and a period when interpretation was valued as highly as composition. Every one of those conditions has changed.

The Marsalis debate

This is where the debate gets heated. Wynton Marsalis's position, broadly, is that jazz has a set of fundamentals: blues, standards, a swing beat, tonality, harmony, craftsmanship and mastery of the tradition from New Orleans through to Ornette Coleman. Standards, in this framework, are the grammar. You learn them to prove you can speak the language.

There is something real in this. Standards gave jazz musicians a common vocabulary that made spontaneous musical conversation possible. When a pickup band at a New York jam session in 1958 could call "All the Things You Are" and every musician in the room knew what to do, that wasn't nostalgia. That was a functional common language. It enabled the music to happen in real time, between strangers, at a level of sophistication that still takes your breath away on the records.

But Marsalis's mistake is treating that particular common language as the common language. The standards became standards because of historical conditions specific to a roughly 40-year window from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. Insisting that contemporary musicians should still be proving themselves through "All the Things You Are" isn't preserving a tradition. It's preserving the specific outputs of a tradition while the conditions that produced those outputs have completely changed.

Miles Davis understood this, which is why Marsalis's comparison of Davis's embrace of rock and pop (on Bitches Brew and beyond) as a betrayal of his art misses the point. Davis wasn't betraying jazz. He was doing what jazz had always done: absorbing the music around it and making something new. The difference was that the music around him in 1970 was Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, not Cole Porter and the Gershwins. If anything, Davis was following the tradition more faithfully than Marsalis, who was preserving its surface while abandoning its underlying principle of restless absorption.

Keith Jarrett's jab that Marsalis sounds like a high school trumpet player was cruel but pointed. Technical command of the tradition's forms isn't the same thing as having something to say within them.

So where does that leave us?

The honest answer is that standards, in the traditional sense, are done. The conditions that created them are gone. No amount of institutional effort (and Lincoln Center has tried) will bring them back, because the problem isn't a lack of respect for the tradition. The problem is that the culture that fed the tradition has changed beyond recognition.

But the function that standards served, providing a shared musical language, hasn't disappeared. It has just moved.

Listen to the London scene that Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Ezra Collective came out of. Those musicians don't share a set of tunes. They share a sensibility: rhythmic language drawn from Afrobeat, Caribbean music, grime and spiritual jazz; a communal approach to performance; a willingness to move between composition and improvisation without treating them as opposed. That's a common language. It just doesn't look like the old one.

Or listen to the Chicago scene around International Anthem. Makaya McCraven, Jeff Parker, Angel Bat Dawid. The shared vocabulary there is textural and rhythmic rather than harmonic. They're not playing changes from a fake book. They're building from loops, samples, open forms and collective improvisation. The connective tissue is aesthetic, not repertorial.

Ethan Iverson, writing about the continued relevance of standards for musicians who choose to play them, made a point worth sitting with. He noted that ensembles often sound fresher and looser on familiar material than on new compositions. There's a freedom that comes from knowing a tune so well that you can forget about it and just play. Coltrane and Davis kept standards in their sets throughout the upheavals of the 1960s for exactly this reason. "My Favourite Things" on the 1961 studio recording is a modal exploration of a Broadway show tune. The version from the Village Vanguard in 1966, released on Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, is a fiery piece of free jazz that still uses that showtune melody as its anchor. The standard didn't constrain the music. It held the door open.

That's the real argument for standards, and it has nothing to do with gatekeeping or institutional conservatism. A great standard is a framework generous enough to contain whatever a musician brings to it. "Body and Soul" in Coleman Hawkins's hands in 1939 is a different piece of music from "Body and Soul" in Dexter Gordon's hands in 1962 or Eric Dolphy's in 1964. The song stays. Everything around it changes. That's not nostalgia. That's the whole point of jazz.

The question for contemporary musicians isn't whether to play standards. It's whether they can find, or build, shared frameworks that do the same work. The older records where standards live and breathe capture that shared language at its most alive. Contemporary jazz is building new languages. Both are worth having on the shelf.

If this piece has piqued your interest in the records where standards really come alive, the Blue Note and Verve collections in the shop are a good place to start. For the other side of the story, the Contemporary Jazz collection carries the music that's building those new languages right now.