Tonight I'm thinking about standards - a broad word, that, with a whole host of connotations, but I'm talking about standards of the (Great) American Song Book. We played a few tonight, as we do everynight, but something about it tonight rang true.

I was thinking about that tune "The More I See You" and so I called it in the first set - and sang it as well. Drawing on Chet Baker's great version from '58. First time I've sung that tune on the Bateaux.

And then we got a request to play Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" - what a tune! The way it succeeds in juxtaposing a certain 'nonchalance' of the descending chromatic motion - with the very 'sophisticated' bridge. I would say somehow it is able to mirror harmonically what the sentiment of the tune, lyrically, actually is. Brilliant.

And a final mention, we also played an instrumental version of "Skylark". Another great tune. This might be a reach, but I wonder if it doesn't do the same thing I mentioned in Sophisticated Lady. I've been working with my hard disk recorder alot this past week and the sonic possibilities are endless. All recorded sounds are in the digital realm and therefore can be sped up, slowed down, stretched out, squeezed together, etc etc. I wonder if I took the whole 32 bar melody of Skylark and compressed it into about a second :01or two:02, would it sound like some kind of birdsong?

I told you it was a stretch. I'm probably subconciously being affected by the fact that I've now stayed up so late, its now early, and the birds just started singing in the forest across from my apt. I should have noted the time precisely, but it was about 15 minutes ago - about 5:15a. Maybe I'll try the experiment and see. The last thing I'll say about that is if you're playing it in Eb, the bridge goes to Ab and then abruptly makes it's way to G, one half step away. This is unusual and could be likened to the free, harmonically wide open melodies of our feathered friends. Come to think of it, if Sophisticated Lady is played in Ab, the bridge goes to G(!).

So anyway, the feeling I had later once I'd gotten home, was that devoting yourself to learning, playing, and improvising on these tunes is a very noble and worthwhile thing. As corny as that sounds. Because for one thing, there's no end to it, and you could easily spend the rest of your life perfecting your craft, finding new things, discovering new ins and outs, trying new angles. But also because the material itself deserves to be revisited and not simply lost or surrendered to canned recordings - no matter how great - because a living language is living only if it is spoken.