[Dixielandjazz] St Louis Blues - Why do bands play it diffrently from the original?

[dwlit at cpcug.org]

The disconnect between composers and publishers' house arrangers is raised
here with some regularity by jazzers as a defense of their wish to do what
they want with tunes. The point is moot and irrelevant, and IMO silly.
Messing with tunes is what jazzers do, and that's cool, and it doesn't
need defending.

For all practical purposes, the sheet music is what we have, our basic
documents for the tunes. Unless proven otherwise for individual tunes, the
melody (vocal) line may be considered definitive.

The arrangers wrote the piano scores. I have no idea what guidance they
had from the composers--maybe lead sheets with chords? Whatever they used
as templates, they did all sorts of weird things, so that many of the
basic chords one can derive from the scores are essentially *indicative*.

But what can one do? The scores are what we have to tell us what the tunes
*sound* like. Eg. "Blue skies" is a minor tune, with a certain basic chord
structure.

So even though the sheet music was not created to be historic documents,
it was intended to convey the tunes to the public for whom the tunes were
composed, in the styles of the day, in an accessible form, and hence are
the key artifacts in our knowledge of the tunes.

--Sheik (in deep pain from trying to decipher the "right" chords from
amidst the whimsies of the sheet music arrangers)
Forthcoming soon: "20s-30s Fake Book"
http://americanmusiccaravan.com

Rocky Ball wrote:
> I have heard this "original sheet music" argument for many years and
> it is made more complex by this fact...
> Many of the pieces of original sheet music, that we often rely on as
> the gospel, or the 'source', in these arguments were ARRANGEMENTS by
> the staff arranger(s) at the music publishing houses. Often these
> were not arrangements by the composer at all.
>
> .. Most sheet music publishers were
> publishing music with a purpose and that purpose was to create an
> entertaining piece that could be played on the parlor piano by the
> end user.
>
> Before the mass acceptance of recordings, sheet music was the
> offering to the end user. And often that sheet music was created by a
> staff arranger who used his or her own creative judgement in making a
> piano arrangement that would sell... not with creating a historical
> piece for preserving the author's complete original intentions.
>