Clarence Chang is the first to admit that one thing the world isn't short of is Beatles tribute CDs. By his count there are more than 100 currently in print, and that is probably a conservative estimate. Furthermore, quite a few of those CDs are by jazz artists.
Jazz musicians started covering the Lennon and McCartney songbook back in the glory days of Beatlemania - Ella Fitzgerald covered Can't Buy Me Love in 1964, the same year it was a hit for John, Paul, George and Ringo.
There are reasons for this beyond the huge popularity of the songs at the time. With the help of George Martin the Beatles added harmonic sophistication and melodic variety to simple three chord rock, and their music gave jazz players something more interesting to improvise with.
Although other pop and rock musicians have written songs that have been added to the list of jazz standards, nobody has composed as many as Lennon and McCartney. Something is really the only one of George Harrison's to have achieved a comparable number of cover versions, but it has certainly turned out to be among the most enduring of the Beatles' tunes.
Chang initially had no special ambition to produce an album of Beatles covers, but after hearing a demo recording of a spontaneous duet recorded by pianist Bob Mocarsky and singer Gigi Marentette he decided he wanted to produce an album of voice and piano duets and started mulling over ideas for a theme to give the project some coherence. The result is Liverpool Stories on Music Net.
Chang is a fan of Tony Bennett's duets with Bill Evans and of Janis Siegel's with Fred Hersch, among others, and considers such performances 'the purest form of musical dialogue'.
'It is no secret that I like to include a piano/vocal duet tune in the albums I've produced throughout the years, more often than not as a closing track, so recording an entire album of such was always on the cards. I guess I was just waiting for the right time to do it,' he says.