A life of its own, inspired by popular song

Live music in Hong Kong may be having a hard time, but 2003 is turning out to be a vintage year for locally recorded jazz on CD.

The latest release, on Music Net distributed by EMI, is called Songs From The Radio. The musicians are the Roel Garcia Trio, which features Garcia on piano, Sylvain Gagnon on bass and Johnny Abraham on drums, with special guest Eugene Pao on acoustic guitar on two tracks.

The group walks a thin line between jazz and easy listening, but does so with a certain panache on an unlikely list of pop tunes including Bee Gees' How Deep Is Your Love and Elton John's Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word.

Why though should those tunes seem to be such improbable platforms for jazz improvisation? From the music's earliest days in New Orleans, jazz musicians always played the popular tunes of the day. Songs we think of as 'jazz standards' by composers such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Richard Rogers were thoroughly familiar to audiences before they heard the jazz variations on their themes, and were originally so employed for exactly that reason.

The essence of jazz, from the gloriously lyrical concision of Louis Armstrong's choruses on Stardust to John Coltrane's feverishly inventive half-hour-plus reworkings of My Favourite Things, was the transmutation of a familiar melody, good, bad or indifferent, into improvisational gold.

Since the 1960s however, when many jazz musicians reworked Beatles tunes, the whole symbiotic relationship between jazz and the contemporary popular song has deteriorated.

For a serious jazzman to record a recent pop tune today is a rarity. The only notable exceptions I can think of are Miles Davis - who cut Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time and Michael Jackson's Human Nature for 1984's You're Under Arrest - and Herbie Hancock on The New Standard in 1996.