When he was a teenager, the jazz pianist Bill Charlap recalled at the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday evening, he met the composer Jule Styne and asked him for the secret to writing a good popular song. Mr. Styne, choosing his words carefully, replied that it had to be “melodically simple and harmonically attractive.”
Mr. Charlap used the Styne tune “Just in Time” as an illustration. The melody’s nub consists of two adjacent notes repeated again and again, with some rhythmic variation. A sense of musical movement is created mostly by the changing harmonies under the motif. Mr. Charlap, a keyboard wizard who continually surprises, went on to inflect the song’s Broadway chords with his own jazz modulations and deliver an exquisite piano solo free of clichs.
This demonstration was one of several pertinent music lessons inserted into “Sondheim & Styne” on the second night of the Y’s Jazz in July Summer Festival, which runs through next Thursday. The concert put the show tunes of Mr. Styne and Stephen Sondheim through the jazz wringer and found a natural compatibility between the genres. It wasn’t so long ago that Mr. Sondheim’s music was considered too rigorously composed and hermetic to be readily open to the kind of improvisation invited by older popular standards, with their more relaxed melodies. That may be true, but only in a limited sense.
Mr. Charlap used the Styne tune “Just in Time” as an illustration. The melody’s nub consists of two adjacent notes repeated again and again, with some rhythmic variation. A sense of musical movement is created mostly by the changing harmonies under the motif. Mr. Charlap, a keyboard wizard who continually surprises, went on to inflect the song’s Broadway chords with his own jazz modulations and deliver an exquisite piano solo free of clichs.
This demonstration was one of several pertinent music lessons inserted into “Sondheim & Styne” on the second night of the Y’s Jazz in July Summer Festival, which runs through next Thursday. The concert put the show tunes of Mr. Styne and Stephen Sondheim through the jazz wringer and found a natural compatibility between the genres. It wasn’t so long ago that Mr. Sondheim’s music was considered too rigorously composed and hermetic to be readily open to the kind of improvisation invited by older popular standards, with their more relaxed melodies. That may be true, but only in a limited sense.
