Jazz meets the Great American Songbook at The Shedd

The 1945 song “Groovin’ High” is a bebop jazz track composed by the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who injected a rapid tempo and layered instrumental textures into the tune.

It’s a world away from “Whispering,” the 1920 track from Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra from which Gillespie borrowed the chord structure as the basis for “Groovin’ High.” “Whispering” is a charming classic, while “Groovin’ High,” well, grooves.

This year’s Oregon Festival of American Music is centered on that dynamic: the relationship between the Great American Songbook, the festival’s traditional wheelhouse, and the jazz interpretations of those songs that came later.

“We look at it through the gauzy light of the past, and at the same time, we bring it right here to the present,” said the festival’s artistic director, Chuck Redd. 

From orchestral to jazzy 

OFAM began in 1991 as a two-day summer pops orchestral festival, interested in American classical music. It started opening up to other genres in the mid-1990s, said executive director Jim Ralph, settling into a celebration of the Great American Songbook.

That music is inextricable from jazz, Ralph said, which has been a part of the festival  lineup since its early days. But this year’s festival — named “My Star Dust Melody” as an homage to Hoagy Carmichael, who bridged the songbook and jazz — brings renewed focus onto the form itself, what the program calls a “self-conscious ponderment” of jazz not just as a genre, but as a way of thinking through music.

Ralph compared the relationship between jazz and the Great American Songbook to the philosophical approaches existentialism and essentialism: one doesn’t make sense without its relationship to the other.

Many of the songs were first written for classic musical theater or film, requiring performances to fall in line with the story and setting. But jazz musicians made those songs their own, divorced from their original context. They exploded across different tempos, melodies and moods. And that change is what drew Ralph to this year’s theme.

“There’s a way of presenting songs where you’re not following exactly what’s on the page, but you’re floating over it,” Ralph explained. “You’re either behind the beat or in front of the beat. You’re working your way through a song, and you’re changing it: you’re embellishing here and there. You’re going down off of the melody. You’re up above it. That process is a natural process when you’re doing popular songs, and that’s why you have so many great examples of transformations.”

New voices for older songs

When guest director Shirley Andress heard about this year’s theme, her mind went to two singers in particular: June Christy and Peggy Lee.

Andress is guest-directing “Something Cool,” a concert focused on Christy and Lee’s interpretations and named for Christy’s first solo album.

That album established Christy as the foremost vocalist of the “cool jazz” subgenre. In Lee’s case, her reinterpretations of prior songs were adopted as the mainstream versions of those tracks, most notably with her 1958 rendition of “Fever” eclipsing its original release two years prior.

What interested Andress is how both singers, who started out accompanying big-band groups in the swing era before breaking out alone, approached their solo careers.

“There’s a certain essence that a singer has when they’ve grown up with big bands or swing,” Andress said. “I feel like that essence of swing remained in their pop songs, and they always went back to it.”

Though Nina Simone is not typically considered a jazz vocalist, Siri Vik thought of her when this year’s theme was solidified. Simone started her performing career as a live singing pianist playing covers of American standards that she infused with her signature flair.

Vik, who is guest directing the Simone-centered concert “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” thought of one of Simone’s first hits, a transformative rendition of “I Loves You, Porgy” from the George Gershwin opera “Porgy and Bess.” Simone adds a new melody line, taken from an earlier song in the opera, that transforms her cover, which Vik said is emblematic of Simone’s approach.

“To me, at that structural level, that’s jazz,” Vik said. “She’s composing on several different levels, not just reinterpreting the lyrics. It feels like she’s wrasslin’ the original song to the ground.”

If you go

What: The Oregon Festival of American Music
Where: The Shedd Institute for the Arts, 285 E. Broadway
When: Aug. 6-16
Concerts: See the full OFAM lineup and purchase tickets online; tickets are also available by calling The Shedd: 541-434-7000