Every musician involved with jazz plays standards: well-known pieces from the great jazz tradition that players enjoy "calling" at jam sessions, for instance. Some also play the more modern and sophisticated ones, arrange them differently, and perform them in concert.

I am one of those musicians, and I enjoy playing them, but above all studying them. The argument that a standard's harmony should be taken from the original version rather than from the Real Book comes up again and again, and it has been made forcefully, so I will not dwell on it here.

Today I want to focus instead on the structure of standards, which is sometimes also "tampered with" out of carelessness and lack of research. In short, my thesis is this: the structure, broadly speaking, of some standards that get played around is not respected.

Among the more sophisticated standards is a great Wayne Shorter composition called Pinocchio (page 349 of the Real Book). The piece has an unconventional harmonic progression and an unconventional 18-bar structure. You can hear it played by the Miles Davis Quintet, from the album "Nefertiti," on YouTube at this link.

Usually, when musicians play this tune, they improvise on the chords. Playing a piece like this that way is not faithful to the conception Shorter or Miles had of it. The whole quintet was in a period of extreme exploration, which is typical of Miles's innovative mindset.

More precisely, analyzing the performance, we find that only Hancock's improvisation (the third solo) respects the most common parameters: it follows the harmonic progression, the harmonic rhythm, the meter, the pulse, and more or less the hypermeter (loosely called the structure, essentially the total number of bars divided into the various sections). The Davis and Shorter solos (the first and second) gradually abandon the structure, the progression and the harmonic rhythm, while preserving the pulse and the meter. So the tune should really be played without respecting the structure, or respecting it only in part.

Another good example of the same Davis-style experimentation is Madness, on YouTube at this link. Here the Miles and Shorter solos follow the same "time, no changes" formula described above: they gradually abandon the structure, the progression and the harmonic rhythm while preserving the pulse and the meter. Hancock's solo deserves special attention, because this time it can be divided into two parts, each improvised with a different approach. In the first part, Herbie gradually abandons the structure and the meter while preserving the pulse and the harmonic progression, but not the harmonic rhythm. In the second part, when the drummer enters (note: Tony Williams), Hancock brings the meter back as well.

I would like to work on these aspects more, including in my own compositions, and in any case to pay more attention when playing standards.