Untitled

Jon Wertheim
Contributing Writer
jon.wertheim[at]gmail.com / @rtbjazz

Having watched thousands of song titles scroll by on my iPod and having written tunes myself, I think I have at least a moderate understanding of how hard it is to choose a song title. Most song titles have special significance to their authors. That significance can be easy to understand - or not. But either way, the relevance of a song title is very important to the way the song itself is parsed by an audience.

In 1958, 1962 or 1947, the titles of original jazz compositions told a very different story from the one we see today. There was "Blue Funk" as well as "Milestones", "Jug Handle", "Off Center", "Angel Voice", to name just a small number. Musicians didn't shy away from descriptive titles, but even if they did, the title was in the tune's ballpark. A song named for someone might seem to illustrate some part of that person's personality, or a tune might have the name of an inside joke. And if a tune had weighty social significance, the title often described emotions clearly evident in the music. Black, Brown And Beige. We Insist! The Freedom Now! Suite. The Freedom Suite. With no title, these works would still speak to us as deeply personal pieces of music, just as a book or film without a title still holds layers and layers of meaning.

The equation doesn't work the other way, however. No matter how sincere the intention, putting a deep, weighty title on a tune that would not carry that weight without it is taking two steps backwards. Even in the 1950s, this could be a problem (Clark Terry's "Serenade To A Bus Seat", written, or at least named, for Rosa Parks; or Max Roach's "Deeds, Not Words"), but the last two decades have seen an increase in titles seemingly alienated from what they are meant to illuminate.

On Gerald Clayton's recent Bond: The Paris Sessions, for example, the tune "Fresh Squeeze" sounds, to be honest, like every other tune on the album. Why is it called "Fresh Squeeze"? That title is evocative of a certain mood, and even if someone thinks it means orange juice and Clayton meant a new love interest, the general feeling of the phrase "fresh squeeze" is similar: freshness, brightness, energy. Clayton's tune is moody, languorous, possessed of a peculiar energy that somehow drags instead of bounces.

Or there's the family of names that sits in the grey area between alienation and relevance. "Unravel." "Constructive Rest." "Dream Of The Old." Do they apply to the music? Who knows?

As I said at the start of this article (which has turned out to be a sort of rant), I understand at least part of the difficulty of naming tunes. One of the purposes of jazz is to describe what has no words. To put a pithy phrase on a jazz tune almost goes against the grain of the entire genre (Mingus often found a solution to this by taking the time to explain his entire thought process in a tune's title).

However, when I received Completion Of Proof, the new album by the Curtis Brothers, I sensed that the trend is going too far. Even the album's title has that amorphously specific vagueness one finds in books by authors who don't know what they're talking about, or in PowerPoints by college students who haven't done the reading.

And it gets worse inside the CD case. An energetic and bouncy hard-bop opener is called "The Protestor" for the unknown man who held up the tanks in Tiananmen Square. Let me repeat: an energetic and bouncy hard-bop opener is named for the man who held up Chinese tanks during the Tiananmen massacre. Take away the title and we have an Art Blakey tune about chicken 'n dumplins, or petty larceny. And the peppy up-tempo tune "The Onge" is inspired by a group of indigenous Bengalese who survived the 2004 tsunami and earthquake by moving into the hills.

In today's world of easily generalized global problems and sentimentalized "news" stories, extra care must be taken in attaching significance to a song through its title. While I have no doubt that the titles on Completion Of Proof are named with sincere and heartfelt intentions, they and the songs they are attached to are serving as examples for music students looking to young musicians who are starting to make it in a difficult world. It's all too easy to write an AABA post-bop head and call it "Untold Suffering" or some vaguely deep crap, get onstage, and have people nodding their heads and wiping their eyes. For what? A beautiful ballad that will get into The Real Book for its statements about human struggle? No. For a competently written tune with some misplaced emotional baggage. It's like painting ten abstract paintings and then giving them all names like "Auschwitz" or "For Nelson Mandela." Yeah, you'll touch some hearts. But how many would you be reaching if you covered up those names?

Write this down, kids: if you name your tune "Untold Suffering", it's not enough for you to mean it. Your tune has to mean it, too.

Jon Wertheim, a jazz drummer and (somewhat) acclaimed jazz writer, can be found at his jazz blog, Rehearsing The Blues, and on Twitter. He has released one album, Returning. The views expressed in this article are his. If you want to complain, you can send him an email at jon.wertheim[at]gmail.com.