James Taylor Sets a Standard with John Pizzarelli

My feature on James Taylor’s collaboration with jazz man John Pizzarelli on the iconic singer-songwriter’s 'American Standard' album, released in February 2020.

Did you know that James Taylor recorded an album of standards? Most people don’t, partly because the 2020 recording, American Standard, in which he collaborated with jazz guitarist (and singer) John Pizzarelli was released just before the pandemic broke. As a result, Taylor did one appearance for iHeart Radio doing material from the album, but none thereafter. I wrote this story about this unique project for the May 2020 issue of JazzTimes. Unlike so many jazz standard recordings done by rock or pop vocalists, this one manages to stay true both to the artist and the material. In short, it sounds like a James Taylor record, but with classic songs that he didn’t write.

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John Pizzarelli was not expecting a call from James Taylor. Sure, the jazz guitarist and singer had recorded with Taylor on his October Road and Christmas with James Taylor albums. Though a lifelong fan of Taylor, Pizzarelli naturally assumed those sessions were a one-and-done (or maybe two-and-done) situation and had simply banked that experience. Pizzarelli didn’t know that Taylor was in the process of planning his latest project – a recording of standards and songs from the Great American Songbook aptly named American Standard, released in February 2020 on Fantasy Records and co-produced by Pizzarelli.

As so often happens, the call came when it was least expected. Pizzarelli and his wife, the noted Broadway singer Jessica Molaskey, had turned off their phones and were on a walk in the woods. (Well, it was in Riverside Park in NYC, but the Sondheim reference was irresistible given Molaskey’s history with that composer.) The couple got home for dinner and Pizzarelli’s phone was lit up. “James’ assistant had texted me that ‘James wants to get in touch with you and is this a good place?’” recalls Pizzarelli. Er, well, yes. “James texted me and said, ‘It’s time for me to do an album of standards and you the man,’” says Pizzarelli. “I looked at it and started laughing. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ We spoke after dinner, and he said, ‘I wanna get together and look at songs and see how we can go about it and whenever you can come up, let’s make a plan.’”

Taylor’s plan was simple. “When I started work on this album, I knew whatever became of it, American Standard was going to start with my arrangements on the guitar of these standards and I wanted to run them by a really good technical player to basically to have an editor for my arrangements of these songs,” Taylor explained in an expansive email to me. “Basically, these songs, like all of my songs, the ones that I write and the ones that I cover, start with my guitar arrangement of the tune. The first thing that I do when I’m approaching a musical piece is to play it on guitar and, often I will show that to my band, starting with the keyboard player and the bass. Bass, drums and keyboard and electric guitar, those are usually what form my basic tracks but, in this case, I wanted to really stick with it as a guitar album, that’s why I went to John Pizzarelli.”

However, the plan wasn’t as clear in Pizzarelli’s mind. “When I first got called about it, I didn’t know what he was thinking,” he says. “I thought there would be a rhythm section. Then I got there and it was just the two of us.” Pizzarelli went up to Taylor’s house in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, where he has built a barn with a recording studio. “One day we sat in the barn going through a bunch of tunes. He literally went page by page in a Fake Book and said ‘This could be interesting.’ I think he had an idea of what songs he wanted to use. The very first day, he sang ‘Old Man River’ by himself. I sat in a booth and every once in a while he’d ask about a chord, and I’d suggest something and he’d try it. I forget what the second tune was, but I started to play with him and then we settled into it. We’d get into the barn around 11 am, have a cup of coffee, tell some stories and then he’d start to play a song he was interested in, and I’d say, ‘That sounds cool.’ We’d make our way into the studio area. We’d play for three hours or so and work it out and then for three hours we’d record it. We’d have dinner, and after 90 minutes or so he’d bring the guitar out and we’d play until midnight or whatever.” The two ended up spending many long days and nights together and their two guitars would end up as the foundation for the sound of the album. With such an idyllic, pastoral scene as the backdrop, it's no surprise that the album oozes with tranquil simplicity.

Taylor offers his perspective on their creative process. “John and I put them down as demos essentially and then we liked them so much, they were so well balanced, and he filled them out so perfectly, basically completed what I was playing on the guitar, he supported it so well that it became the basic tracks for that album,” wrote Taylor. “I just remembered him as being the quintessential technical guitarist, the one to go to for knowledge about guitar arrangement and it turned out to be exactly the case. Plus, he’s a great guy to work with and to hang with. We had a great time.”

Taylor had obviously chosen to work with Pizzarelli not just because of his unique swinging 7-string guitar style, but also because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the Great American Songbook. American Standard features an interesting and eclectic collection of songs, many from musicals of the 40s and 50s. As they worked through the songs, Pizzarelli offered more input. “After the first five days, there was a little time off and he said, ‘If you have any ideas, let me know.’ I played ‘Surrey With the Fringe on Top,’ ‘My Heart Stood Still’ and ‘You’ve Got To be Carefully Taught,’ which is the one I really wanted him to do. Instead of playing it in 3/4 as it was written, I came up with a 4/4 version of it. At one point, he said, ‘You really James Taylor-ized that thing.’ He ended up doing it in 3/4. I don’t know why, but he came up with a beautiful thing on it. ‘My Heart Stood Still’ was the same sort of thing. There were things that were attractive to him about the tunes.”

Taylor explained that the choice of material was not just a matter of taste. “Basically, they were the songs that I felt I had good arrangements for,” wrote Taylor. “I had about 20 songs that, over the years, I had taught myself and that I could play and that I had arrangements for. I showed those to John and he made a couple of suggestions, like ‘You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught’ from South Pacific. The songs that are on the album are really simply there because I can play them on the guitar and that’s what narrowed down the incredible potential list.”

Taylor’s love of the classic songs he grew up with and his unique approach to the guitar are inextricably tied together. “What we do when we fall in love with an instrument and keep stealing off to quiet places to practice and to expand our knowledge on it, is we play whatever we know, we just try and play any song we can think of,” he wrote. “In the beginning I played popular songs, folk songs, I played hymns from the Protestant Hymnal at school, and I played these standards that I had heard in my home from the family record collection. We had numerous cast albums of the great Broadway musicals and we had albums by jazz singers like Nina Simone, and those songs which I knew and had sort of ingested, I then sat down and played on the guitar and I came up with arrangements of them. In the process I basically taught myself to play the guitar.”

This musical home schooling inadvertently led the self-taught Taylor to develop a very different technique and sound on the guitar. “Anyone who you talk to about my fingerings of an A chord, a D chord, an E chord, will tell you that I play them backwards because nobody taught those chords to me, I just knew I needed a four chord in the key of E and I just played through the guitar, putting my finger where I knew it needed to go to make the sound,” he explained. “I learned my A, my D, my E that way, I learned my B7th that way, and those are the things that contribute to an individual’s style. For instance, I’m known for my hammering-off of those chords, particularly the A and the D, the G as well, and that’s because I play them backwards, my index finger is doing the off-hammering, which is why it happened. I can’t tell you exactly which songs from that great era of American songbook writing… I can’t tell you which songs informed which songs and in what way. I only know that when I play a four chord that’s a major 7th to a five chord that’s a suspended fourth 7th, I learned that from Aaron Copland. These are things that stick in your mind and then become part of your thing.”

Pizzarelli enjoyed his front row seat to Taylor’s creative process. “It’s really amazing because you’re sitting there and you start to understand how he works, how he’s thinking on the guitar,” says Pizzarelli. “He came up with fantastic intros and outros to the tunes. He’s so full of ideas. It was fun to come up with contrasting guitar parts, having been a fan of him my whole life.”

[Photo of John Pizzarelli (and Kurt Elling) by John Abbott]

Over that time, Pizzarelli came to really appreciate his friend’s gifts. “His harmonic sense is what makes the whole thing happen,” says the guitarist. “You hear all the James Taylor-izations of stuff. Those hammer-offs are part of the whole package he’s got. He seems to think like ‘Well, I got a couple of things that I do,’ but when you put it all together, it’s a lot. He’s applied it to 16 pop songs or standards and he’s made it special. I joked with him when we did ‘Mean Old Man’ [on October Road]. He said to me, ‘You got to show me that thing you do with the rhythm guitar.’ And I said, ‘Yea, sure, if you show me how to do that finger-picking thing you do.’” Apparently, in order to do so Pizzarelli would have to unlearn the guitar and start over listening to his parents’ albums in their living room.

Although the two had made what many of us would consider a finished, albeit stripped down, album, Taylor wasn’t done. He and his longtime engineer and producer Dave O’Donnell took the tapes to Nashville, where they dubbed some tracks with three of the great Nashville cats – Jerry Douglas on dobro, Stuart Duncan on violin and Viktor Krauss on bass – who added a touch of Americana to the recording. They also added percussion touches by Luis Conte and Steve Gadd, as well as some backing vocals by Taylor’s longtime cohorts Arnold McCullers, Kate Markowitz and Andrea Zonn. Taylor’s wife Kim does a nice cameo singing the response verse in “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” Even with all those additions, the two guitars form the real backbone of the album and nicely set up Taylor’s sui generis vocal style.

Interestingly, this was not Pizzarelli’s first time at the “pop star does jazz” rodeo, having been a part of Paul McCartney’s Kisses on the Bottom session, along with Diana Krall, John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton. Although the two albums are quite different as far as the sound, Pizzarelli saw a common thread in the leaders’ strong affinity for musicals and the Great American Songbook. “Paul McCartney would make all sorts of references to Johnny Mercer in his songs,” explains Pizzarelli. “Both Paul and James mentioned being around the house with the songbooks. They’re both cut from the same cloth in how they first heard music.” Ironic too that McCartney offered Taylor his first record deal back in 1968 with Apple. No, not Steve Jobs’ Apple. The Beatles’ Apple.

One revelation from American Standard is not how James Taylor sounds doing songs from musicals, but rather how songs from musicals informed his own songwriting from the beginning – from “Sweet Baby James” (see Oklahoma) to “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” (see My Fair Lady). Lifelong fans of Taylor are well acquainted with how he was influenced by folk, blues and soul music, but they may not have been aware of just how much the songs from the golden era of American music were already in his musical DNA going all the way back to his long-haired singer-songwriter days in the 60s and 70s.

Taylor acknowledged his deep affection not just for the Great American Songbook, but also for its interpreters – the great singers in American history. “I love Ella and I love Frank, I also love Nat King Cole and, whenever Ray Charles sings anything, I’m just a sucker for it, whatever it is,” wrote Taylor. “But you know, the thing that strikes me about these songs, is when we listen to music today, the things that are popular are popular, not primarily because of the song, that figures into it somewhat, but really the reason they’re popular is because of the singer. It’s the singer that we’re listening to, that particular voice, and that’s because it’s recorded and when we think of the song, we think of the performance of it. But these songs, generally speaking, were written before there was going to be a particular performance of it. They were written for musicals, they were written for movies, there was no telling who would be singing these songs. So that’s the interesting thing about these songs to me, they exist as songs for anyone to sing and that’s why they are so strong as songs, the songwriting on display, the craft of these songwriters is as high and evolved and sophisticated and interesting, as emotionally compelling as anything else in the history of popular American music. They are, to my mind, the high-water mark of popular music, they are the high point. There are other sources for great music, notably Brazilian music, and then the Celtic tradition, then the Afro-Cuban tradition—the African tradition; but these songs are really rare, they’re really the high mark.”

In the making of American Standard, Pizzarelli saw how Taylor the songwriter helped Taylor the singer to interpret the works of other writers. “When he’s translating those songs into his style, there’s a songwriter who is listening to the lyric,” says Pizzarelli. “That was an interesting aspect of watching him listen to the songs because he’d talk about the lyrics and figure things out. He’s not just singing something on a page, he’s looking at it as a guy who’s written a lot of songs, going ‘What did this person mean by this?’ That’s why you hear those things in his interpretation.”

The deep affection and respect are mutual, as evidenced when Taylor is asked about what he thinks is unique about Pizzarelli. “It’s the depth and breadth of his ability, his talent,” wrote Taylor. “He’s got a very extremely musical ear, with, at his disposal, the most complete encyclopedic knowledge of jazz chords and of American popular music. He’s one of those rare, very evolved and very accomplished musicians – a guitarist who can listen to anything in the American songbook and sit down and play it for you. He knows what the ingredients are, he knows five different ways to play all of them. What we see over and over again is musical sensibility by John, by me, by Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, you see this musical sensibility applied to whatever draws his focus. When John takes something and interprets it, he brings so much to the discussion. He brings such a wealth of knowledge and ability and talent to the conversation that it’s just a delight. That’s what he is, he’s a musical mind and it is a unique one. Without a question he’s a second-generation guitarist who’s devoured his father, Bucky Pizzarelli’s, knowledge, and has built on it. There are very few like him in the world today, he’s just uniquely talented, uniquely rare.”

In Taylor’s eyes (and ears), Pizzarelli was the perfect accomplice to create a different sort of standards album. “It was an idea in the beginning to see whether or not two guitars would suffice,” explained Taylor. “But as soon as we put them down as tracks I said, ‘Let’s see if we can make this a guitar album,’ and, in fact, it was a great idea.” Pizzarelli sums up the recording succinctly. “It was the right idea and he pulled it off beautifully.” They both did.