Issue #82: Jazz and Country, swingin' and twangin'

The Venn diagram is a circle, as these artists will tell you :)

A photo from the shoot for Armstrong's final album, taken in (where else) Central Park.

By Natalie

Jazz and country. Like basically any of the traditionally-understood 20th century genres, their superficial difference (rendered starker through years of profit-driven, racist marketing) belies shared roots — a whole world of overlap between these two worlds hiding in plain sight.

The first example that always comes to mind for me is Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart," though it is far from the origin of this kind of crossover. Tony Bennett (another guy uninterested in genre orthodoxy) turned it into a pop hit shortly after its original release in 1951, and after that anyone and everyone took a pass; it is one of the songs credited with making country mainstream.

Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington, two jazz icons, were among those who recorded takes on the song. Both were successful enough by the early '50s to ride pop waves in hopes of hitting gold, but there's still no question their jazz bona fides shaped their readings of the twangy classic — and though they both reimagined the song as intimate and swinging instead of sweeping and schlocky like Bennett or plaintive and rough-hewn like Williams, Washington, at least, had a bona fide hit with her version.

Washington even re-recorded the song a decade later, just after Ray Charles prompted another wave of interest in country/pop/jazz/R&B crossover with his Modern Sounds of Country and Western Music. Armstrong, for his part, tapped "Your Cheatin' Heart" nine years before Modern Sounds, on which Charles more famously brought that song back to the pop charts with a jazz-inflected sound (Armstrong's final recording? Louis "Country & Western" Armstrong. To promote the album, he went on The Johnny Cash Show and talked about how he recorded with Jimmie Rodgers in 1930; but I digress!). And Norah Jones, of course, famously reprised "Cold, Cold Heart" on one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, Come Away With Me (2002).

These aren't just unexpected pop history anomalies; rather, they're details of a musical relationship that, again, goes back to the very beginning — one where the power dynamic has always swung one racially-determined way, one where obscuring their ties and similarities has historically worked to reinforce ideas of difference where there really aren't many. "Cold, Cold Heart" is a blues that Williams performed, if not in a full country shuffle, at least with an implied swing drawn from Bob Wills and his crew — blues and swing being two musical ideas drawn from Black music, and in the case of swing, jazz.

So what does it all mean, besides everything and nothing :) Rather than try to create an exhaustive guide to this kind of crossover, which would require at least one book to do justice, I talked to a few different artists who have worked in the in-between of these genres, and tried to get their perspective on what jazz and country crossover means. All of them are making music that I heartily recommend, if you're looking for some ear-expanding listening.

Hilary Gardner is a wonderful jazz vocalist who I actually met over a decade ago when she performed regularly at Caffé Vivaldi in Greenwich Village, where I was a bartender. Last year, she recorded an album of vintage cowboy songs called On the Trail with The Lonesome Pines — a return, in a way, to her days singing Patsy Cline songs at cover gigs in her home state of Alaska as a teenager. Inspiration had struck during COVID quarantine, when she became enamored of the 1930s composition "Twilight on the Trail."

"The lyrics are quite evocative," she said. "They're not silly, they're not tongue in cheek — they're really quite beautiful. I was intrigued by the fact that this song was built, in a lot of ways, like a standard but it really painted a different picture. There are all these jazz harmonies, and then there's the yippee-ki-yay."

She kept digging into the cowboy songs of the '30s and '40s, and in the end decided to make a whole album of them — a specific showcase of the kind of urbane, cosmopolitan depiction of cowboy culture that has shaped so much American mythology. Most of these songs imagining the Wild West were, after all, written by coastal songwriters whose idea of roping and riding was based on books and the very movies they were shaping the soundtracks to. "It felt so freeing," she said, comparing the experience of recording these less familiar tunes to the jazz standards she's spent most of her career performing. "I don't like gimmicks, and we could just kind of let these songs reveal themselves to us."

In concept, it reminds me a lot of Sonny Rollins’ iconic Way Out West, which I wrote about for Pitchfork when it was reissued a few years back - timeless takes on songs that are typically thought of as unserious kitsch (don’t come for me, if it had been up to me it would have been a 10.0!!).

She recruited guitarist Justin Poindexter to help manifest her musical vision in the studio. Poindexter has performed with everyone from Pete Seeger to David Amram to Jonathan Batiste, operating between folk and jazz and Americana worlds as a sideman and in his own work. "I guess my criteria, if I had any, is that I wanted the record to be sincere," said Poindexter. "I didn't want it to be a joke. A lot of times people approach Western swing or cowboy stuff with humor, and that's fine, but I wanted to do it in a way that was — I don't know if it's actually innovative — but that would be a fresh approach."

Poindexter grew up in North Carolina, and his father is a country singer. "I went through various phases of liking country music when I was a little kid, and being kind of embarrassed about it when I got older — and then coming right back to it," he said. "I fell in love with jazz but I loved bluegrass — I've never been a purist." Now, he finds himself playing more and more with artists that marry those worlds — Queen Esther, who he was touring through Texas with when we spoke, and Sweet Megg among them.

"It gets kind of meta in a way because it's like, so much of the music that influenced me that is not jazz was played by people that were influenced by jazz," Poindexter adds. The blend, then, is so deep in the heart of his own music as to almost become invisible; the end of one thing and the beginning of another getting completely elided in the process. "The question, really, is does it move you?" Poindexter said. "Categories in music, they're helpful for organizing your record collection I guess, but in other ways, they can be really, really annoying."

Poindexter played for a long time in a band called Silver City Bound, formerly the Tres Amigos, that earned some acclaim for their take on this particular crossover — even winning an Independent Music Award for Best Americana Album for their 2014 release Diner In The Sky. Pianist and accordionist Sam Reider was also in Silver City Bound, and has carved out a similarly genre-agnostic path since, working with artists including Sierra Hull and Paquito d'Rivera. He just put out a new album of instrumental folk music alongside his band the Human Hands last year called The Golem and Other Tales; that cast's collective resume includes a number of names likely familiar to readers of this newsletter (Billy Strings, Kaia Kater, Molly Tuttle).

It's a carefully-crafted, intimate record, centered around Reider's suite The Golem, inspired by Jewish folklore. Reider first started thinking about the relationship between jazz and country in college (coincidentally, in the same American Studies program at Columbia that I was in!), and even wrote his thesis comparing the lyrics of Woody Guthrie with Ira Gershwin. He had exclusively played jazz piano until his sophomore year, when he started listening more to folk music thanks to what he calls "one hard drive dump of Ralph Stanley recordings" from none other than Logan Ledger, who Reider knew from high school and also went to Columbia, and took up the accordion.

Together with Poindexter and saxophonist Eddie Barbash, he started the Tres Amigos to keep exploring that intersection. "As the years went by, it sort of became less and less like vaudeville, and more and more like Americana," Reider said. They even did State Department-sponsored tours representing American roots music abroad. "It broadened my ears, but then, ironically, helped me narrow in even more on what my personal voice and approach is," he said. "I started to feel less and less connected to Southern American music, country music, and more and more interested in what you might call instrumental folk music, of which there are many traditions around the world that I love."

Having vacillated between jazz and Americana and all points in between has been as fruitful creatively as it has been challenging from a practical perspective for Reider. "I'm so frequently in a situation where people only know me for one of the things that I do, and are kind of surprised to find out about the other things — and so that's my constant issue as an artist from a marketing perspective," Reider said. "So I try to emphasize composition as the thing that ties in all these different things. Whether I'm writing music for an instrumental Americana ensemble, or for a classical string quartet, or solo piano, I put the idea of composition at the center of it."

Reider's impressive cast of collaborators is a testament to the strength of those compositions. "Now I play with a real mixture of American folk musicians and bluegrass musicians, but then also folk musicians from other countries, and I do a lot of work with classical artists and jazz artists," he said. "It just would have never happened for me in this way without all these communities. It's really a testament to the way that community shapes musical innovation."

I wanted to also ask Jeff Parker about this topic because I was so thrilled to see him on the tracklist for I Am A Pilgram, the Doc Watson tribute album that came out in 2023. Parker is an extraordinary guitarist; to call him one of the leading improvisors of our time is, I don't think, an exaggeration. His 2024 album The Way Out of Easy (on International Anthem, just about the hippest label there is) is searching but not abrasive, recorded live during one iteration of Parker's extended residency at Los Angeles' ETA — if you have any interest in improvised music (or really, music period), you should listen. Because of his esteem in the more eclectic corners of the jazz world, I was curious to hear how he got involved in the Doc Watson project; as it turns out, it was mostly because his fellow extraordinary jazz guitarist Matthew Stevens was producing the tribute. Nevertheless, Parker humored my country questions.

"[Stevens] played the Doc Watson part, and I kind of looked at myself as more like a vocalist — trying to phrase it the way a singer," Parker said of his and Stevens' take on Watson's "Alberta."

Another country name, though, was influential to Parker's work. "One of my biggest influences as a guitarist is Hank Garland," said Parker. "He's identified with country music and his session work with artists like Elvis, but he was also a great jazz guitar player. He very much represents the intersection of those two musics, and he's somebody I've certainly modeled my career as a kind of session musician around — somebody who developed their voice through, for lack of a better term, jazz, but then used it as a solid musical foundation to build on. He was just very versatile and open minded."

Musicians working in the jazz tradition often pride themselves on their specific ability to improvise — in Parker's eyes, though, that's just making music. "Everything starts with improvising — you might have an idea, but everybody who composes music starts with not really knowing what they're gonna do," he said. "They sit at or pick up their instrument, start to improvise, and then eventually stumble on something that they want to develop."

He has also played with Andrew Bird among many others; Jay Bellerose, the drummer on The Way Out of Easy, is Allison Krauss' touring drummer. "I certainly try to carve out my niche as an artist who kind of thrives on that overlap of things, just for my own curiosity and to keep my own work interesting," Parker said. "The deeper you know, the closer it all gets."