Tommy Dorsey had heard about composer Matt Dennis via singer Jo Staff ord, and fl ew both the songwriter and lyricist Tom Adair out to New York, where he set them up in his penthouse offi ce in the Brill Building. Here the duo was expected to churn out material for Dorsey’s band, which turned “Everything Happens to Me” into a top 10 hit. But in this instance, as in a few others, Dorsey rode the coattails of his prized singer, Frank Sinatra, who had a special knack for interpreting Dennis’s works. In his later years, Sinatra would probably have played up the campier elements in the lyrics of “Everything Happens to Me,” and maybe added a few new jokes à la Dennis himself, but his 1941 recording is pure and pristine, and goes straight to the heart.
This is a very well-crafted song, which Dennis and Adair built out of the simplest of ingredients. The bassline of the main theme runs through varia- tions on one of the most predictable patterns in popular music—an almost vaudevillian vamp that, in its most basic form, moves from II to V to III to VI, and then starts all over again. But Dennis tinkers with the progression, and inserts some choice jazz-oriented substitutions. Even better, he draws on some of the color tones in these chords in shaping an aff ecting melody.
Adair, a lyricist who prized cleverness almost to an extreme, took a gamble with the words. He adopts a coy, at times comic tone, and uses Dennis’s melody as the basis for a list song—in this instance, relating all the unlucky and incon- gruous things that have happened in a jinxed life. This type of approach is
104 Everything Happens to Me
usually better suited to a medium-tempo or fast patter song, and the few pop- ular jazz ballads that rely on lists (for example, “These Foolish Things”) usually steer away from humor. But Adair delivers less-than-zinging zingers in one of the oddest love songs in the jazz repertoire—I can almost imagine Henny Youngman or Milton Berle grabbing on to some of these concepts on a bad night in Peoria ( I try out everything that comes around. . . . like the measles ).
But somehow, the song works, and an emotionally sensitive vocalist can deliver these lines in a way that even amplifi es the pathos of the fi nal bars. The stance here is actually a familiar one: a person is telling a painful and revealing personal story, and though the humor may be awkward, it allows for a degree of self-revelation that could not take place with a more serious demeanor. Even so, you can push the comedy too much here: Dennis, a fi ne singer in his own right, performed this song with an additional chorus about the travails of playing piano in a cocktail lounge, with references to the bartender turning on the blender, loud conversations, and people blowing their noses. Such additions may get a few chuckles, but undercut the power of what can be a very intense, revelatory song. To hear the profundity in this composition, listen instead to Billie Holiday’s interpretation, where no laugh track is needed or intended.
A few jazz bands covered this song in the months leading up to America’s entry into World War II, but it soon fell out of the repertoires of the big bands and didn’t emerge as a popular standard until embraced by a number of mod- ern jazz artists after the war. Bud Powell recorded a trio version, with Curly Russell and Max Roach, in 1947, and Charlie Parker adopted the song for his string orchestra project from 1949. Thelonious Monk selected it for his solo piano session with the Riverside label in 1959, and then chose it again when Columbia had him do a solo session fi ve years later. The song was perhaps even more popular with the cool school and West Coast players, and shows up on recordings by Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, Art Pepper, Shelly Manne, and Lee Konitz, among others.
”Everything Happens to Me” remains one of the core ballads in the jazz repertoire. I have been playing it for decades, and there are few standards that I return to more often or with greater satisfaction. Certainly there is no shortage of tunes aiming to capture a similar woe-is-me attitude, but many of them seem to overshoot with theatrical angst or never get beyond glib clichés. Yet Dennis and Adair found a very convincing and human angle on this ancient theme, and their song shows no signs of going out of date or out of fashion.
recommended versions
Tommy Dorsey (with Frank Sinatra), New York, February 7, 1941 Bud Powell, New York, January 10, 1947
Evidence 105
Billie Holiday, from Stay with Me , New York, February 14, 1955
Thelonious Monk, from Thelonious Alone in San Francisco , San Francisco, October 21, 1959
Scott Hamilton, from Scott Hamilton 2 , Hollywood, January 7, 1978
Art Pepper (with George Cables), from Roadgame , live at Maiden Voyage, Los Angeles, August 15, 1981
Branford Marsalis, from Bloomington , live at Indiana University Auditorium, Bloomington, Indiana, September 23, 1991
Lee Konitz (with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Haden), from Another Shade of Blue , live at the Jazz Bakery, Culver City, California, December 21–22, 1997
Paolo Fresu and Uri Caine, from Things , Pernes-les-Fontaines, France, December 2005
Evidence
Composed by Thelonious Monk
Did you notice the pun in the song’s title? No? Well, this is the world of Theloni- ous Monk, where you need to probe a little under the surface. Here’s your crib sheet: the composition is based on the chord changes to the 1929 song “Just You, Just Me,” which translates into “Just Us,” which leads, naturally enough, to “Justice.” And everyone knows that for justice you need evidence. Voilà!
The song is as elusive as its name. I can’t think of any other jazz piece from the late 1940s that was so prickly—a composition without phrases, only isolated notes and clusters, most of them off the beat and surrounded by rests. Indeed, the opening gambit of Monk’s debut recording from 1948 may be the most avant-garde moment in the artist’s career, presenting a foreboding sequence of 11 tones and chord fragments that give little indication of tonality, tempo, or bar lines. Yet Monk is merely playing a variant of the “melody.” It’s something of a letdown (although perhaps a relief for fi rst-time listeners) when this fusillade is followed by the bass and drums supporting a vibes solo in conventional 4/4 time. Only Monk is unaff ected, continuing to extend his series of strident sounds, which are transformed into comping chords.
Monk’s now-lauded compositions were slow in establishing themselves as jazz standards, but “Evidence” was more of a laggard than most. Over a decade elapsed before any bandleader other than Monk recorded the song—with the exception of Art Blakey, who featured the piece at a 1957 session . . . but probably only because Monk was guest pianist on the date. During the remainder of the decade, Blakey would occasionally perform “Evidence” with his working unit, but few followed this bold example. Throughout the 1960s, your best chance of
106 Evidence
hearing this work would be at a Thelonious Monk concert: it was a regular in the pianist’s set list, and more than 20 live recordings of him playing it have survived from the decade. When pianist Jaki Byard showcased “Evidence” on his uninhibited 1968 collaboration with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, released as The Jaki Byard Experience , the piece was still something of a curio in the jazz world. The 1970s weren’t much better for Monk’s tune. “Evidence” never made the cut for The Real Book , the work that helped defi ne the standard repertoire for the musicians of that period, nor does it show up in most of the other fake books of the era.
As with so many Monk pieces, “Evidence” only gained traction as a standard in the aftermath of the composer’s death from a stroke on February 17, 1982. By coincidence, the band Sphere, featuring pianist Kenny Barron and Monk’s erst- while sideman Charlie Rouse on sax, recorded the song on that same day for their album Four in One . “Evidence” reached additional listeners through the many Monk tribute concerts and projects that followed. More cover versions were recorded between 1983 and 1987 than during the previous two decades combined.
This foreboding song from 1948 had fi nally gone mainstream, even if it had taken several decades. Yet it remains one of Monk’s least accessible works and an unlikely candidate for crossover success of any sort. Even so, a handful of players have specialized in this piece and will serve as indispensable guides to its riches. Pianists Mal Waldron and Jessica Williams have off ered up “Evidence” so often, they may well qualify as expert witnesses. But saxophonist Steve Lacy trumped them all, recording “Evidence” almost as many times as Monk him- self, as documented on around 20 recordings made over a period of four decades.
recommended versions
Thelonious Monk (with Milt Jackson), New York, July 2, 1948
Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk, from Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Thelonious
Monk , New York, May 15, 1957
Thelonious Monk (with Johnny Griffi n), from Thelonious in Action , live at the Five
Spot, New York, July 9, 1958
Steve Lacy (with Don Cherry), from Evidence , Hackensack, New Jersey, November 14, 1961
Jaki Byard (with Rahsaan Roland Kirk), from The Jaki Byard Experience , New York, September 17, 1968
Sphere (with Charlie Rouse and Kenny Barron), from Four in One , Englewood Cliff s, New Jersey, February 17, 1982
Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye 107
Paul Motian (with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano), from Monk in Motian , New York, March 1988
Mal Waldron, from Evidence , Toronto, March 14, 1988
Wynton Marsalis, from Marsalis Plays Monk: Standard Time, Vol. 4 , New York, September 17–18, 1993, and October 3–4, 1994
Jessica Williams, from Jazz in the Afternoon , live at Chemekata College, Portland, Oregon, February 8, 1998