Mark
Winkler Talks About Being Hip, Jazz and Other Four Letter Words
Mark
Winkler Talks About Being Hip, Jazz and Other Four Letter Words
One
look at the eleven songs that appear on platinum award winning singer / lyricist
Mark Winkler’s current album Jazz and
Other Four Letter Words suggests this is a hip guy, with hip music and a hip
attitude about life. If that is the conclusion that you reached, you would be
right. There are songs such as the original tune that he co-wrote with Rich
Eames, “Stay Hip,” and then there is the Dave Fishberg and Bob Dorough song “I’m
Hip,” that he performs as a duet with Cheryl Bentyne. There are also songs that
testify to his hipness, such as the swinging “My Idea Of A Good Time,” a Mark
Winkler and Greg Gordon Smith collaboration, then there is the convergence of
love and Jazz, both hip, as told through the words and music of “Your Cat Plays
Piano,” (music by Bill Cantos, lyrics by Mark Winkler). For those old enough to
remember or whose parents told them about the Beatnik culture of the ‘50s and
early ‘60s, the story Winkler tells in “Your Cat Plays Piano,” is of a person
who had they been born a few decades earlier might have fit in well as a
Beatnik. One look at the eleven songs that appear on platinum selling songwriter
Mark Winkler’s current album Jazz and Other Four Letter Words leaves the
definite impression this is a hip guy, with hip music and a hip attitude about
life. If that is the conclusion that you reached, you would be right. There are
songs such as the original tune that he co-wrote with Rich Eames, “Stay Hip,”
and then there is the Dave Fishberg and Bob Dorough song “I’m Hip,” that he
performs as a duet with Cheryl Bentyne. There are also songs that testify to his
hipness, such as the swinging “My Idea of a Good Time,” a Mark Winkler and Greg
Gordon Smith collaboration, then there is the convergence of love and Jazz, both
hip, as told through the words and music of “Your Cat Plays Piano.” For those
old enough to remember or whose parents told them about the Beatnik culture of
the ‘50s and early ‘60s, Winkler sings that if the person to whom he is singing
had been born a few decades earlier that individual would have been a Beatnik.
Mark Winkler says, “Stay Hip,” has a story behind it.
There is a DJ in Kansas City named David Basse who is also a singer and who is a
very good friend of mine. He had been telling me about this fan of his radio
show who wrote him a handwritten letter every week for ten years. Four years ago
he mentioned it to me and I thought that was incredible. He said yes you have to
read some of these letters, because they are so beautifully written. It has
gotten to the point that I will play songs and she will write me the week before
she suggests the song. They had a very close relationship and she was
housebound. She was older by that time. She died a couple of years ago and David
did a eulogy, which he sent to me and then he sent me a lot of her letters. I
was so taken by them, because they were signed, Your Co-Pilot, Stay Hip, Nan
Hill. I thought this would be an amazing subject for a song. I would inhabit the
voice of Nan Hill and I could write the song to Jazz lovers everywhere. That is
how that song came about. I had no
idea that I was going to write something and I finished reading this one letter
and I thought it just came to me. It is amazing how you get these ideas. I feel
very close to her. I really do love people who love Jazz. Nobody loves Jazz for
any other reason except the love of Jazz. They aren’t trying to be cool or to
make loads of money or to get sex or to be groupies, they just love Jazz,
because they dig the music. I dig the fans of Jazz.
Rich Eames is one of my collaboraters. He is one of my
piano players. He actually, arranged and played the whole
West Coast Cool album with Cheryl and
me. When I am not using Jamieson Trotter, I am using Rich Eames. Rich Eames is a
fantastic keyboardist and songwriter.”
While the title of the album
Jazz and Other Four Letter Words,
might suggest that an explicit warning be attached to the CD cover, there is no
need for concern, as Winkler explains how the album and the song of the same
name ended up with this moniker.
“I read a couple of articles last year and there was one
that said Jazz is over, that Jazz is no good and that Jazz is out of date and
here am I and the stuff that I love is Jazz. I love Jazz singing and Jazz
musicians and I didn’t think that was true at all. I am usually pretty hardnosed
about the entertainment business. I am the first one to say hey, I think Jazz
could be doing better. I wish in the United States they would play Jazz on the
television. There really aren’t any outlets. On The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson
used to feature a lot of Jazz and once David Letterman and Jay Leno came on they
would just do the latest flavor of the month or an alternative Rock band. Jazz
has a hard road in that part of the entertainment business. There are incredible
people who are selling out shows in Jazz, like Gregory Porter, Diana Krall,
Jamie Cullum, whom I love and Melody Gardot who are doing it very well and they
are using the vocabulary of Jazz and mixing it up, Soul, Folk and whatever. Then
there are all of the instrumentalists who are so wonderful and happening right
now. I think that Jazz is very
relevant to music and that is why I wrote the song “Jazz and Other Four Letter
Words.”
Jazz is not even on PBS, because somebody like Andrea
Bocelli’s record label will spend a million dollars on a special and they will
give it to PBS. You don’t have that large of an infrastructure in the Jazz
world. There aren’t that many labels in Jazz and they don’t seem to be putting
the specials on with the Jazz artists and I wish they were,” he says. One look
at the eleven songs that appear on platinum selling songwriter Mark Winkler’s
current album Jazz and Other Four Letter Words leaves the definite impression
this is a hip guy, with hip music and a hip attitude about life. If that is the
conclusion that you reached, you would be right. There are songs such as the
original tune that he co-wrote with Rich Eames, “Stay Hip,” and then there is
the Dave Fishberg and Bob Dorough song “I’m Hip,” that he performs as a duet
with Cheryl Bentyne. There are also songs that testify to his hipness, such as
the swinging “My Idea Of A Good Time,” a Mark Winkler and Greg Gordon Smith
collaboration, then there is the convergence of love and Jazz, both hip, as told
through the words and music of “Your Cat Plays Piano.” For those old enough to
remember or whose parents told them about the Beatnik culture of the ‘50s and
early ‘60s, Winkler sings that if the person to whom he is singing had been born
a few decades earlier that individual would have been a Beatnik.
Mark Winkler has been thinking about ways to try and
“galvanize” the Jazz community to bring about a higher profile for the genre on
television.
He says, “Television still has a very big reach. It is
amazing that when I teach music and when I teach songwriting in colleges, it is
not that kids don’t like Jazz. They don’t even know there is such a thing as
Jazz. That’s what is scary. I mean some kids. I am trying to think of ways to
expose it more.”
Winkler considers it a good sign that within the
education system there is still a strong focus on Jazz music in both the lower
levels of education, as well as the college system. He points to friends of his
whose children are in a school that has what he refers to as a great music
department. One of the children plays the trombone, another the trumpet and the
third one is playing drums and all of them are into Jazz music.
“I think the vocabulary of Jazz is great and I love to
use it. I love to use the rhythms and I love to use the freedom. Even though I
am not an improviser, I am improvisational in terms of my phrasing. I think it
is a great vocabulary to use and it is a smart music. I like smart music
wherever it is. If it is smart Pop, if it is smart Opera and I like Elvis
Costello. He is smart. I like Taylor Swift, because she’s smart. She writes good
songs and she follows the rules. She does good lyrics. I am not a big fan of
dumb music. (He laughs) Duke Ellington said there are two kinds of music good
and bad, well Mark Winkler is going to say there are two kinds of music, smart
and dumb and I don’t like dumb music. It is like one chord, with someone saying
baby, baby, let’s back it up to the fender or whatever. There is a lot of stupid
music out there, but there is good music too. I seek it out, because I need to
let my students know that (it exists) in every genre. In Country there are some
fantastic lyricists and alternative music and singer-songwriters and even Pop.
Max Martin producer, singer-songwriter writes some great tracks. Those Swedes
know how to write good melodies, I’ll tell you, ABBA. I like all kinds.
Jazz fits me really well, vocally. I never had a raspy
kind of Rock voice. I wasn’t Joe Cocker,” he says.
The conversation segues back to being hip. Winkler says
that it was Cheryl Bentyne who brought the song “I’m Hip,” to his attention and
there has been some talk about the duo doing an East Coast Cool show as a
follow-up to their West Coast Cool tour that launched the duo album
West Coast Cool a couple of years
ago. As for the song “I’m Hip,” he considers it to be a great song that is a lot
of fun. He also refers to it as a laundry list song, so we asked Mark Winkler to
explain that term for our readers.
“I
teach songwriting at our university here, UCLA. I do UCLA extension, one quarter
a year, spring quarter and I also teach privately and I have been doing that for
about ten years. It is fantastic and one of my favorite things in the world to
do. One of the things that I teach people is a form called the laundry list
song. The laundry list song has been around since the beginning of songwriting.
It is basically a list of things in the song that ends in the title. If it is a
Great American Songbook song like, “I wish you blue birds in the spring / I wish
you…./ all the things that I wish you, I wish you love…(“I Wish You Love.” or
“You’re The Top” (A Cole Porter song from the 1934 musical
Anything Goes). “You’re the Louvre
museum / You’re the top.” It is a list of things, “You’re a Bendel bonnet / A
Shakespeare sonnet / You’re Mickey Mouse,” and it is just a list of things. It
is like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” is a list of things, saying we
didn’t start the fire. “Get Here,”
by Brenda Russell is (a list) of all the ways that you can take to get to this
person. It is a wonderful form to use in songwriting and I love to use it a lot.
I have a lot of laundry list songs and “I’m Hip,” is a prememinent one. “Better
Than Anything,” is another laundry list song,” he says. (Editor’s
note: The song “I Wish You Love,”
had English lyrics by Albert A. Beach, but it was originally written in France
by Léo Chauliac and singer-songwriter Charles Trenet and recorded by Trenet in
1943 as “Que reste-t-il de nos amour? (“What remains of Our Love?” The song was
recorded in America in 1957 by Keely Smith and was given the new title “”I Wish
You Love.”)
I think of myself as a songwriter and I am always
writing songs and with the last two albums that I did,
West Coast Cool and
The Laura Nyro Project, it took a lot
of time. The previous album before that
Sweet Spot was the closest one to this one, which was an album that featured
a lot of Mark Winkler songs, so by the time that I was done with
West Coast Cool and a year had
passed, I was ready to do an album of my own material. I had plenty of songs to
pick from. I always like to do an album every other year, so I knew I was going
to be doing a Mark Winkler album and everything came together,” he says.
One of those Mark Winkler songs (with music by Bill
Cantos) is “I Chose the Moon,” a love song dedicated to his partner.
“I will tell you the whole story. My partner and I
celebrated out thirty-fourth anniversary together. We got together in 1981 and
we have really had a wonderful relationship and we still have a wonderful
relationship. I wanted to do something special for him this year. I was thinking
about that and oh, I want to write a song for him and then I happened to be
looking through some old lyrics, because sometimes that causes me to write a new
lyric. I had written a musical about ten years ago called,
Too Old for the Chorus, But Not Too Old
to be a Star. There was a song in that musical that had a first version
where the lyrics were quite different. There was a line in that version, “I
chose the moon, I left the stars behind,” and when I saw that I thought, how did
I not put those two lines in the song? Those are great. I immediately thought of
Richard and our relationship and what that song could mean, so I wrote the
lyric.
Love songs are very hard for me to write. That song
talks about something that I don’t think people talk about a lot. When you are
in a committed relationship that means you aren’t fucking around with other
people. I don’t believe in that. I don’t think it works. Yet we are only human
and we sometimes think, hey this person would be great or what would my life
have been like if I would have done that? It is that moment when you are
thinking about it and then you think of your relationship and you go, you don’t
know. I made this choice and it was the best choice that I ever made. It is a
pretty heavy thing for me to write about, but I didn’t do it in a heavy handed
way. It is an interesting thing and relationships are interesting creatures,” he
explains.
Continuing with the thought about relationships and how
it ties in with the song “I Chose The Moon,” Winkler provides an insight into
something he truly values.
“There was this movie that I almost had to leave,
because it was so upsetting to me. It wasn’t a very good movie,
Artificial Intelligence by Steven
Spielberg and I remember there was the little robot boy and he got close to the
family. I think they threw him away when there was another model that came out
or something. It was about how people don’t value things and if something better
comes along they will just move along to the next thing and throw away the old
thing. There is that beautiful Randy Newman song called “When You Were Mine,”
and it (talks about) when the little girl throws away her doll and then the doll
sings the song. That scene in the movie when they leave the little robot boy got
me very upset. I almost left the movie theatre. We do throw away things,
relationships, and children and even our own identities in search of something
that we think is better,” he says.
The album is titled
Jazz and Other Four Letter Words, but
the songs are about a man who is hip and who has a great heart.
You can visit Mark Winkler on his website where you can
also listen to some of his music or you can follow him on his official Facebook
page.