And all that jazz

I was talking yesterday about the cornet playing of the late Ruby Braff (not a girl's name, incidentally – it was short for his real name, Reuben), which was as lyrical as jazz playing can ever hope to get from the lips of such a cantankerous person. Paying tribute to him, Humphrey Lyttelton said that Braff's own driving force in music had been his "adoration of the song", and it was certainly true that Ruby Braff seemed to know all the songs you had ever heard of and then some.

To some extent this is the blessing and the curse of the jazz musician. He has to, or should, know hundreds, maybe thousands of songs by heart, so that when a band gets together and someone suggests playing "You Took Advantage of Me", you don't want one member of the band rooting around in his encyclopedia for 10 minutes trying to locate the chords – usually me.

(I once did a job in Bath filling in for a missing bass player in a band called Le Jazz Hot, which specialised in Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli numbers, and half of them I had never played in my life. Heard, maybe, not played, so for most of the evening the rhythm guitarist, Dave Kelbie, patiently hissed chord names at me. "Two bars G, two E Flat, A minor, D and back to G, then the middle-eight is sort of round the houses..." That was all you got. You had to pick it up from there. A sweaty evening it was, I can tell you.)

I remember the guitarist Joe Pass playing solo at Ronnie Scott's, coming to the end of one number and then, after the applause, saying: "I really don't know what to play next. I know 5,000 numbers. And I hate them all..." And the funny thing is he probably did know about 5,000 numbers.

And the funny thing, too, is that if the songwriters had heard him play them, they would probably have hated the way he did it, because it has gradually dawned on me over my life that although jazz musicians like Ruby Braff and Joe Pass have a bigger repertoire of standard songs than anyone in the world, all they do with them is improvise on them, which is the sort of thing that drives a songwriter wild.

I once met an American songwriter called Johnny Green, who as a young man had written three of the most famous songs of all time ("Body and Soul", "I Cover the Waterfront", and "Out of Nowhere") and had then stopped writing songs. When I asked him which were his favourite versions of these songs, he gave me a list of singers I had never heard of. They were all Broadway performers. They were not jazz artists. And what they had in common was that they sang the songs straight. They didn't muck about. They just did the tune and words.

"I also collect unusual versions of my songs," he told me. "I have somewhere an old 78 of an organist playing 'Out of Nowhere', which I treasure because it is so bad. This guy doesn't seem to realise that there are harmonies in the song, because he plays it on one single chord throughout. It's frightening."

What he didn't mention and didn't seem to like were all the jazz versions of his songs, though within jazz they are revered, and indeed it is odd to find a songwriter such as Hoagy Carmichael, who has a little jazz in his soul and actually expects his songs to be batted around by jazz musicians.

The other day Henry Mancini was talking on the radio about the song that made him famous, "Moon River", and declared to everyone's amazement that his favourite version of the song was the one sung on the film soundtrack by Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn! Well, she has got a sweet little voice but she doesn't sing much and is not trained and the way she sings it is very plain and innocent... And the presenter of the programme suggested that it was this very innocence that appealed to Mancini. But I don't think so. I think it was the fact that Hepburn was in awe of the song, and just concentrated on singing it straight, and didn't muck about with the tune or any of the notes.

Because what we jazz fans think of as the noble art of improvisation must appear to a man who has written a classic song as just mucking about with it.

Meanwhile, I have a correction to make. The name of the film I mentioned yesterday should have been 'Like Water for Chocolate' and not, as I mistakenly said, 'Like Water for Chick Lit'.