All the Things You Are

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! In this post, I'm playing a song called "All the Things You Are," composed by Jerome Kern. If you've listened to a lot of jazz standards, you've almost certainly heard of this one. The song has made it to a lot of lists of "Jazz Standards for Beginners" and "Songs Everyone Needs to Know." I hope you like it!


Listen to the song here
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Like many of the jazz standards in the 30 and 40s, this song was written to be sung in a theater production. All the Things You Are belonged to a musical called "Very Warm for May."

Despite the standard's current reputation, the musical actually didn't turn out to be that successful. In fact, original watchers must have been spreading bad reviews quickly. The theater was almost empty on the second day it was performed.

However, the songs written must have been better than the musical itself. People didn't seem to mind the complex harmonies and the sentimental lyrics. In fact, the song's harmony is one of the reasons why it's popular today.

All the Things You Are's title could have become self-fulfilling. It's now listed as a song that every jazz musician needs to know. You can find all kinds of articles about how to improvise over it. There's even been variations written to the song, as well as contrafacts (songs that have the same chords and a different melody).

I suppose this song is a reminder to not write things off as failures right away. There's potential for them to have a huge impact in the future. Jerome Kern could have decided to stop selling his song because the musical performed so badly, but then he never would have seen it rise to success.

You could decide to sell all the stocks you bought this year because the market's down, but then you'll never see it go up.

I could decide to take Tea with Liya off the Internet because I haven't heard everybody talking about it, but then I'd never see anyone . . .

filling your teacup with music!

~Liya