Ahhhh....."Mack the Knife".  I didn't grow up on old standards from the "Great American Songbook", but I've grown extremely fond of them over the years.  Of course, this song didn't come from American writers....it was featured in a 1928 "Play with Music" called "The Threepenny Opera", written by Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht.  It's the story of a murderous hit man in London, but it had to be translated into English.

It's been cut by a lot of great artists over the decades, including the GREAT Louis Armstrong, who kind of introduced it for the first time in 1955 to a broader American audience.  He did both an instrumental and a vocal version that the record label spliced together for a single release.  It climbed to #20 on what was then called the Billboard Top 100. 

But a few years later in 1958, Bobby Darin and his creative collaborators created the "Definitive Record" for it.  They gave it a bounce and a groove that nobody quite had before, and starting with the third verse, they modulated up a half-tone for every subsequent verse, building tension and intensity so that the final verse is nothing short of explosive.  And his wry, charismatic delivery of the lyrics....it was an instant classic.  Hit #1 on that same Billboard chart, and became Darin's career anthem, defining his legacy, which was tragically short due to congenital heart problems....he died shortly after receiving open heart surgery at the age of just 37.

What strikes me as I write this morning thinking about this song though, is that the version of it that we all know and love is quite different in so many ways from the original version featured in the play.  The melody is the same, the words are more or less the same (a few tweaks, but nothing substantive)....but there's a vitality and energy to Darin's classic record that borders on electricity.  It was an arrangement and an entertainer destined for each other....and without that combination of a fresh arrangement and the perfect messenger, I don't think this would be the standard that it is.

One of the many things I love about the method of learning piano that I call the "Piano Man Approach" is that it empowers you to do whatever you want with a song.  Once you have the basic skeleton of a song...the chords and the melody...you can enhance chords by making them more complex, sub them out with their relative majors or minors, or even just try something completely different to see if it still works with the melody.  You can play around with different rhythm patterns to give the song a whole new feel and or tempo.  You can use any kind of improv techniques you want....you can give it a bluesy flavor, a country flavor, or a straight pop flavor....the choices are endless.

With this method, you can recreate the song the way you already know it to be....or turn it into an entirely new creation.  Without this capacity, just think what we would have missed out on.  Bobby Darin and his creative team took an already good and interesting song and turned it into an EPIC timeless classic because they didn't feel constrained to play it the same way it had already been played. 

Almost none of us will have our ideas recorded by a major label and released to the world at scale...but are there interesting ideas floating around inside you for some of your favorite songs that you are suppressing in the name of "keeping true to the original"?  If so...it's fine to play it the way you have always known it...but I urge you to give yourself the gift of playing around with it just for the delight that comes from the creative process.  Nobody ever needs to hear it but you if you like, but something special might be lurking and you'll never know unless you open the door and let it come out to play. 😎🎶

Enjoy my cover of this song from a livestream show I did on July 1, 2020 during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and then check out both Bobby Darin's iconic rendition and Louis Armstrong's 1955 record that helped first break the song out into the zeitgeist.

If you'd like to explore my piano method more deeply, my best students use my video courses and join me for conversation and twice monthly Q&A Livestreams in my private community...you can find it all HERE. Thanks.

If the video doesn't show above, use THIS LINK to see it on YouTube

If the video doesn't show above, use THIS LINK to see it on YouTube

 
If the video doesn't show above, use THIS LINK to see it on YouTube