What do Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart and James Taylor all have in common? Well, besides the fact that they are all septuagenarians, they’ve also all made albums of standards, James Taylor’s American Standard being the most recent.

American Standard is Taylor’s 20th studio album and second album of non-original material in twelve years. His Covers album from 2008 came about after a well publicized seven year long case of writers block. In fact, Taylor has only released two albums of original material in nearly twenty years (October Road 2002 & Before This World 2015). Taylor’s reasons for mining the great American Songbook may never fully be known however the results of his efforts are plain and simple; 14 songs exemplifying pure American craftsmanship.

Unlike those before him who took on the daunting task of interpreting the Songbook, with the exception of Bob Dylan, who famously quipped, “I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them”, Taylor is perhaps the most successful at making these songs his own.

Anyone unfamiliar with the Songbook would think Taylor had written all these songs himself, he’s just that good at internalizing the material and putting it back out there in that laid back free and easy style he is know for. With the help of noted jazz singer/guitarist John Pizzarelli, Taylor delivers a decidedly unjazzy cross section of material from the musicals Brigadoon, Guys & Dolls, South Pacific, Showboat and Oklahoma! covering legendary composers Henry Mancini, Johnny Mercer, Sammy Cahn, Lerner & Lowe, Frank Loesser, Hoagy Carmichael, Rogers & Hammerstein, Rogers & Hart, Billie Holiday, Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen. Curiously absent from Taylor’s collection are three of the best known composers of the Great American Songbook era; George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter.

Perhaps the most timely of all the songs Taylor covers here is his rendition of Rogers & Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” from the musical South Pacific. Controversial in it’s day, legislator’s went so far as to try and have the song banned from the musical, this 70 year old song from 1949 rings as true today in the age of Trump’s Wall and Black Lives Matter as it did in the post war pre-Civil Rights Movement era it was written in:

8/10