Morath defines and tells the story of popular standards and then deconstructs them. He discusses the performers, the songwriters, popular CD’s, and the continuing interest of performers in reinterpreting these songs from the golden age of American music.

With regard to jazz standards, The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Popular Standards is a great introductory reference, containing 100 song abstracts of approximately 120 words and interesting discussions on the standards. There is a fair amount of overlap with the top 100 jazz standards documented at this site by statistical ranking. Those documented by Morath were selected to “introduce the genre at its best.”

Max Morath is the author of The Road to Ragtime and a contributor to Jazz: A Reader’s Companion. He is an acclaimed ragtime musician and recording artist and has been heard on NPR’s “Performance Today.”