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JS: How and why do you pick a tune to play?
BS: My favorite standards come from the Great American Song Form period: Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers, Arthur Schwartz, and their contemporaries. I am not alone. Most musicians of my generation obviously feel the same way. For example, some of the great bebop lines were written over the chord structures of these songs.
Many of our radical "outside" brethren say this is delving too far into the past and playing music by composers who are long gone and no longer relevant. However, I don't think that improvisational musicians have fully explored the possibilities of this material. Until that happens, there is no need to play new material just for the sake of doing so. Even the originals that I write are structured in a similar chordal and melodic fashion.
JS:Does the size or texture of the group you play with influence tune selection?
BS: I often work in different configurations such as duo (sax plus either piano or bass), quartet (my personal favorite), quintet, and sextet, and the charts for any of these may or may not spill over into other sizes of groups. When I am playing in a sextet or quintet, I would tend to use more of my original music or prepared arrangements of standards. I don't do jam sessions, which we have had enough of!
JS: How do you decide what tunes to record?
BS: The tunes I record other than my originals are selected by: Do I like the tune? Have I recorded it before? Clearly I don't like every single song that was written in the Song Form period. Melody and chord structure are equally important to me. Some songs lend themselves more naturally to improvisation. The structures frequently used by these composers are AABA, ABAB1, and extensions of these formulae. We as jazz composers now attempt as much as possible to violate these formulae in the hopes of finding new structures on which to improvise.
Read the rest of the interview at Jazz Standards.