"How Long Has This Been Going On?" - J.J. Johnson

SONG: “How Long Has This Been Going On?” (PDF)
ALBUM: We’ll Be Together Again
ARTIST: Joe Pass & J.J. Johnson
YEAR: 1984
LABEL: Pablo Records

Originally written in 1927 by George & Ira Gershwin for the musical Funny Face, a show that saw many rewrites before eventually finding success on Broadway, the song “How Long Has This Been Going On?” had been cut and repurposed the following year for the show Rosalie before also being cut from its film adaptation.

Decades later as bebop musicians repurposed “vintage” show tunes into complex chamber music, trombonists J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding first recorded “How Long Has This Been Going On?” during the December 3, 1954 recording session for Prestige.

Still decades later, Johnson recorded another version of the tune as a duo with guitarist Joe Pass in 1983, a recording session that was eventually repurposed for a 1988 release. Their version appears to have been influenced by Ray Charles’ performance on his 1977 album, True To Life, which repurposed the song as a gospel-blues big-band ballad.

Even still decades later, as historian Ted Gioia points out in his book The Jazz Standards, a previously unreleased 1973 recording of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” by Ray Charles had been digitally repurposed for a posthumous release in 2006 on the Hear Music label, a Starbucks-owned distributor that repurposed music CDs as an impulse item.

Recommended Reading: Exercises And Etudes For The Jazz Instrumentalist by J.J. Johnson. Published by Hal Leonard.