50 Pieces of Music - Part Two - Jazz

Jazz

1.     ‘I Can’t Get Started’, Bunny Berrigan

Listen here:   Bunny Berigan & His Orchestra - I Can't Get Started (1937)

I began playing the trumpet when I was 10. I paid my way through university largely from money I received playing in a jazz band called The Boys from Ipanema. (Feel free to laugh at a photo of me playing at the end of this post). Bunny Berrigan’s track was part of our repertoire, and though I haven’t played it for many years, it remains a firm favourite.

 

2.     ‘I’m Confessin’ that I Love You’, Louis Armstrong

Watch the amazing video and listen here:   Louis Armstrong (Live) - I'm Confessin'

Satchmo (short for satchel-mouth) – as Armstrong was affectionately known to his friends – managed to combine toughness and sentimentality and showmanship in his best music, and this is a great example, I think. This is true both in his vocals and his trumpet playing. There are more virtuoso pieces I could choose, but I find this song his most affecting.
 

3.     ‘Si Tu Vois Ma Mere’, Sidney Bechet

Listen here:   Sidney Bechet - Si Tu Vois Ma Mere

A few doors down from my last school in London there was a plaque saying that Sidney Bechet had lived there for a few years. Bechet was American but was one of those, along with Josephine Baker, who conquered Paris in the 1920s. This song was recorded later but was clearly inspired by that time. His warbling clarinet first warms then pierces your heart.
 

4. ‘I’ve Never Heard That Song Before’, Harry James

Watch and listen here:   Harry James & Helen Forrest I've Heard That Song Before

Woody Allen used this song as part of the soundtrack for his best film, Hannah and Her Sisters. Its upbeat, metropolitan rhythms serve as a perfect backdrop to the sidewalks of Manhattan as his characters walk along. The tone of James’s trumpet is clean as a bell, as one might expect from someone known as the ‘man with the golden horn’.
 

5.     ‘Without Your Love’, Billie Holiday

Listen here:   Without Your Love - Billie Holiday ft. Lester Young (Tenor Sax)

Indisputably the world’s greatest jazz singer, Billie Holliday had a voice that could modulate from joy to sorrow in an instant, and that could linger and persist beyond the accompanying music and become an instrument in itself. Impossible to choose one track, but often I find myself humming this. There is also the bonus of ‘the Pres’, Lester Young, featuring on sax. 
 

6.     ‘Limehouse Blues’, Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli

Listen here:   Django Reinhardt - Limehouse Blues (1936)

The legend about Django Reinhardt losing a finger, and still playing the guitar like a god is true. Born in Belgium, with French and Romany roots, he teamed up with Stéphane Grappelli on violin, and together they formed the Hot Club de France, their two instruments braiding and generating melodies irresistible to the human ear.
 

7.     ‘Let There Be Love’, Nat King Cole

Watch and listen here:   Let there be love Nat King Cole

Often underestimated as a jazz instrumentalist and vocalist, Nat King Cole shows his versatility as well as his showmanship on this track. My mother loved his songs. It took me a while to surrender to the peach-melba charms of his voice, but once you yield, you want to bathe in its warm well of sound forever.
 

8.     ‘Moanin’’, Art Blakey

Watch and listen here:   Moanin' - Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers - Live

I have probably over-represented trumpeters on this list, so let’s choose a drummer. Art Blakey led a group called The Jazz Messengers, and their music developed a textured, sophisticated, and elegantly restrained sound that is best represented by this track. 
 

9.     ‘Freddie Freeloader’, Miles Davies

Listen here:   Miles Davis - "Freddie Freeloader" (Kind Of Blue - 1959)

Hard to pick just one Miles Davies track. ‘So What?’ might have been more obvious, or the opening concerto from Sketches of Spain, or ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess, but this is my favourite from his finest album Kind of Blue, and with John Coltrane on sax and Bill Evans on piano, what can go wrong? 
 

10.  ‘Let’s Get Lost’, Chet Baker

Listen here:   Chet Baker - Let's get lost

Chet Baker was a musician and vocalist with a limited range but within that range he was perfect. When he hits the right register and sustains it, as he does here, embellishing it with his cool, incisive trumpet and even cooler voice, the effect is subtly devastating. If you get the chance, see the documentary of the same name that chronicles Baker’s tragic life.
 

11.  ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’, Dizzy Gillespie

Listen here:  On The Sunny Side Of The Street

This is my bebop track of choice. I love Charlie Parker as a virtuoso, but he doesn’t quite move me as much as Miles Davies or quicken me to joy as does this live track by Dizzy Gillespie, recorded in Paris in the 50s. Dizzy tweaks an old standard into something utterly new and beautiful. 
 

12.  ‘Feeling Good’, Nina Simone

Listen here:  Nina Simone Feeling Good

This is a big song. A big voice, with a big band behind it. A real performance piece, delivered with all the confidence of an artist on the top of her form. It builds sensuously, but the swagger is cut with a poignancy and blueness that reminds us how this determined hymn to happiness also contains an implicit acknowledgment of human pain.
 

13.  ‘Into My Soul’, Gabin & Dee Dee Bridgewater

 Watch and listen here:  GABIN feat. DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER - INTO MY SOUL - Official Video

A finger-snapping rendition of a great song, delivered with verve, energy and real momentum. I like the way that, in true jazz tradition, the voice riffs freely over the driving instrumental rhythms. Just listen to it, and enjoy. 
 

14.  ‘O Grande Amor’, Stan Getz/Joao Gilberto

Listen here:  O Grande Amor

I could have gone for the more obvious (and enduringly beautiful) ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, with Astrid Gilberto’s incredible vocal line, but this track has always touched me more in its smoky depth and breathy textures. A piece worthy of its grand title.
 

15.  ‘Evil Ways’ , Willie Bobo

Listen here: Evil Ways

I love this song. It is cool, witty, and danceable. I defy you to listen and to resist its funky, hypnotic rhythms. For all the frustration and mockery expressed in the lyrics, it’s hard to imagine they didn’t have enormous fun recording this. I’m happy that this track ends my selection of great jazz tunes.
 

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This photo was taken many years ago. I remember I was performing Dizzy Gillespie-inflected version of Sunny Side of the Street. I was also trying to impress a girl, who finally agreed to a date after seeing me play. She became my wife. I have jazz to thank for that.

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO