I still have a few entries to go in the Rolling Stone Top 500 list, but I wanted to take a break from it this week for a small diversion. I recently played the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take 5” as part of my “play all of my songs in alphabetical order” project, and while I was listening to it I thought it was probably one of the best known and most recognized jazz songs around. What I meant by that specifically was that people who aren’t jazz aficionados are familiar with it – they know the name and would recognize the tune if they heard it. So I got to wondering what other jazz songs might qualify as being generally well known, and from such exercises are Random Ten lists born.
1. In the Mood – Glenn Miller
2. It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) – Duke Ellington
3. Take 5 – Dave Brubeck Quartet
4. Round Midnight – Thelonious Monk
5. Birdland – Weather Report
6. Begin the Beguine – Artie Shaw
7. Sing Sing Sing – Benny Goodman
8. The Girl From Ipanema – Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto
9. Minnie The Moocher – Cab Calloway
10. Linus and Lucy – The Vince Guaraldi Trio
Obviously, this list is extremely subjective, in more ways than one. First, just what is a “jazz” song? Arguably, big band/swing music doesn’t qualify, which would eliminate much of this list. I say this because a lot of this music crosses into mainstream pop, at least for the era in which it was recorded. Much of it is what we call “standards” these days – Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Linda Rondstadt from her Nelson Riddle days, and so forth. Is that jazz? For these purposes, I decided the answer is No. Similarly, just because there’s a jazz arrangement of something doesn’t make it a jazz song. One of Stan Getz’s biggest hits was a version of “My Favorite Things”. Including a song like that on this list would clearly be cheating.
And of course, my own opinion of what the top ten are is completely subjective. By all means, disagree with my choices as you see fit. I’m moderately knowledgeable about jazz, though I’m no expert by any means. But that’s okay, because the whole point of this is to identify well-known songs – who cares what the cognoscenti think? But that means I may have overlooked something, so jump in and tell me what I missed.
A number of these songs have been used in commercials – I know I’ve seen ads that featured “It Don’t Mean A Thing”, “Take 5”, “Sing Sing Sing”, and “The Girl From Ipanema”. “Round Midnight” and “Birdland” have a number of covers. The former has been done by Ella Fitzgerald and Linda Rondstadt, among others, and is probably better known that way. The latter has renditions by Maynard Ferguson and the Manhattan Transfer, who wrote lyrics for it. “Begin the Beguine” is a Cole Porter song, and anybody who is anybody has recorded it; the Artie Shaw version is the one I think of when I think of the song. Yeah, I know, it could be considered a “standard”; I said this was subjective, didn’t I? “Minnie the Moocher”, of course, was famously performed in the movie “The Blues Brothers”, which has been a common theme in these Random Tens lately. I trust you know the story behind “Linus and Lucy”. If I had to pick the best known one of them all on this list, that would be it.
I should add that I don’t have all of these tunes in my collection. I have some version, not necessarily the listed one, of eight songs, with “Begin the Beguine” and “Sing Sing Sing” missing altogether. Which I clearly need to rectify.
So, was I right that most people would know these songs? How many do you recognize? Click the links to hear them if you need to.
Entire song list report: Started with “Take The ‘A’ Train”, which could substitute for “It Don’t Mean A Thing” on this list. I have three versions of it – the Ray Brown Trio, Joe Henderson, and Duke Ellington; the Ray Brown rendition comes up first on the iPod. Finished with “That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas”, by Lyle Lovett, song #5373. Given that I finished with song #5222 last week, that would mean I did 151 tunes this week, but I didn’t. One of the results of my iPod issue was that the Genius Bar guy did a factory reset, which in turn meant I had to reload my library from scratch. That’s a bit complicated because I’d previously done things like eliminate duplicate songs and stop the sync of intros and other spoken bits from live albums. I tried to recreate that, but I know I didn’t do all of it, and in the end song #5222 from last week is now #5280. So, based on that, it was a 93 song week.
If you’re in your 40s or up you probably remember United Airlines using Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which I think is considered jazz rather than classical.
Excellent suggestion. I remember those ads, though I don’t think they were from that long ago.