April in Paris
April in Paris is a song in the Great American Songbook that Vernon Duke wrote in 1932 to a text by EY Harburg for the musical Walk a Little Faster . At least since the song was played by Count Basie in 1955 , it has developed into the jazz standard .
History of origin
Walk a Little Faster was the first musical Duke wrote all the songs for. However, the song was not part of the songs initially created for the musical. During the production, the wish was expressed to add a love song. The idea for this further song, April in Paris , came about while Vernon Duke was having dinner with his friends in a New York restaurant when a guest, allegedly Dorothy Parker , expressed a wish to go to Paris in April, paraphrasing Robert Browning : "Oh, to be in Paris now that April's here!" Duke is said to have immediately run up a floor to an old piano and worked out the melody.
Features of the song
The song, which is almost entirely in major , is based on a 32- bar song form with the scheme A-A'-BA ". Based on the words 'April in Paris', the basic motif was created:" Three short higher and one short lower notes lead to one long tone in between. "The basic motif is presented in different pitches in the A sections." The more moving motif of the B section corresponds in four different ways to the words 'I never' of the anaphoric verse. " According to Alec Wilder , it is is "a perfect theater song."
Impact history
April in Paris was sung with great success by Evelyn Hoey during the Boston preview in Walk a Little Faster . On Broadway , however, the song fell through with criticism - possibly because Hoey had a laryngitis and was therefore vocally not up to date. But the blues singer Marian Chase recognized the potential of the song and added it to her repertoire, so that other musicians such as Eddie Duchin, Paul Weston , Hildegarde , as well as the opera singers Lilly Pons and Dorothy Kirsten became aware of it and also interpreted the song. Two recordings from April in Paris hit the American charts in 1933/34, but only stayed there for a few weeks:
- Freddy Martin and His Orchestra (1933-34, with singer Elmer Feldkamp, # 5)
- Henry King and His Orchestra (1933-34, with singer Joe Sudy, # 14).
At the end of the 1940s, the bebopers had become aware of the "interesting changes" of the song: Coleman Hawkins , Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker developed into "advocates of the song", which they played again and again; so Parker got through that April in Paris was also played on his album With Strings in 1949. In 1952 Doris Day sang the song in the film of the same name with Ray Bolger . The film flopped, but other interpretations followed, almost simultaneously by the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra . 1955 the Count Basie Orchestra played the song in an arrangement by Wild Bill Davis ; So Basie got into the charts and used the song, with which he also got into the Grammy Hall of Fame , from then on as a signature tune. The same arrangement was used by Duke Ellington .
Among the numerous vocal versions that emerged in the mid-1950s ( Billie Holiday , Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong , Gloria Lynne ), the interpretation by Sarah Vaughan is particularly impressive . Numerous other versions have been made to this day, for example by Bill Evans , Erroll Garner , Nina Simone , Stéphane Grappelli , Dinah Shore , Kurt Elling or Alex Chilton .
literature
- Ted Gioia The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire Oxford University Press; Oxford 2012; ISBN 978-0199937394
- Hans-Jürgen Schaal (Ed.): Jazz standards. The encyclopedia. 3rd, revised edition. Bärenreiter, Kassel u. a. 2004, ISBN 3-7618-1414-3 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d April in Paris at www.jazzstandards.com
- ↑ The line from Browning's poem Home Thoughts from Abroad actually reads: “Oh, to be in England now that April's there.” Cf. Edmund Clarence Stedman, A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895.
- ↑ Ken Bloom: The American Songbook - The Singers, the Songwriters, and the Songs - 100 Years of American Popular Music - The Stories of the Creators and Performers . New York City, Black Dog & Leventhal, 2005
- ↑ a b c H.-J. Schaal Jazz-Standards , p. 39ff.
- ↑ Alec Wilder : American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 . Oxford University Press, New York 1972, ISBN 0-19-501445-6 , p. 357.
- ↑ “All versions of Monk are so much Monk that one could easily mistake the piece for one's own work.” Marcus A. Woelfle in Schaal, Jazz-Standards , p. 40
- ↑ Count Basie - April In Paris (Verve Records)