Cherokee (song)

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Cherokee is a jazz standard that the English musician and composer Ray Noble composed in 1938 for his five-movement Indian Suite after he moved to the United States of America. The piece is subtitled Indian Love Song and is a declaration of love to an Indian girl. Noble also wrote the lyrics praising the Sweet Indian maiden from a male perspective .

Building the composition

The song is structured in the classical song form (AABA). In the A part of the piece, the melody is based on an "Indian" pentatonic scale , which is underlaid with quite advanced harmonies, while in the "European" B part it is developed in a conventional harmonic manner. The rhythm strikes twice the tempo, so that the chorus comprises 64 bars. The piece was originally played and sung as a love song at a moderate tempo.

Impact history

The Indian Suite was initially recorded by Ray Noble and his orchestra. In 1939, the band leader and tenor saxophonist Charlie Barnet Cherokee ; for his swing band it became a commercial success in a new arrangement by Billy May (No. 15 on the pop charts) and subsequently became their signature tune in a different form (as Redskin Rhumba ). Cherokee also became known as a jazz song through recordings of the big bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington , but later also of Lionel Hampton and Stan Kenton .

The pleasing swing version did not go under. In 1946 Peggy Lee interpreted the piece in the film Jasper in a Jam , in 1959 it formed the musical climax in the film The Gene Krupa Story . Even Sarah Vaughan has often sung the piece (first recording in 1955).

Kurt Henkels recorded Werner Baumgart's arrangement in the style of progressive jazz with the Leipzig broadcaster's dance orchestra , which attracted international attention. Many bebop and neobop musicians repeatedly published the piece; The recordings of Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard became famous . The version by Don Byas (1961) contains a very nice saxophone coda . On the CD I Remember Clifford by Arturo Sandoval from 1992 there is a version with a tempo of 320 beats per minute together with the saxophonist Ernie Watts . Wynton Marsalis illuminated the piece on his album Standard Time Vol. 1 in two very different versions.

Function as bebop head

Charlie Parker discovered the piece in the early 1940s and often played it for its interesting harmonies. In the style of bebop, however, the piece was played much faster. Finally Parker put a new melody over the only slightly modified harmonies and called the piece Ko Ko . He played it in 1945 with Dizzy Gillespie , when his then regular trumpeter Miles Davis refused to play the piece at his speed of more than 300 beats per minute; he “didn't want to embarrass himself” (as he wrote in his autobiography). You can often still hear Cherokee / Ko-ko at jam sessions today , with the pace often being increased extremely.

Not only Ko Ko is based on the harmonies of Cherokee , but also Charlie Parker's pieces Warming Up a Riff and Homecooking . Also Serge Chaloff (Blue Serge), Donald Byrd (The Injun), Warne Marsh (marshmallow), Horace Silver (hillbilly boppers) and Sonny Rollins (B-Quick) use the harmonies as a starting point for their bebop head .

See also

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ It's the first movement of the suite. This is followed by the movements Comanche War Dance, Iroquois, Seminole and Sioux Sue
  2. ↑ The A-parts vary a bit so that it has the shape A1-A2-B-A2.
  3. ^ Gerhard Conrad Werner Baumgart: An already forgotten German jazz musician? Jazz Podium 3/2012: 38-41. The version was re-released on the album Deutscher Musikrat Musik in Deutschland 1950-2000: Big Bands 1950-2000