Why this tune?
This week I took some time to add another jazz standard to the repertoire of tunes I can play comfortably without the music. The educators all say that the best way to do that is to learn the song in every key, and practice it until it’s in your fingers and head. I recorded this week’s track midway along that journey, playing through the tune in three keys, getting the melody more or less correct.
It’s always a good idea to add another Cole Porter tune to the list. Porter wrote it for the 1943 film “Something To Shout About” (and received an Oscar nomination), and like so many other cases, the song is now much more well-known than the picture, with almost 750 recordings since Dinah Shore made it a hit after its release. It’s another example of Porter’s genius in pairing an evocative lyric with a beautiful melody and interesting harmony. That combination attracts artists from many genres to his works in every generation.
The song was particularly relevant in 1943, as jazzstandards.com notes, when Porter’s words “soothed a war time generation of couples longing to be reunited. ” The music amplified the lyric; “the move from the minor key opening to the major key ending adds to the song’s hopefulness.”
Most performers skip over Cole Porter’s verse, which places the chorus in context as a song of hope and seduction. It’s not “You will be nice to come home to,” but “you would be nice to come home to,” if we can ever get together.
Tunes On Tuesday Reel
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Complete track
Dinah Shore
Cecil Taylor
Oren Levine, jazz pianist and songwriter 